While Bush supported these independence movements, U. With the policy review complete, and taking into account unfolding events in Europe, Bush met with Gorbachev at Malta in early December Facing a growing schism between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, the Bush administration opted to work primarily with Gorbachev because they viewed him as the more reliable partner and because he made numerous concessions that promoted U.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States and the Soviet leadership worked together diplomatically to repel this attack. In January , violence erupted in Lithuania and Latvia. Soviet tanks intervened to halt the democratic uprisings, a move that Bush resolutely condemned. By , the Bush administration reconsidered policy options in light of the growing level of turmoil within the Soviet Union.
Three basic options presented themselves. The administration could continue to support Gorbachev in hopes of preventing Soviet disintegration. Alternately, the United States could shift support to Yeltsin and the leaders of the Republics and provide support for a controlled restructuring or possible breakup of the Soviet Union.
The final option consisted of lending conditional support to Gorbachev, leveraging aid and assistance in return for more rapid and radical political and economic reforms. Unsure about how much political capital Gorbachev retained, Bush combined elements of the second and third options. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was vast, as were Soviet conventional forces, and further weakening of Gorbachev could derail further arms control negotiations. To balance U.
Other miners followed suit in separate incidents. Land privatization was postponed and the budget deficit grew exponentially. Second, the Soviets had always feared the superiority of U. Soviet revenues devoted to defense would have to increase, further depriving ordinary citizens of revenues for medical research, infrastructure, and consumer goods.
Complaints from ordinary citizens soared. Third, nationalism in Eastern Europe and the USSR itself had become more pronounced as the dream of a classless communist society became illusory.
Among the peoples of both regions, there arose a gradual loss of ideological self-confidence. In its place, national pride against an externally imposed Soviet system had goaded the citizens of Poland and the Baltics to seek self-determination.
In June , they gained the right to participate in free legislative elections, whipping the official communist party. In the three Baltic States, approximately 2 million people formed a human chain of national determination spanning miles to rid themselves of Soviet authority. Fourth, Soviet disbursements of funds into Eastern Europe and the Trans-Caucuses resulted in higher and higher costs as Soviet military presence and subsidies to unproductive factories siphoned off funds that could be spent at home.
It became clear to ordinary citizens that the Soviet empire was overextended in Africa and Latin America. The invasion of Afghanistan in cracked the veneer of the Soviet solidarity with Third-World nations, and the disillusion spread as men came home in body bags, provoking strident complaints from mothers of fallen soldiers.
Finally, the creation of the nation Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe CSCE and its achievement of the Helsinki Accords in created new norms of international behavior, including the right to self-determination, the right to travel and respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms. The consequence of these gradual developments was increasing economic stagnation and growing complaints from citizens who could now compare their life style with that of cities in Western Europe.
In the face of this internal decline, President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and longtime Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko chose the 54 year-old, well-educated and travelled member of the Politburo with responsibility for agriculture to become general-secretary. He was tasked with reforming the Soviet Union. What did the energetic change maker undertake?
Everything must be done in a new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches, our views of the past and our future. And all of this — from top to bottom and from bottom to top. It has to be changed. Gorbachev and his group appeared to believe that what was right was also politically manageable. The Soviet model was defeated not only on the economic and social levels; it was defeated on a cultural level.
Our society, our people, the most educated, the most intellectual, rejected that model on the cultural level because it does not respect the man, oppresses him spiritually and politically. But one does not feel like it. Indeed, the expectations that greeted the coming to power of Gorbachev were so strong, and growing, that they shaped his actual policy.
Suddenly, ideas themselves became a material, structural factor in the unfolding revolution. In an instance of Robert K.
Already at the end of , the first representative national public opinion survey found overwhelming support for competitive elections and the legalization of parties other than the Soviet Communist Party — after four generations under a one-party dictatorship and with independent parties still illegal. Another year passed, and the share of the pro-market respondents increased to 64 percent.
And so it was in Soviet Russia. To them, a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject.
And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Proud citizens of a proud nation! As usual, Tocqueville was onto something hugely important. From the Founding Fathers to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, revolutionaries have fought under essentially the same banner: advancement of human dignity.
Languages and political cultures aside, their messages and the feelings they inspired were remarkably similar. He could have been reporting from Moscow in The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8 percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. With high oil prices, Libya on the brink of uprising also enjoyed an economic boom of sorts. Both are reminders that in the modern world, economic progress is not a substitute for the pride and self-respect of citizenship. Of course, the magnificent moral impulse, the search for truth and goodness, is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the successful remaking of a country.
It may be enough to bring down the ancien regime , but not to overcome, in one fell swoop, a deep-seated authoritarian national political culture. The roots of the democratic institutions spawned by morally charged revolutions may prove too shallow to sustain a functioning democracy in a society with precious little tradition of grassroots self-organization and self-rule.
This is something that is likely to prove a huge obstacle to the carrying out of the promise of the Arab Spring — as it has proved in Russia. The Russian moral renaissance was thwarted by the atomization and mistrust bred by 70 years of totalitarianism.
The moral imperative of freedom is reasserting itself, and not just among the limited circles of pro-democracy activists and intellectuals.
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