Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv

IF 0.3 3区 历史学 Q2 HISTORY KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/kri.2023.a910983
Serhy Yekelchyk
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But my thought about \"them\" came complete with the notion of \"us,\" the members of Ukraine's generation of the late 1980s and early 1990s—students and young professionals for whom the notion of political freedom had become fused with the conscious choice of Ukrainian culture as an anti-imperial identity marker. I knew that this imagined community would not give up and allow the authorities to go back to the bleak days of the late Soviet period. The student hunger strike on the Maidan in October 1990 had proved that by forcing the resignation of Vitaly Masol, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of Ministers. The different memories of 1991 do not suggest that one particular memory was right and the other was not. Instead, all of them highlight the fact that the end of the Soviet Union was a complex event produced by multiple social and political processes that unfolded simultaneously, the resulting dynamic differing depending on the region. The optics of a Russian contemporary could differ from that of a Ukrainian one, and the full picture would emerge only when these two optics (and many more) were reconciled. Just as the perceptions of the fall of the Soviet superpower differed in 1991, so do its subsequent interpretations—depending on their [End Page 853] focus. In this sense, Zubok's gripping and extremely well-researched account concentrating on the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the central authorities reads particularly well in concert with studies emphasizing the agency of mass movements in the non-Russian republics, such as Ronald G. Suny's The Revenge of the Past, Mark Beissinger's Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, and Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire.1 Among the many contributions of this book, the most important one is Zubok's detailed inquiry into the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his motivation for starting the fateful reforms in the first place. 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Abstract

Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv Serhy Yekelchyk (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). Like Vladislav M. Zubok, I have a vivid recollection of my immediate reaction to the news of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The August 1991 coup left a particularly strong imprint on my memory. At the time I was an aspirant with an almost-completed dissertation draft, and my first thought was that "they" would force me to rewrite most of the text or write a new thesis on a Soviet-style topic. But my thought about "them" came complete with the notion of "us," the members of Ukraine's generation of the late 1980s and early 1990s—students and young professionals for whom the notion of political freedom had become fused with the conscious choice of Ukrainian culture as an anti-imperial identity marker. I knew that this imagined community would not give up and allow the authorities to go back to the bleak days of the late Soviet period. The student hunger strike on the Maidan in October 1990 had proved that by forcing the resignation of Vitaly Masol, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of Ministers. The different memories of 1991 do not suggest that one particular memory was right and the other was not. Instead, all of them highlight the fact that the end of the Soviet Union was a complex event produced by multiple social and political processes that unfolded simultaneously, the resulting dynamic differing depending on the region. The optics of a Russian contemporary could differ from that of a Ukrainian one, and the full picture would emerge only when these two optics (and many more) were reconciled. Just as the perceptions of the fall of the Soviet superpower differed in 1991, so do its subsequent interpretations—depending on their [End Page 853] focus. In this sense, Zubok's gripping and extremely well-researched account concentrating on the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the central authorities reads particularly well in concert with studies emphasizing the agency of mass movements in the non-Russian republics, such as Ronald G. Suny's The Revenge of the Past, Mark Beissinger's Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, and Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire.1 Among the many contributions of this book, the most important one is Zubok's detailed inquiry into the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his motivation for starting the fateful reforms in the first place. It is true that the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union made the Union republics natural default foci of loyalty, if the center were to weaken and Soviet policies made ethnicity a powerful idiom of dissent.2 It is also correct to say that many republics, especially in the so-called Soviet West, experienced national mobilization outside the USSR during the interwar period and, as Soviet republics during the postwar period, developed a significant tradition of political dissent that was articulated in terms of ethnic identity and national rights, even if these activities were largely suppressed by the early 1980s.3 Still, it was Gorbachev's series of political decisions that created a discursive and, later, political space for reclaiming the republics' sovereignty—even if he believed these measures to be unavoidable. We might view them differently, perhaps as being forced by growing popular disillusionment with the viability of the informal late Soviet "social contract," but this does not detract from their importance. Zubok argues that the origins of Gorbachev's reforms should be sought in his commitment to Leninism. He produces an impressive list of evidence ranging from Gorbachev's own statements to the memoirs of those closest to him. It is difficult not to agree with Zubok on this, but I would like to propose an amendment aimed at considering this term in the intellectual context of the late Soviet period. There was simply no other way to ground any [End Page 854] reforms in theory other than to present them as a...
