A man waves a Russian flag during a rally November 21, 1988 (MF/AA/REUTERS Pictures)
Virtually all American commentary about the end of the Soviet Union extols what the West is believed to have gained from that historic event. On this twentieth anniversary of the breakup, The Nation presents three writers who focus instead on what may have been lost. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader and first constitutional president, argues that a chance for a more secure and just world order was missed. Stephen F. Cohen, a historian and longtime Nation contributor, reminds readers of the political, economic and social costs to Russians themselves. And Vadim Nikitin, a US-educated Russian journalist, presents a new interpretation of pro-Soviet nostalgia. —The Editors
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, Western commentators have often celebrated it as though what disappeared from the world arena in December 1991 was the old Soviet Union, the USSR of Stalin and Brezhnev, rather than the reforming Soviet Union of perestroika. Moreover, discussion of its consequences has focused mostly on developments inside Russia. Equally important, however, have been the consequences for international relations, in particular lost alternatives for a truly new world order opened up by the end of the cold war.
Following my election as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, the Soviet leadership formulated a new foreign policy agenda. One of the key ideas of our reforms, or perestroika, was new political thinking, based on the recognition of the world’s interconnectedness and interdependence. The top priority was to avert the threat of nuclear war. Our immediate international goals included ending the nuclear arms race, reducing conventional armed forces, settling numerous regional conflicts involving the Soviet Union and the United States, and replacing the division of the European continent into hostile camps with what I called a common European home.
We understood that this could be accomplished only by working with the United States. Our two nations together held 95 percent of the world’s arsenals of nuclear weapons. It was therefore of enormous importance that at my first summit meeting with President Ronald Reagan, held in Geneva in November 1985, we stated that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” We also agreed that the USSR and the United States would not seek military superiority over each other. At our next summit, in Reykjavik in 1986, Reagan and I went on to discuss specific ways to achieve a world without nuclear weapons.
Concrete steps in that direction soon followed. In December 1987 President Reagan and I signed in Washington the INF Treaty—the first and still the only agreement eliminating two classes of weapons of mass destruction, intermediate- and short-range missiles. In 1991 President George H.W. Bush and I signed in Moscow the first START treaty, reducing strategic nuclear weapons by half, and then in the fall of the same year we agreed to eliminate most tactical nuclear weapons on both sides.
The road to these agreements was difficult, but the result was mutual trust, which enabled me and President Bush to state at the Malta summit in December 1989 that our two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies. It meant that the cold war was over. This opened the way to cooperation in ending regional conflicts that had raged for decades in various parts of the world and in pushing back Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990, and, most important, led to peaceful change in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–91, based on the free choice of its people. This process culminated in the unification of Germany. Conditions were now in place to revive the United Nations as the main tool for international conflict resolution and prevention.