Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union.

By Edward W. Walker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 216p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

In Russia's second decade as a country, a majority of surveyed Russians have no idea why June 12 is celebrated as the national holiday of their independence, while a larger percentage in Russia and other post-Soviet countries consider the breakup of the Soviet Union the greatest disaster in their lifetime. Ethnic separatists in Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova battle for independence or defy their central governments as autonomous quasi states, while the national leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus attempt to integrate their economies with a common currency and other attributes of a single country. Post-Soviet countries mirror the confusion that led to the USSR's dissolution in 1991. The breakup—unforeseen, unplanned, and undesired by most in the USSR and the West—is cogently analyzed in this book by Edward Walker.

The author rejects conventional wisdom in post-Soviet countries and Western academic literature that attributes the breakup to conspiracies by Western and Soviet elites or ethnic discontent overwhelming the central government. He contends that the breakup resulted from an unintended sequence of events, initiated by union-republic elites in a context of great ambiguity and only enflamed by the mistaken responses of Mikhail Gorbachev. Ironically, the vast majority of the Soviet Union voted for continuation of the USSR in the national referendum of March 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed less than nine months after the referendum because of an escalating buildup of demands for greater “sovereignty” and “independence” on the part of union-republic elites, which had become freer to challenge central authority under Gorbachev's economic and political reforms after 1987.

For Walker, the breakup was almost inevitable. Both sides reacted to each other in a reality conditioned by their Soviet institutional and normative legacy. Soviet constitutions had vested nominal sovereignty in the major eponymous ethnic groups as union-republics under Soviet ethno-federalism. The same union-republics from 1922 through the last Soviet constitution of 1977 also retained nominal rights of self-determination and even secession for their ethnic majority. These were meaningless declarative rights—unspecified, unrealizable by any laws, and undefined until Gorbachev's reforms. Yet the self-determination of ethnic groups and their right of secession, ostensibly legitimated by the constitution and doctrinal myths about Soviet ethnic nationalities, became the very rallying points for union-republic elites to assert their increasing economic and political autonomy from the central government in 1988–91. Gorbachev, too, was affected by Soviet nationality myths about the so-called Soviet friendship of peoples, evidenced in his unwillingness to allow secession for any union-republics except by the terms of the extremely draconian law on secession forced through the Soviet parliament in 1990.

The demands by leaders of the union-republic eponymous groups sparked equivalent challenges for sovereignty by numerous other ethnic minorities against their own union-republic governments. The minorities, geographically located within the union-republics, asserted themselves against their ethnic majorities, despite their institutionally vague status as so-called autonomous republics, territories, and districts without formal sovereignty and a right of secession under Soviet constitutional and doctrinal myths. As central communist authority collapsed under Gorbachev's political reforms, a cascade of sovereign resolutions passed by all union-republic governments and ethnic-minority enclaves found almost everyone by 1991 declaring their sovereignty and independence without actually understanding the ambiguous meaning of the terms or the consequences of their actions. The one group of union-republics resolute in insisting on complete political independence from the Soviet Union from the very outset in 1989–90 and with a broad popular mandate were the three previously independent Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Their defiance of Gorbachev and his hard-line response only ratcheted up the level of demands for sovereignty and independence throughout the Soviet Union, even prior to the August 1991 abortive putsch. That abortive putsch and Ukraine's independence vote in December 1991 were almost anticlimactic events in what had already become the imminent dissolution of the country. For Walker, Gorbachev's attempts to save the country as some form of loose confederation in the last four months of 1991 after the putsch were doomed and feckless.

Dissolution is more an interpretive history based on secondary sources by Soviet participants, Western diplomats, and academics and less an originally researched study of late Soviet politics. The strength of the book is Walker's ability to integrate these various sources into a focused explanation of the Soviet Union's demise. The weakness of the book is that policies and events relative to ethnic nationalities and the breakup of the Soviet Union cannot be isolated and treated separately from Gorbachev's overall program to transform the Soviet Union and end the Cold War with the West. Walker alludes to these other aspects of Gorbachev's program, if sardonically, throughout the book, but key here is Gorbachev's own motivation and vision. In his own memoirs and numerous speeches, Gorbachev has confessed his own failures in not appreciating the scope of the nationality problem in the Soviet Union until too late. His priorities were political and economic reform and foreign policy. His envisioned opposition until 1991 were hard-line Stalinists in the party leadership. The outbreak of ethnic nationalism and demands for sovereignty overwhelmed him because they appeared until 1990 to be an annoying secondary sideshow to the big picture. In contrast, Boris Yeltsin—just as flawed a communist leader and almost as dominant as Gorbachev in influencing events in 1990–91—comes off in Walker's interpretation as relatively blameless for the USSR's demise, despite clinging just as much as Gorbachev to the goal of a confederated Soviet Union very late into 1991.

A fuller interpretation of the Soviet Union's breakup should include its central protagonist Gorbachev in all of his goals and obstacles in 1987–91, but in fairness to Walker, his book was based solely on the specific factors and sequence of events accounting for the Soviet Union's breakup. A well-written, fair, and balanced overview of the period, Dissolution would be recommended for undergraduate courses in Soviet and post-Soviet politics. However, as a comprehensive analysis of the USSR's breakup and the one individual, Gorbachev, most directly responsible, it is incomplete.