tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/perestroika-114023/articlesPerestroika – The Conversation2022-11-16T17:24:16Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1941102022-11-16T17:24:16Z2022-11-16T17:24:16ZArmenia-Azerbaijan: an intermittent war as a way of life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493862/original/file-20221107-13-395lle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4742%2C3157&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/es/image-illustration/grunge-flags-azerbaijan-armenia-divided-by-2203835411">Shutterstock / xbrchx</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Clashes in the border territories between Armenia and Azerbaijan around Nagorno-Karabakh <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-visual-explainer">have recurred in recent months</a>, with claims of hundreds of dead and wounded from both sides, which can’t be verified.</p>
<p>The initiative in this lengthy, but <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/en/joint-statement-on-the-escalation-on-the/product-details/20211117DPU31721">intermittent war</a> has tilted each way over the decades. In the 1980s, Armenia was the big winner, annexing the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and integrating the so-called Republic of Artsakh into Armenian territory. </p>
<p>At that time, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54324772">Armenian superiority was overwhelming</a> and the soldiers <a href="https://supremecourt.gov.az/en/static/view/182">cruelly showed it</a>. Now the tables have turned and it is the Azeris, with <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/83143/as-turkey-backs-azerbaijans-recent-strikes-on-armenian-towns-where-are-russia-the-eu-and-the-us/">Turkish support</a>, who are demonstrating <a href="https://news.am/eng/news/720993.html">their superiority on the ground</a>, but facing claims they are torturing prisoners, brutalising civilians, mutilating people, destroying centuries-old churches and publishing their misdeeds on social media. </p>
<p>Few people in that region forget that there was a <a href="https://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html">Turkish genocide against the Armenians</a> between 1915-1923.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493780/original/file-20221107-15-xiz9zg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Map showing the location of clashes on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border in 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2022_Armenian%E2%80%93Azerbaijani_clashes.png">Wikimedia Commons / Viewsridge</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Nagorno-Karabakh is a <a href="https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/4994587/0/claves-conflictos-congelados-putin-rusia-presion-occidente-ucrania/">frozen conflict</a> zone. Joseph Stalin organised the vast territory of the Soviet Union in a pattern that sowed division to prevent the emergence of nationalist movements demanding independence from Moscow. Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gl%C3%A1snost">glasnost</a> these forces began to reveal themselves. </p>
<p>Since 1991, the associated conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia – a breakaway republic of Georgia – or <a href="https://theconversation.com/4-claves-para-entender-que-es-transnistria-y-por-que-moldavia-podria-ser-la-nueva-victima-de-putin-182319">Transnistria</a> – formerly part of Moldova – have ebbed and flowed. Moscow has used them to try to demonstrate that it remains an indispensable actor in keeping former territories stable and pacified. </p>
<h2>Stable situation until 2020</h2>
<p>The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh had been more or less stable - with no large-scale open clashes - until 2020, when Azerbaijan decided to launch a campaign to regain the territory it had lost, humiliated, 25 years earlier. <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2022/10/20/heads-of-turkey-and-azerbaijan-meet-in-territory-captured-during-nagorno-karabakh-war">Thanks to Turkish weaponry</a>, the Azeris crushed the Armenian army without much difficulty.</p>
<p>Armenia is also suffering the consequences of its political instability, having changed government several times in recent years in bloodless popular revolts. <a href="https://www.academia.edu/1068864/Russia_the_US_the_Others_and_the_101_Things_to_Do_to_Win_a_Colour_Revolution_Reflections_on_Georgia_and_Ukraine">Moscow accuses the West</a> - and specifically Washington - of being behind revolts in the countries of the former Soviet orbit, such as the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/internacional-georgia-revolucion-idLTASIE4AM08S20081123">Rose Revolution in Georgia</a> (2003) and the <a href="https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/ucrania-la-revolucion-naranja-se-tine-de-rojo/">Orange Revolution in Ukraine</a>(2004), a model replicated in the so-called <a href="https://nuso.org/articulo/la-rebelion-que-no-dio-frutos/">Arab Spring</a>, starting in 2011. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/109750/Review_XII.pdf">According to the Kremlin</a>, some Western countries fund foundations and NGOs to spread the values of democracy and liberalism in their former domains and ultimately replace Moscow-friendly regimes with pro-Western governments. The South Ossetia war (2008) and the occupation of Crimea (2014) were Russian attempts to show that there are certain lines that cannot be crossed.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493781/original/file-20221107-3705-nedhe6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Armenian diaspora protests in New York in connection with the Armenia-Azerbaijan border clashes that began on 13 September 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Protests_of_the_Armenian_diaspora_in_New_York,_2022.png">Wikimedia Commons / Voice of America</a></span>