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戈尔巴乔夫、叶利钦和基辅的形势
《戈尔巴乔夫、叶利钦和基辅的形势》,谢里·叶克尔奇克(传记)弗拉季斯拉夫·m·祖布克著,《崩溃:苏联的垮台》。Xv + 576页,插图。、地图。纽黑文:耶鲁大学出版社,2021。ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00(布)。ISBN-13 978-0300268171,纸质版25美元。和弗拉迪斯拉夫·m·祖博克一样,我清楚地记得自己听到苏联解体的消息时的即时反应。1991年8月的政变在我的记忆中留下了特别深刻的印记。当时我是一个有抱负的人,论文初稿即将完成,我的第一个想法是“他们”会强迫我重写大部分文本,或者写一篇关于苏联风格主题的新论文。但是,我对“他们”的思考与“我们”的概念是完全一致的,“我们”是20世纪80年代末和90年代初的乌克兰一代成员,他们是学生和年轻的专业人士,对他们来说,政治自由的概念已经与乌克兰文化作为反帝国主义身份标志的自觉选择融合在一起。我知道,这个想象中的共同体不会放弃,不会允许当局回到苏联后期的黯淡岁月。1990年10月,独立广场上的学生绝食抗议迫使乌克兰苏维埃社会主义共和国部长委员会主席维塔利·马索尔辞职,证明了这一点。1991年的不同记忆并不意味着一个特定的记忆是正确的,而另一个是错误的。相反,它们都强调了这样一个事实,即苏联的解体是由同时展开的多种社会和政治进程所产生的复杂事件,其结果因地区而异。当代俄罗斯人的视角可能与乌克兰人的视角不同,只有当这两种视角(以及更多视角)协调一致时,全貌才会浮现。正如1991年人们对苏联解体的看法不同一样,随后的解释也是如此——这取决于他们关注的焦点。从这个意义上说,祖博克对中央政府采取的行动(或缺乏行动)进行了深入研究,扣人眼球,与强调非俄罗斯共和国群众运动机构的研究(如罗纳德·g·苏尼的《过去的复仇》、马克·贝辛格的《民族主义动员与苏维埃国家的崩溃》和谢尔盖·普洛基的《最后的帝国》)相结合,读起来特别好。其中最重要的是祖博克对米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫的角色以及他最初发起重大改革的动机的详细调查。诚然,苏联的宪法结构使各加盟共和国自然成为忠诚的默认焦点,如果中心被削弱,苏联的政策使种族主义成为反对的有力成语同样正确的是,许多共和国,特别是所谓的苏联西部的共和国,在两次世界大战期间经历了苏联以外的民族动员,并且,作为战后时期的苏联共和国,发展了一种重要的政治异议传统,这种政治异议在种族认同和民族权利方面得到了明确表达,即使这些活动在20世纪80年代初基本上受到压制然而,正是戈尔巴乔夫的一系列政治决定创造了一个话语空间,后来又为收回共和国主权创造了政治空间——即使他认为这些措施是不可避免的。我们可能会对他们有不同的看法,也许是由于对非正式的苏联后期“社会契约”的可行性越来越普遍的幻灭所迫使的,但这并没有降低他们的重要性。祖博克认为,戈尔巴乔夫改革的起源应该从他对列宁主义的承诺中寻找。他提供了一系列令人印象深刻的证据,从戈尔巴乔夫自己的声明到他最亲近的人的回忆录。在这一点上,很难不同意祖布克的观点,但我想提出一个修正案,旨在将这个术语放在苏联后期的知识背景中考虑。从理论上讲,除了把改革作为一种……
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.60
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发文量
51
期刊介绍: A leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history and culture, Kritika is dedicated to internationalizing the field and making it relevant to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The journal regularly publishes forums, discussions, and special issues; it regularly translates important works by Russian and European scholars into English; and it publishes in every issue in-depth, lengthy review articles, review essays, and reviews of Russian, Eurasian, and European works that are rarely, if ever, reviewed in North American Russian studies journals.
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