The Penguin History of the World

Nor was that easier to see as the year came to an end. With the decision taken to abandon price controls in the Russian republic in the near future, it seemed likely that not only inflation – unparalleled since the earliest days of the Soviet system – but also, perhaps, starvation too, would soon face millions of Soviets. In another republic, Georgia, fighting had already broken out between the supporters of the president elected after the first free elections there and the discontented opposition. Dwarfing all such facts, though, was the end of the giant superpower which had emerged from the bloody experiments of the Bolshevik revolution. For nearly seventy years and almost to the end it was the hope of revolutionaries around the world, and the generator of military strength that had won the greatest land campaigns in history. Now it dissolved suddenly and helplessly into a set of successor states.

The last of the great European multi-national empires disappeared when Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian leaders met at Minsk on 8 December and announced the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a new ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’(CIS). On 21 December 1991, a gathering of representatives from eleven of the former republics met briefly at Alma-Ata to confirm this. They agreed that the formal end of the Union would come on the last day of the year. Almost immediately, Gorbachev resigned.

It was the climax of one of the most startling and important changes of modern history. Of what lay ahead, no one could be sure – except that it would be a period of danger, difficulty and, for many former Soviet citizens, misery. In other countries, politicians were rarely tempted to express more than caution over the turn events had taken. There was too much uncertainty ahead. As for the USSR’s former friends, they were silent. A few of them had deplored the turn of events earlier in the year so much that they had expressed approval or encouragement for the failed coup of August. Libya and the PLO did so because any return to anything like Cold War groupings was bound to arouse their hopes of renewed possibilities of international manoeuvre that had been constricted first by détente between the United States and the USSR and then by the growing powerlessness of the latter.

Events in the USSR must have been followed with special interest in China. Its rulers had their own reasons for uneasiness about the direction in which events appeared to be going on the other side of their longest land frontier after the collapse of Communism there. With the Soviet Union’s disappearance, they were the rulers of the only multi-national empire still intact. Moreover, China had been engaged since 1978 in a continuing process of cautious and controlled modernization.

Deng Xiaoping came to be seen as the dominating influence in this, but he worked in a collective leadership. Scope was to be given to local and community enterprise and the profit motive. Commercial ties with non-Communist countries were encouraged. Although the new course was still defined in appropriately Marxist language, the outcome seemed to be a substantially market-driven fundamental reform of the economy. But it showed no weakening of the will to maintain the power of the regime. China’s rulers remained firmly in control and intended to do so. They were helped by the persistence of the old Chinese social disciplines, by the relief felt by millions that the Cultural Revolution had been left behind, by the cult (qualified though it might be) of the benefits of the revolution, and by the policy (contrary to that of Marxism as still expounded in Moscow until 1990) that economic rewards should flow through the system to the peasant. This built up rural purchasing power and that made for contentment in the countryside. There was a major swing of power away from the rural communes, which in many places practically ceased to be relevant, and by 1985 the family farm was back as the dominant form of rural production over much of China.

Village industrial and commercial enterprise emerged from the industrial communes and ‘brigades’ of the era of the Great Leap Forward. By the mid-1980s a half of rural income was drawn from industrial employment. Special Economic Zones – enclaves where foreigners could invest and benefit from low Chinese wages – were set up, mostly in regions where foreign concessions had existed prior to the 1940s. By the end of the decade, major private Chinese companies had emerged, many of them made from what had been collective enterprises in the southern provinces, or from joint ventures with foreigners. Urbanization intensified, and exports grew very rapidly; for the first time since the 1930s China was again a part of the world economy.