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<h2>Why is Armenia asking the US for help?</h2>
<p>What is most striking about the latest episode of this intermittent war is the shift in alliances. Although Armenian citizens are aware that the existence of their country depends to a large extent on Russia’s willingness to defend them, Armenia has turned to the US for help. This is due to two factors.</p>
<p>First, because Russian protection has proved less than effective over the past two years. Although Armenia is part of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and Azerbaijan is not, Russia has not intervened forcefully but has limited itself to offering its expertise as a mediator to defuse tensions and peacefully reach ceasefires and peace agreements that have been a complete surrender - and humiliation - for the Armenian side. </p>
<p>If it has not stepped in more decisively to defend its ally Armenia (a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, CSTO) against Azerbaijan by force of arms, it is, among other reasons, because the latter is a strategic ally of Turkey, which in turn has a balanced relationship with Russia, as evidenced by the war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Secondly, Nikol Pashinian, Armenia’s prime minister, is aware of Washington’s hopes for this small country, a wedge between three countries that are more than interesting from the US’s point of view: Russia, Iran and Turkey. </p>
<p>Nancy Pelosi visited the country as speaker of the US House of Representatives in mid-September to show her support, and specifically to “highlight the strong US commitment to security, economic prosperity and democratic governance in Armenia and the region”. </p>
<p>Turkey has close trade ties with Azerbaijan and has infrastructure projects to link the two countries, the only obstacle being Armenia. The latest attacks would clear the way for <a href="https://www.azernews.az/nation/182882.html"><em>Victory Road</em></a>, a project that would connect the Azeri cities of Hajigabul-Minjivan-Zangazur via the town of Susha (in Nagorno-Karabakh territory).</p>
<p>In any case, whether the ceasefire is respected will depend on pressure from these two major players - Russia and Turkey. It seems likely though, that hostilities will continue to reopen from time to time, with this “never fully resolved conflict” remaining the <em>modus vivendi</em> for the inhabitants of the area.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194110/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Antonio Alonso Marcos receives funding from Universidad San Pablo CEU.</span></em></p>The on-again, off-again war between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been raging for 30 years and has been tilting back and forth. Armenia accused Azerbaijan a few days ago of opening fire on its positions on the border when EU experts went to the area to try to find peace.Antonio Alonso Marcos, Profesor Adjunto Historia del Pensamiento y de los Movimientos Sociales Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad CEU San PabloLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1898822022-09-02T18:04:44Z2022-09-02T18:04:44ZMikhail Gorbachev’s death brings many tributes – but his legacy in Africa remains ambiguous<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482469/original/file-20220902-14-yyr9fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JOSEPH EID/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/30/mikhail-gorbachev-dies-soviet-leader-92">presided over</a> the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States as well as the dissolution of the union of socialist republics. In the West, he is commonly seen as a towering historical figure who changed the course of history. </p>
<p>But Gorbachev’s legacy outside the West-Russia binary is more ambivalent. As the Soviets and Americans repaired their rift on Gorbachev’s watch, many of Africa’s political and intellectual elites were full of foreboding. As I’ve documented in <a href="https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00626.x">past research</a>, the Cold War was a period that provided African nations with considerable international leverage. </p>
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<p>The superpower rivalry presented independent nations with unique opportunities to play one side against the other. For instance, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the leader of the Ethiopian Derg, declared himself Marxist-Leninist. This gave him Moscow’s backing in his war against neighbouring Somalia. And Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko successfully lobbied Western powers for military and financial assistance by showcasing his anti-Communist credentials.</p>
<p>In the late 1990s, I spent some time in Nigeria and was surprised to discover that the very same reforms that gave former Soviet citizens (like myself) the cherished opportunities of free speech and travel didn’t have a similarly positive appeal to all my African academic colleagues. </p>
<p>Gorbachev’s reforms of <em>perestroika</em> (restructuring) and <em>glasnost</em> (opening) – which brought an end to the Cold War – had a quick and devastating impact on the Soviet Union’s commitments in the developing world. Gorbachev overhauled the Soviet economy and opened up Soviet society. He was convinced that his nation was facing an inevitable decline. His ambition was to make the economy more efficient and the everyday existence of Soviet citizens less oppressive. </p>
<p>But by admitting openly to the Soviet Union’s internal problems he diverted attention away from its ideological battles. This diminished the significance of Moscow’s ties with developing nations, particularly those in Africa. Under Gorbachev, the focal point of Soviet foreign policy was a rapprochement with the west.</p>
<p>The global realignment triggered by the end of the Cold War and Gorbachev’s reforms ushered in a period of transition on the African continent. But the outcomes remained uneven. Some oppressive regimes fell; new conflicts arose. </p>
