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I scuttled through Moscow’s backstreets early in October 1993, skirting the soldiers besieging the White House, Russia’s imposing parliament building. My destination: Lefortovo prison, where I was to interview nationalist parliamentarians and gunmen opposed to President Boris Yeltsin — who had locked them up before they could join the legislature’s revolt against his government.
It was a time that in many ways resonates with our contemporary turmoil.
The disheveled men rounded up in that notorious political prison loathed Yeltsin and his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev for their part in dismantling the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has lamented its collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Already in Lefortovo in 1993, the sense of humiliation was palpable.
Ironically, dissolving the Soviet Union had been furthest from Gorbachev’s thoughts when he wound up its wider informal empire in eastern Europe: the former satellite states of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany that now constitute much of NATO and the European Union’s eastern flank. Though rightly mourned by many in the West this week for his role in ending the Cold War, Gorbachev also sanctioned military force in a vain attempt to preserve the empire: 21 protestors died in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi alone; dozens more were killed in Riga and Vilnius, the capitals of Latvia and Lithuania in 1991 after the peoples of the Baltics and Caucasus on the Soviet periphery declared independence.
Even Yeltsin, who along with the leaders of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan formally dissolved the Soviet Union, was later prepared to spill rivers of blood to prevent the Chechens from breaking away from the Russian Federation.
It is hard, if not impossible, to stop the tapestry of empire unraveling once the threads have been pulled. That’s my perspective as a citizen of the successor state of the greatest empire the world has ever seen: Britain.
