SEVEN SHOCK WAVES FROM THE BREAKUP OF SOVIET UNION
MOSCOW— Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union disappeared.
A superpower was suddenly gone and 15 new countries appeared in its place: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
“The Soviet Union broke up without a civil war, thank God,” says Yevgeny Roizman, 54, a historian and mayor of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s third-largest city, which borders Siberia. “But huge empires always go down with a lot of noise. The process is not over. It will be many years before all the damage can be undone.”
Indeed, political systems, economies, cultures and military alliances have undergone varying transformations that continue in some countries and have stalled or reversed in others. “Now, it’s like the Soviet era is a phantom pain,” Roizman adds.
People who remember living under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — the U.S.S.R. — have mixed feelings whether those were the good old days or the bad old days.
In Kazan, in central Russia, Alexander Andreev, 64, a retired oil worker, recalls the end of Soviet life as a time of chronic food shortages. His wife would wake him at 5 a.m. so he could stand outside the store near their home in hopes of buying an item before it ran out. “It was only a few minutes’ walk away and it didn’t open until 6 a.m. Most days there would be a long line. If I was in the first 10 we would get cottage cheese or sour cream. If not, only milk,” he says.
“I cried so much,” says Andreev’s wife, Tatiana, 65, of this period. “I was worried about the children. We were constantly adding things to the food to make it go further,” she says. “Now, within reason, we can buy anything. Different kinds of cars. We can travel. We don’t want to go back.”
But her husband is a bit nostalgic. While communism was not a political system he admired, the Soviet Union was a place where there was “real unity” between the people of the different republics. “In this way, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin was right,” Andreev says. “The breakup was the worst thing that happened to us.”
Here are seven things that have happened since the 1991 breakup: Wealth gap grows After 74 years of authoritarian communist rule in which supposedly everyone was equal, Russia is one of the world’s most unequal countries, according to a 2016 Credit Suisse global wealth report: 75 per cent of its wealth is controlled by the richest 1 per cent. In 1991, there were no billionaires in Russia. Today, there are 77 with a combined net worth of $283 billion (U.S.), according to Forbes’ list of richest people. Change is traumatic The transition to new systems was cataclysmic. “It wasn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union that was the problem,” says Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. “It was the economic dislocation. It created an economic depression that was far harsher than what was experienced in the United States in the 1930s.” Baltics look west The tiny Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have joined the European Union and NATO and adopted a Western liberal democratic order. But they are nervous about their vulnerability to Russian expansion, fearing they would be easiest to swallow up and wondering if U.S. President Donald Trump will uphold NATO members’ commitment to defend any other member that is attacked. Satellites veer off Former Soviet-sphere nations in Europe have gone their own way. Poland, free of Soviet dominance, has turned western to become the largest economy in Central Europe. It is now a member of the EU and NATO, along with former Soviet satellites Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Romania. Repression persists Belarus is one of the world’s most repressive regimes, where criticizing the president can lead to a lengthy jail term. Uzbekistan and other ex-Soviet Central Asian “Stans” have enjoyed stable leadership and big oil revenues, but corruption and human rights abuses remain endemic. “It’s becoming harder and harder to speak out against these crimes and it is worse now than it’s been at any point since Soviet times,” says Svetlana Gannushkina, 74, a former Russian lawmaker, now a human rights lawyer. Gannushkina is regularly named as a potential Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In Russia’s predominantly Muslim and restive province of Chechnya, “there is no law, no constitution, only the order of (Chechnya leader) Ramzan Kadyrov,” Gannushkina says of Putin’s ally. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say Kadyrov uses public shaming, torture and abductions to keep a tight grip on the province, which waged a guerrilla war for independence against Russia for more than a decade before conceding defeat in 2009. Russian democracy fades Russia embraced democracy after the Soviet breakup but has been sliding back toward authoritarianism. Putin, who has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” has undermined civil liberties as he tightens his grip on power. He has jailed critics, imposed restrictions on news and social media, reclaimed Crimea from West-leaning Ukraine, abetted proRussian separatists in eastern Ukraine, cracked down on foreign non-profit groups and stoked the flames of rightwing nationalism.
After years of neglect, the military has been restored and has taken a lead role in Syria to help President Bashar Assad win a five-year-old civil war. “Putin thinks the state is legitimate because it is the state,” says Alex Kliment, a Russia specialist at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “He has a philosophical belief that popular revolutions against state power are always illegitimate, and always end in tears.” Russia tilts to Trump Russia has developed one of the world’s most sophisticated cyberwarfare networks — one that the CIA believes interfered in America’s election to help Trump. The President has dismissed the allegation, but Congress vows to look into it. Whatever the outcome of that investigation, Russia and Trump seem to be on a path toward friendship and international co-operation that would have been inconceivable after Russia reclaimed Crimea in 2014. Trump has spoken positively about Putin and his choice for secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who has negotiated energy deals with Russia, said he has “a very close relationship” with Putin.