<h2>Cold War in Africa</h2>
<p>The Cold War was a political and economic rivalry that developed after the second world war between the US and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. It overlapped with another important historical development – the collapse of the global system of European colonialism and the emergence of the postcolonial world.</p>
<p>In the battle for the hearts and minds (and resources) of the developing world, Africa loomed particularly large. In the <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/book/distant-front-the-cold-war-the-ussr-west-africa-and-the-congo-1956-1964">words</a> of a prominent Russian historian of Africa, Sergey Mazov, by the 1960s Africa had emerged as a “front of the Cold War”.</p>
<p>In most of the continent’s conflicts, the Soviets took the side of forces fighting for national liberation. This was against European colonialism and, in <a href="https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00508.x">South Africa</a> and <a href="https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dab0a0a3-28a7-438a-abd6-69df2e2ab4dc">Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)</a>, institutionalised racism.</p>
<p>The Soviets and their allies rendered crucial and often decisive support to a variety of liberation causes. Numerous affiliates of powerful independence political parties – such as the ANC in South Africa, MPLA in Angola and Frelimo in Mozambique – undertook <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469665863/cold-war-liberation/">political and military training</a> behind the proverbial “Iron Curtain”. </p>
<p>Thousands of young Africans <a href="https://srbpodcast.org/2021/09/24/african-students-in-the-ussr/">travelled</a> to the Soviet Union on generous educational scholarships. They forged close personal, cultural and sentimental ties, which often endured. </p>
<p>Just like the Americans, who supported anti-Communist forces on the continent, the Soviets propped up African regimes sympathetic to their ideology. As a result, a number of independent African nations developed close political and economic connections with the Soviet Union. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mikhail-gorbachev-southern-africans-have-a-special-reason-to-thank-him-189741">Mikhail Gorbachev: southern Africans have a special reason to thank him</a>
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<p>Soviet foreign policy had a major impact in southern Africa. The conclusion of the Cold War facilitated the independence of Namibia from South Africa and the end of South Africa’s direct military involvement in Angola’s civil war. And it ultimately led to the end of apartheid in South Africa. The Soviet Union – which supported the Angolan government and the liberation fighters in Namibia and South Africa – played no small part in these events. </p>
<p>Elsewhere in Africa, the end of the Cold War led to the eventual collapse of the bloody Mengistu Haile Mariam rule in Ethiopia and the termination of the kleptocratic reign of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. With the disappearance of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/17/world/after-cold-war-views-africa-stranded-superpowers-africa-seeks-identity.html">East-West rivalry</a> in the developing world, these regimes lost their ideological and geopolitical significance. This meant that they also lost the support of their former superpower sponsors, the Soviet Union and the US.</p>
<h2>Unleashed instability</h2>
<p>But the end of the Cold War also unleashed new instability on the continent. This included the implosion of the Somali state, the Rwandan genocide and civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.</p>
<p>For a number of <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/202209010064.html">observers</a>, these tragedies happened because the global balance had shifted. And that was the outcome of Gorbachev’s reforms. </p>
<p>The Cold War left parts of Africa inundated with weaponry and simmering with unresolved inter-ethnic conflicts. The disintegration of Somalia into conflict <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Somalia/Civil-war">during this period</a> had a lot to do with the aftershocks of the 1977-78 Ogaden war. This was a war between the Soviet-supported communist Ethiopia and Somalia. </p>
<p>Under the weight of its own economic troubles the Soviet Union <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2021.1948829">cut down dramatically</a> on foreign aid and withdrew from the continent. For instance, scholarships previously distributed to African students <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/484948/">largely dried up</a> as the Soviets discovered “for-profit” education. At the time, Africans residing in the USSR began to complain about the worsening climate of xenophobia and racism in the country.</p>
<h2>Putin as an anti-Gorbachev</h2>
<p>These memories have lingered among some ruling African elites. The older ANC cadres or Soviet-educated Africans, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00083968.2020.1841012">for instance</a>, now active in political and economic life of their countries. Some of them probably feel that they have few reasons to mourn Gorbachev’s passing. And such sentiments are well understood by Kremlin’s new rulers. </p>
