Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
Empires, after a long period of international reverses and inner political decay, often expire, as T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” may suggest, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
This was the case with two of the mightiest imperiums on earth, separated by more than 1,500 years – Rome and the Soviet Union.
On Sept. 4, 476, the last day of the Roman Empire in the west, Odoacer, a member of the Germanic tribe Siri and former commander in the Roman Army, who had entered the city unopposed, easily dethroned the sixteen-year-old emperor Romulus Augustulus.
The one time military and financial power of the Mediterranean was unable to resist and disappeared.
Fast forward more than 15 centuries to Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991, when the last Communist president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, like Rome, had been one of the mightiest powers on earth.
By then, most of its 15 constituent republics had effectively seceded from the federation.
Even its core, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, had declared its independence under its leader Boris Yeltsin, who had assumed its presidency on June 12, and it would emerge as the Russian Federation.
In a nationally televised speech, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president. He declared the office extinct and handed over its functions, including control of the Soviet nuclear codes, to Yeltsin.
A state whose Communist Party had for more than seven decades exercised totalitarian control over the economy, administering all industrial activity and collective farms, and which controlled every aspect of political and social life, was no more.
Gorbachev had come to power in 1985, following decades of rule by old apparatchiks. He inherited a stagnant economy, an onerous arms race with the United States, a debilitating war in Afghanistan, and a restive group of Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe, in particular Poland, whose fierce sense of nationalism had grown in the wake of the election of a Polish pope, John Paul II.
Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. The first of these was known as glasnost, or political openness.
Glasnost gave new freedoms to Soviet citizens. Political prisoners were released. Newspapers could print criticisms of the government. For the first time, parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
The second set of reforms was known as perestroika, or economic restructuring. The best way to revive the Soviet economy, Gorbachev thought, was to loosen the government’s grip on it. Individuals and cooperatives were allowed to own businesses for the first time since the 1920s. Workers were given the right to strike for better wages and conditions.
However, these reforms were slow to bear fruit. Perestroika had torpedoed the “command economy” that had kept the Soviet state afloat, but the market economy took time to mature.
In his farewell address, Gorbachev summed up the problem: “The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working.”
He also withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and declared a policy of non-intervention in the Warsaw Pact states. The first revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, soon followed by others.
Not surprisingly, the desire for sovereignty spread to the Soviet republics themselves. It was a tsunami that swept away one of the world’s largest empires by the end of 1991.
The USSR committed many crimes, especially against its own citizens, and no one should mourn its passing. But no one should forget what it stood for, however imperfectly, either.
Its values included altruism, self-sacrifice, the elevation of group over individual concerns, and the rejection of materialism. This bound people together and gave them a sense of meaning.
That this became intertwined with the cruelty and mass murder that eventually destroyed it was a twentieth-century tragedy.
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