<p>There is probably no politician more committed to this negative vision of Gorbachev’s legacy than the current president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. In a speech in 2005, he famously <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-was-catastrophe-of-the-century-521064.html">referred</a> to the Soviet collapse as a “major geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In the context of Russia’s growing international isolation, Putin has once again made Africa one of the primary objects of Kremlin’s global outreach.“</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189882/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maxim Matusevich is affiliated with Seton Hall University. </span></em></p>The global realignment triggered by the end of the Cold War and Gorbachev’s reforms ushered in a period of transition on the African continent.Maxim Matusevich, Professor and Director, Russian and East European Studies Program, Seton Hall UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1897782022-09-02T03:59:18Z2022-09-02T03:59:18ZWhy Gorbachev’s legacy still threatens Putin<p>Little remains of the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader and one of the greatest reformers in Russian history.</p>
<p>In the name of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring), Gorbachev dismantled totalitarianism, abolished censorship, freed hundreds of political prisoners, and held competitive elections that inaugurated a decade of democratisation.</p>
<p>By jettisoning the USSR’s ideologically driven foreign policy, he also ended the Cold War and brought humanity back from the brink of nuclear annihilation.</p>
<p>During his presidency, Vladimir Putin has systematically destroyed these historic achievements. On their ruins, his regime is mobilising militants behind a new totalitarian project.</p>
<p>Once again, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/06/russian-teacher-shocked-as-she-faces-jail-over-anti-war-speech-pupils-taped">education</a> and <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220701-rebel-moscow-theatre-shuts-doors-after-final-show">culture</a> are being policed by the state. Once again, <a href="https://memohrc.org/ru/content/programma-podderzhka-politzaklyuchyonnyh-i-drugih-zhertv-politicheskih-repressiy">hundreds of prisoners of conscience</a> are languishing in prisons and labour camps. And once again, Russia is locked in a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/russian-tv-says-nuclear-war-only-alternative-russia-victory-ukraine-1709539">potentially apocalyptic</a> confrontation with the West.</p>
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<h2>Gorbachev’s dialogue with a dissident</h2>
<p>Nothing better illustrates the differences between Gorbachev and Putin than how they treated their adversaries.</p>
<p>In December 1986, Gorbachev phoned <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-andrei-sakharov-went-from-soviet-hero-to-dissident-and-forced-the-world-to-pay-attention-to-human-rights-157688">Andrei Sakharov</a>, the most vilified dissident in the USSR. Sakharov had been languishing for seven years in internal exile in the closed city of Gorky for his condemnation of the invasion of Afghanistan. In a radical rupture with the etiquette of his predecessors, Gorbachev politely invited Sakharov to return to Moscow to “<a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/12/19/Freedom-came-with-a-phone-call/9238535352400/">resume your patriotic work</a>”.</p>
<p>This act of civility was only the beginning of what <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=NQpaBWWh4_AC&pg=PA1714&lpg=PA1714&dq=%22the+sharp+and+profound+Gorbachev-Sakharov+dialogue,+a+dialogue+which+became+one+of+the+engines+of+our+progress%22&source=bl&ots=yAI3qj8w1H&sig=ACfU3U1b1LE2HI4YUp8M3km1YHuKef8jNA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwivldOPw_L5AhXEwzgGHZX_AHoQ6AF6BAgDEAM#v=onepage&q=%22the%20sharp%20and%20profound%20Gorbachev-Sakharov%20dialogue%2C%20a%20dialogue%20which%20became%20one%20of%20the%20engines%20of%20our%20progress%22&f=false">one liberal intellectual called</a> “the sharp and profound Gorbachev-Sakharov dialogue, a dialogue which became one of the engines of our progress”.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-andrei-sakharov-went-from-soviet-hero-to-dissident-and-forced-the-world-to-pay-attention-to-human-rights-157688">How Andrei Sakharov went from Soviet hero to dissident — and forced the world to pay attention to human rights</a>
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<p>When Gorbachev introduced multi-candidate elections to a new Soviet legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, Sakharov became one of 2,250 new parliamentarians.</p>
<p>His voice might have been lost in the tumult of this unwieldy assembly. However, Gorbachev repeatedly intervened to allow Sakharov to take the podium and deliver speeches that set the agenda of Russia’s democratic reforms.</p>
<p>After Sakharov died of a heart attack in December 1989, Gorbachev <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/12/16/gorbachev-praises-sakharov/5c19e614-c727-49bd-8435-a9e0c66cc3f9/">lamented</a> this “great loss” of “a person with his own ideas and convictions, which he expressed openly and directly”.</p>
<p>Contrast this openness to dialogue with Putin’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/03/this-gentleman-alexei-navalny-the-name-putin-dares-not-speak">strange inability</a> to utter even the name of his principal adversary, Aleksei Navalny, who was subject to a decade of vilification, trumped up criminal prosecutions, and violent attacks by Kremlin proxies before state security agents poisoned him with the nerve agent novichok.</p>
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<h2>Gorbachev’s restraint</h2>
<p>There’s no doubt Gorbachev’s greatest achievement was the relatively peaceful dismantlement of a highly militarised totalitarian regime with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>As his power ebbed during the terminal crisis of the USSR, Gorbachev was unable to prevent excesses by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/01/13/soviet-troops-seize-lithuanias-tv-station/34739858-1b02-4f92-85e8-ab612554fd4e/">military hardliners in the Baltic states</a>. However, at the decisive moment, he resisted the temptation to wage war to preserve the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe or suppress the nationalist movements that were tearing the Soviet federation apart at its seams. </p>
<p>His reticence earned him the vilification of the neo-Stalinists and radical nationalists who dominated Russian opposition politics in the 1990s.</p>
<p>But it almost certainly saved millions of people from the ethnic cleansing and genocidal massacres that devastated the former Yugoslavia, eastern Europe’s other Leninist federation.</p>
<p>Gorbachev’s restraint also unshackled Russia’s civil society after seven decades of totalitarian regimentation. The early years of perestroika witnessed a proliferation of “informal groups”, small clubs of citizens engaged in the kind of associational life that’s the lifeblood of democratic politics. </p>
<p>The most important of these informals was the Memorial Society, which emerged as a group of activists petitioning for the construction of a monument to the victims of Stalinism. As Memorial grew into a grassroots human rights movement, it was denied legal status by obstructionist bureaucrats. Gorbachev, at the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/19/yelena-bonner-obituary">prompting of Sakharov’s widow</a>, ordered its registration.</p>
<p>For the next three decades, Memorial shone a spotlight on atrocities in the flashpoints of the former Soviet space and on repression within Russia. Unsurprisingly, it became a principal target of Putin’s anti-NGO laws and the Kremlin’s small army of <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-nationalists-attack-event-for-high-school-history-students-ulitskaya/27704871.html">anti-Western proxies</a>. Last December, when Memorial was banned, Gorbachev <a href="https://meduza.io/feature/2021/11/16/vlast-unichtozhaet-nashu-pamyat">spoke out in its defence</a>.</p>
<p>During his six years in power, Gorbachev evolved from a Leninist true believer into a kind of social democrat. In the end, his political credo revolved around the notion of “universal values”, which repudiated Marxism-Leninism’s division of the world into capitalism and socialism.</p>
<p>In the name of universal values, Gorbachev became the only Soviet leader to embrace the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/08/excerpts-from-gorbachevs-speech/a6b37f64-2b28-44db-bdd2-c54869b0acb1/">principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a>.</p>
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<h2>Putin’s ‘traditional values’</h2>
<p>For Putin’s propagandists, universal values are an object of derision, a pitiful delusion that blinded naive reformers like Gorbachev to an unfolding national catastrophe.</p>
<p>In its place, they offer “traditional values”, which justify attacks on international human rights norms, domestic repression, and genocidal war in Ukraine. At the same time, these <a href="https://nstarikov.ru/sud-nad-gorbachevym-14932">propagandists slander</a> Gorbachev as a criminal who should be tried for treason. </p>
<p>Despite the torrent of hatred directed at him, Gorbachev remained true to universal values. In 1993, while Putin was already <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-bribe-scandal/31867449.html">mired in the corruption schemes</a> that would make him one of the world’s richest kleptocrats, Gorbachev donated part of the money from his Nobel Prize to the newspaper <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/novaya-gazeta-nobel-prize-journalists-killed/24944541.html">Novaya Gazeta</a>, a bastion of courageous reportage and liberal values in post-Soviet Russia.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-fascists-the-russian-states-long-history-of-cultivating-homegrown-neo-nazis-178535">Putin’s fascists: the Russian state's long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis</a>
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<p>When neo-nazis <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/05/stanislav-markelov-anastasia-baburova-murders">murdered one of Novaya Gazeta’s journalists </a>alongside Russia’s most prominent human rights lawyer in 2009, Gorbachev accompanied the newspaper’s editor to a <a href="https://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/148821/">meeting in the Kremlin</a> with then President Dmitrii Medvedev to demand action. Like other independent media, Novaya Gazeta became <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/28/russian-news-outlet-novaya-gazeta-to-close-until-end-of-ukraine-war">a victim of the domestic crackdown</a> that followed the invasion of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Putin may have levelled Russia’s democratic institutions and pulverised its civic landscape, but he has been unable to extirpate one thing: the memory of the democratic experiment that Gorbachev set in motion.</p>
<p>For decades since the unveiling of glasnost and perestroika, millions of Russians have acted as free citizens, protesting, debating and associating, despite the dangers of an increasingly authoritarian environment. Those experiences cannot be unlived. They are already part of Russia’s democratic tradition. They are Gorbachev’s most enduring legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189778/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Horvath receives funding from Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>For over a decade, Putin has been systematically destroying Gorbachev’s historic achievements.Robert Horvath, Senior lecturer, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1897272022-08-31T19:28:29Z2022-08-31T19:28:29ZMikhail Gorbachev’s legacy: sadly, history will judge this good man harshly<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482139/original/file-20220831-20-1mnn2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C1992%2C1235&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">h</span> </figcaption></figure><p>No other person but the final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev – who has died aged 91 – could bring to life the eternal debate on the role of the individual in history. Does real change happen because of impersonal structural factors, or because of individual choice by influential people?</p>
<p>For many years I thought that the end of the USSR was inevitable. But the more I’ve been reading and thinking about it, the less inevitable it seems to me. And so the role of Gorbachev becomes ever more significant for the two epochal events: the end of the cold war and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. </p>
<p>Historians still intensely <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1060586X.1992.10641355?journalCode=rpsa20">debate</a> the Soviet collapse. Some point to the long-term structural problems in the USSR from a lack of popular legitimacy of the Soviet rule and the simmering ethnic tensions, to the chronic inability of the Soviet planned economy to satisfy growing consumer demands and keep up the growth with the west.</p>
<p>But equally when Gorbachev came to power there still was a reasonably robust system in place which kept dissent at bay and maintained military parity with the west. In March 1985, when the general secretary came to power, there was nothing to <a href="https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/armageddon-averted-soviet-collapse-1970-2000">suggest</a> the collapse of the whole system was inevitable in six years.</p>
<p>Gorbachev wanted to reform the Soviet system, not destroy it. He started his economic reforms by investing huge amounts in heavy industry alongside partial liberalisation of small trade, while controversially cracking down on alcohol consumption. But all of these, apart from the hugely <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-gorbachev-admits-botching-anti-alcohol-campaign/27018247.html">unpopular anti-drinking campaign</a>, were half measures. All of them only made things worse.</p>
<p>Gorbachev’s economic reforms undermined the command economy discipline. The retention of price controls by the state and ban on private property meant what was left of the old state system functioned worse than before – while the new market one couldn’t take off either. The <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674836808&content=toc">origins of vast illicit wealth</a>, legalised under Boris Yeltsin, was thanks to <em>perestroika</em>, his restructuring of the economic system.</p>
<p>Running into severe economic difficulties, which were exacerbated by collapsing oil prices, Gorbachev decided to switch his focus on to political reform. The aim was to give the Soviet system more legitimacy through partial democratisation. Gorbachev always thought that his reforms faced danger from the conservatives within the Soviet apparatus. Yet, it was the democrats, led by Yelstin, who destroyed him. </p>
<p>Gorbachev ended up falling between two stools. His reforms were too much for the conservatives, but too little for the democrats. He created the office of president to preserve his power as the Communist Party’s authority was increasingly undermined through public debates, revelations about the Soviet past and the growth of national movements in ethnic republics. But he never dared to face a popular election and, as a result, always lacked popular legitimacy, which was ironic as this was the aim of his political reforms. </p>
<p>Instead, Yeltsin got a popular <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-27-mn-430-story.html">mandate</a> with more than 80% of votes in the 1989 Russian elections. He emerged as an alternative centre of power with a mission to destroy Gorbachev – even if it meant dissolution of the USSR to boot.</p>
<p>In retrospect, it seems that Gorbachev simply didn’t understand how the Soviet system worked. He sincerely believed that it could be saved if he removed some elements such as the fear of repression and the command economy. But they turned out to be essential for its survival. Having removed them, the system unravelled as well. </p>
<p>Gorbachev emerged as the general secretary at a bifurcation point when the Soviet system was a crossroads. And he unintentionally tipped the balance towards its collapse. Judging on his own terms, he was a failure in the key task he set out for himself. He wanted to reform and improve the Soviet system, and instead he led it to its total disintegration.</p>
<h2>The end of the cold war</h2>
<p>The same sense of failure hangs over his foreign policy as well, which is where there is a huge gap in the western and Russian perceptions of his time in office. In the early 1980s, there was a huge build up of nuclear weapons in Europe with new intermediate missiles deployed by both the USSR and the US. Ronald Reagan’s “<a href="https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/">evil empire</a>” reference to the Soviet Union was a reflection of the tensions and little room for compromise.</p>
<p>Gorbachev changed all that. Instead of a zero sum nuclear standoff, he wanted a new security based on shared interests and common values. Instead of security based on mutually assured destruction, Gorbachev offered one built on mutual trust. Just like in domestic reforms, the aim was not to give up Soviet power but to secure it on a new basis.</p>
<p>Key arms reduction treaties were negotiated with the US, including the <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-how-gorbachevs-1987-inf-missile-treaty-has-limited-the-arsenal-available-to-putin-189750?notice=Article+has+been+updated.">1987 INF treaty</a> getting rid of all intermediate range missiles, and the START 1 treaty which drastically reduced US and Soviet nuclear arsenals signed in 1990. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-how-gorbachevs-1987-inf-missile-treaty-has-limited-the-arsenal-available-to-putin-189750">Ukraine war: how Gorbachev's 1987 INF missile treaty has limited the arsenal available to Putin</a>
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<p>In 1988, Gorbachev even <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/%20116224%20.pdf">announced</a> a unilateral cut of 500,000 Soviet troops based in Europe.
In eastern Europe, the Soviet leader favoured a “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinatra_Doctrine">Sinatra Doctrine</a>”, named after the famous song, allowing the Soviet satellites to do it reforms their way and refusing to back Communist regimes with Soviet force if they didn’t reform.</p>
<p>Again, Gorbachev expected reformed socialist governments to survive with a new bout of legitimacy. But that was a gross misunderstanding of the nature of those regimes, which were maintained by Soviet forces and enjoyed little local support.</p>
<p>The collapse of the Berlin Wall and German unification which followed were the final nail in the cold war’s coffin. It is this legacy which continues to irk the Russian leaders from Yeltsin to Putin. </p>
<p>Gorbachev enjoyed significant leverage through Soviet legal rights in Germany and the troops stationed there. The Germans needed Soviet cooperation for unification to happen and were willing to give a lot in return, including promises of “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300268034/not-one-inch/">not one inch east</a>” for Nato after the reunification. But Gorbachev utterly failed to use his leverage and extract any legally binding guarantees over future military expansion. The Russian leaders who succeeded him – and Gorbachev himself in his memoirs – accused the west of betrayal. </p>
<p>But it was his own inability to get any official guarantees that lies at the heart of Russian complaints. The naked truth is that Gorbachev’s idealism in foreign policy, with his emphasis on mutual interests and common values, only works if both sides equally subscribe to those views.</p>
<p>Unlike his western counterparts who knew exactly what they wanted (a reunification of Germany on their terms, nuclear and conventional arms cuts while retaining the freedom to expand Nato further east), Gorbachev simply didn’t know what he wanted beyond a grand vision of world peace. In the end, he simply stalled for time and kept asking the Germans and Americans for more money while hoping multiple problems would somehow solve themselves.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the end of the cold war is seen in the west as its victory as was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/29/us/state-union-transcript-president-bush-s-address-state-union.html">proclaimed</a> by George Bush in January 1992. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">George Bush proclaims the end of the cold war, January 1992.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Gorbachev wanted a new <a href="https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/which-way-out-of-ukraine-versailles-yalta-or-vienna">security</a> based on mutual interests and common values, but ended the cold war as essentially a politely wrapped up defeat of the country he once led.</p>
<h2>Gorbachev’s legacy</h2>
<p>It’s difficult to know how to assess Gorbachev given most of the things he set out to do didn’t actually work. Should he be given credit for the unintended consequences of his reforms? </p>
<p>There were many who benefited from Gorbachev’s policies - above all the former eastern bloc countries who were finally able to rejoin their natural place in the west, the EU and Nato.</p>
<p>Many people in the former USSR – myself included – also benefited from the new freedom and opportunities offered by <em>perestroika</em> and Soviet collapse. But for many more people the dislocation of the late 1980s and the 1990s was a huge hardship.</p>
<p>The Russians still have wide economic and personal freedoms that were unimaginable under the USSR, but are also ruled by a new, still actually popular, authoritarian <a href="https://theconversation.com/putin-is-sure-to-win-so-whats-the-point-of-elections-in-russia-93170">regime</a> with ever decreasing political freedoms. Could the same have been achieved without the trauma of the collapse and the 1990s transition? Probably not, but many will disagree.</p>
<p>International security has been enhanced from the west’s point of view as now the Russians are fighting on the Dnieper in Ukraine instead of holding the line on the Elbe in Germany. But the chances of escalation into a direct war between Russia and Nato are much greater now than in the whole of the cold war: the “red lines” are blurred while there’s essentially an uncontrollable military escalation spiral in Ukraine.</p>
<p>And any direct conflict with Nato would most likely involve – given Russia’s inferiority in conventional arms – tactical nuclear weapons. All this after huge nuclear arms cuts in the late 1980s, which should really be Gorbachev’s central legacy.</p>
<p>Not entirely surprising, that Gorbachev’s current successor in the Kremlin only believes in raw power as the ultimate argument in international relations. This is a real tragedy too.</p>
<p>Domestically, Putin’s <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20419058221108783">attitude</a> is shaped by Gorbachev’s perceived mistakes. Reform and liberalisation can lead to state collapse. This happened twice in 20th-century Russia: in 1917 and 1991. So, in no small measure thanks to Gorbachev, Putin believes that not letting go of control is key to the state and regime’s survival.</p>
<p>Gorbachev is still a puzzle for me – not least of all because of the contrast between the astuteness with which he climbed to the top, and his utter naivety when he got there about the Soviet system as a whole and power in international relations. Yet, Gorbachev was the individual who brought down the USSR and without whom the cold war would not have ended.</p>
<p>The best summing up of Gorbachev’s legacy came from one his closest aides: Gorbachev was good as messiah but lost as a politician.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189727/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Titov does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gorbachev failed in his two main aims: to hold togteher a reformed Soviet Union and cement its place in a new world order.Alexander Titov, Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1727882021-12-07T11:53:46Z2021-12-07T11:53:46ZWriting history: 30 years on, a former Moscow correspondent reflects on the end of the USSR<p>The Soviet anthem hailed the socialist union that it celebrated as “indestructible”. Yet 30 years ago this week, the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, together with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, signed the agreement that created the <a href="https://cis-legislation.com/document.fwx?rgn=3917">Commonwealth of Independent States</a>. It was the end for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). </p>
<p>Events unfolded in a deliberately discreet location: a hunting lodge for the Soviet elite tucked away in a forest in Belarus. As historian Vladislav Zubok writes in his new book <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300257304/collapse">Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union</a>, previous guests had included Cuban president Fidel Castro and the East German communist leader Erich Honecker. By Sunday December 8, he wrote: “Some 160 journalists had arrived, intrigued by the proceedings.” </p>
<p>Their presence was more than appropriate. This was one of those occasions when journalism had truly written the first draft of history. Since the launch of the perestroika reforms in the mid-1980s, Soviet and international correspondents had been allowed unprecedented freedom to write about the USSR. They were not to be denied a front row seat in the audience for this final act. </p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-31733045">Perestroika</a></em> – meaning “reconstruction” – was the policy that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had intended should reinvigorate the moribund Soviet system. Instead it led to its downfall, finally confirmed that cold weekend in late 1991. </p>
<p>Gorbachev had not expected the path ahead to be easy. Still, as Zubok argues, he could have prepared himself better. Instead, as he recounts, Gorbachev “willingly overlooked history lessons apparent to those who had read widely on world and Russian history”. Many conservative elements in the Soviet political elite were wary of change. So along with perestroika came <em><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1046656">glasnost</a></em> – meaning “openness” – licence for unprecedented public discussion of the problems that beset the Soviet system.</p>
<p>Journalists could cover stories that had previously been taboo. In effect, Gorbachev enlisted them to promote his cause. They willingly took on the role. As journalist and academic Ivan Zassoursky put it in his 2004 book <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Media-and-Power-in-Post-Soviet-Russia-1st-Edition/Zassoursky/p/book/9780765608635">Media and Power in Post-Soviet Russia</a>: “with the sanction of the general secretary, journalists also attacked the party establishment”. </p>
<h2>An ‘amazing time’</h2>
<p>Optimism characterised both the Soviet and international reporting of that period. This was the era of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/240271840">“the end of history”</a> – in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase – a time when he and many others hailed what they believed they saw coming: “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”.</p>
<p>Even those who might not have shared this great enthusiasm for the triumph of western liberalism remember an era more exciting than any other. “You could practically talk to anybody, fear dissipated, it was an extraordinary time,” remembered Moscow-based Canadian journalist Fred Weir in an interview for my 2020 book: <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/assignment-moscow-9780755601165/">Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin</a>. </p>
<p>Weir first arrived in Moscow in 1986, the year after Gorbachev came to power. He came to the Soviet Union as the correspondent for a communist newspaper, The <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2009218155/">Canadian Tribune</a>. So he was not a natural ally of those who enthusiastically embraced the collapse of Soviet socialism. Still he remembers, “an amazing time”.</p>
<p>The end of communism was the start of my own career reporting international news. I went to Moscow as a producer for the TV news agency Visnews (later Reuters Television). I was just in time to see the world that I had grown up in change forever. The Cold War, in which the rival power blocs of Soviet communism and American capitalism, faced off against each other was ending.</p>
<h2>Historical differences</h2>
<p>Three decades later, I have been reflecting a lot on the relationship between journalism and history. I have been remembering how quickly those feelings of excitement and optimism in Russia’s relations with the west fizzled out. The consequences of the Soviet collapse are still felt today in the conflict in Ukraine, and the confrontation between the Kremlin and the west that has resulted from that conflict.</p>
<p>Part of that confrontation has arisen from differing interpretations of the second world war. If you have not read it, I recommend the excellent 2020 paper by <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/experts/1015">Andrei Kolesnikov</a>, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the subject: <a href="https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/81718">Our Dark Past is our Bright Future</a>. </p>
<p>I would argue that we are now in an era when journalists need more than ever to understand the way that history is used to promote political narratives in current events. History influences both contemporary political and journalistic discourse both within the west and between the west and Russia. That’s why we at City, University of London, where I teach in the <a href="https://www.city.ac.uk/about/schools/arts-social-sciences/journalism">department of journalism,</a> are starting a new degree in Journalism, Politics and History. </p>
<p>Think of Black Lives Matter and the discussion it has led to over the legacy of empire and slavery. Or of how both sides in the Brexit debate co-opted Britain’s role in the second world war. Think too of Vladimir Putin’s broadside against the west on the 75th anniversary of the end of that conflict when he warned, in an article for the <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982">National Interest</a>: “Historical revisionism, the manifestations of which we now observe in the west, primarily with regard to the subject of the second world war and its outcome, is dangerous.”</p>
<p>Now, 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia’s relations with the west are worse than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In June 2021 – referring to the current focus of greatest tension between Russia and the west, Ukraine – Putin insisted, that “<a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181">Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole</a>”. More recently, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/uk-restates-russia-its-support-ukraines-sovereignty-2021-12-02/">UK</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/blinken-set-meet-russias-lavrov-ukraine-tensions-flare-2021-12-02/">US</a> foreign policy chiefs have been keen to stress their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. </p>
<p>Here are two vastly differing interpretations of distant and recent history casting a shadow over current events. Anyone seeking to write the first draft of history, therefore, needs to know history themselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172788/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Rodgers received funding from the Society of Authors for research for his book 'Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin' to which he makes reference in this article </span></em></p>Former BBC reporter James Rodgers reflects on the end of the Soviet Union and finds lessons for today.James Rodgers, Reader in International Journalism, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.