Introduction

Li Bennich-Björkman and Saulius Grybkauskas

The once commonly held view in the West of the Soviet Union as virtually monolithic and ‘streamlined’ into grey uniformity in contrast to the technicoloured world of the West has been successfully challenged by a scholarly understanding that allows for more complexity and nuance. Everyday life continued for decades in the Soviet Union, generations grew up and grew old, patterns of economic and social relations crystallized into established practice as life’s joy and despair continued to leave their marks (Ledeneva, 1998, 2006). From an ideological point of view, the Soviet experiment was indeed a road to modernity, an alternative civilization, built on heavy industrialization, urbanization, and higher levels of education, but a modernity that rejected capitalism and used force if necessary to realize its plans (Kotkin,1995). As such, it was revolutionary (Suny and Martin, 2001). This path to modernity inspired by Marxism-Leninism finally ended one December day in late 1991 when the Belovezha Accords confirming the dissolution of the Union were signed by leaders representing some of the founding republics of the USSR. The predicted transition to a classless society was not the reason, but moral, even existential, defeat (Beissinger, 2002). What remained to be said except that if adhering to the Marxist plan of history’s progress, this must mean the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992).

Even if developments after 1991 in what became fifteen independent states were not to foreseeable, how the Soviet era played out on the republican level, and particularly in the post-Stalin decades that offered greater opportunities for individual initiative and strategic decision-making, has continued to shape national paths.

The Soviet centre and periphery

Patterns of governance, framed by the ‘triangular’ relationship between the Centre in Moscow, the local Party-states in the republics, and their national intelligentsias, created what we claim to be multiple Soviet models with legacies that varied once independence was established. How these governance patterns formed and developed after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 is the focus of this book.

Moscow, and by extension the Kremlin, or Staraya Ploschad (Old Square, the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party [CC CPSU]), is a prevailing geographical place in the political history of USSR. This book is about the Soviet republics and that means Moscow was the main variable in the above-mentioned triangle. The ‘Moscow factor’ played an even greater role within its ‘own’, that is Soviet, republics than in other Communist countries. If, in the case of the satellite states, their ruling parties had more latitude to deal with society and Moscow’s intervention was rare, in the Soviet republics the leaderships were always under Moscow’s permanent supervision. Moscow’s interventions, the ongoing control, changed the relationship with the Soviet republics dramatically compared to the Eastern European Communist countries. The aim of the local nomenklatura was not only to find a way for how to deal with any opposition and society in general but also how to convince Moscow that the republic’s leadership faithfully served All-Union interests as well.

Every Soviet republic experienced routine interventions, cadre purges, inspections sent from the Centre. Moscow’s representatives were installed in local leaderships (like the second secretaries of Communist parties) and there was a constant everyday flow of various documents and reports to and from Moscow. The political control of the vast Soviet territories in the CC CPSU apparatus reveals a strong system of observation of the periphery where a Soviet republic was supervised by the Department of Organizational and Party Work (and its predecessors), the most powerful structure among the departments of the apparatus. The Department had several sectors, one of which supervised Ukraine and Moldavia, another one for the Baltic republics and Byelorussia, another for the republics of Transcaucasia, and one in charge of the Central Asian republics. These sectors gathered information and thus, through the Department, the top Party leaders were regularly informed about the misbehaviour of the intelligentsia and manifestations of nationalism in the Soviet republics. These four regions are all covered in the chapters of this book as Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Uzbekistan. While the book is limited to a number of case studies from the Soviet periphery (i.e. not Russia), we have coverage of the Slavic republics (Ukraine and Belarus), the Caucasus (Georgia), the most Western (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Central Asia (Uzbekistan), and the most Southern European (Moldova) republic, which spans a large variety. The first chapter, however, gazes out from the Centre, focusing on Moscow’s ambitious and numerous Party purges in the republics a few years into the post-Stalin epoch, in the late 1950s.

A common political space resulted in the development of ties among republics, both among the local nomenklaturas and the intelligentsias. Rather than just mirroring events in Moscow, our book seeks to reveal horizontal ties, similarities, and differences in dynamics. This book’s ambition is to show the political developments of the USSR from the perspective of the Soviet periphery.

The Soviet republics in this book have all previously been part of Tsarist Russia. Incorporated into the Soviet Union at different points in time, Moldova, the Baltic States, and Western Ukraine in connection to the Second World War, some also carried a cultural heritage and historical experiences from Central Europe and the Austrian Dual Monarchy, and from Sweden and Scandinavia. Bessarabia, present-day Moldova, formed part of Tsarist Russia from 1812, but between the wars it was a Romanian territory and as such claimed by the Soviets in 1940, when it was united with Soviet Transnistria as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The territories of what today constitute Estonia and Latvia were conquered by Tsarist Russia in 1721, after Russia defeated Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and a separate peace agreement was signed in Nystad. The Baltic German nobility however continued to exercise absolute power in this region, exchanging influence for loyalty towards the Tsar in Moscow.

Lithuania, which was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was integrated into Russia through the three partitions of the Rzeczpospolita territories, the last one in 1795. The wars of liberation against the Russian Bolsheviks in 1918–1920 were successful for the three Baltic States, which proclaimed independence in 1918. Lithuania regained her sovereignty, which connected back to her proud medieval heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Union. In all three Baltic States, the Western and Central European cultural legacy of Christianity and pluralism was predominant.

Ukraine is marked by the historical legacies of different empires and states. The present Western Ukrainian regions of Galicia, Volhynia, and Bukovina were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War, and then during the interwar period divided between Poland, Romania, and what was then Czechoslovakia. Eastern Ukraine was integrated into the Soviet Union in 1922, Western Ukraine was incorporated as a Soviet territory much later, at the beginning of the Second World War, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its infamous secret protocol. Eastern Ukraine suffered terribly due to the brutality of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture in which millions of people did not survive the Great Famine, the Holodomor of 1932–1933 (Conquest, 1986; Applebaum, 2017). Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were later deported in large purges of 1937–1938 (Applebaum, 2003). The Autonomous Crimean Republic belonged to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 1954 when it was transferred to Ukrainian SSR by a Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Regional differences in the processes of integration into the Soviet Union influenced the forms of Sovietization in Ukraine and subsequently shaped the attitudes of the population towards Soviet rule. The legacy of these ‘different’ types of Sovietization adds to the ambivalence in the national identity of Ukrainians, including in attitudes to Perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the independence of Ukraine. Belarus, like Ukraine is a Slavic culture with linguistic, historic, and religious ties to both Russia and Ukraine, and was part of imperial Russia under the Romanov dynasty. Again like Ukraine, Belarus fought a war of independence against the Bolsheviks that was lost, and Belarus became part of the original territories that formed the Soviet Union in 1922.

Georgia in the South Caucasus along with the two other South Caucasus republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, formed part of the original territories of the Soviet Union. One of the oldest Christian cultures in Europe, Georgia possessed a strong and proud national identity. Finally, Uzbekistan was part of the Central Asian region of the Soviet Union with its very different demographic traditions of nomads, an overwhelmingly Muslim faith, and cultural affinity with the Middle East and Iran rather than Central or Northern Europe.

Investigating the ‘triangular’ relationship

If the Soviet Union was not a monolith, then what patterns of governance prevailed on the ground and in the periphery of the republics? When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, it marked the end of an era characterized by severe violence and harsh repression in many republics of the Soviet Union. Directed not least against the intelligentsia, the artists, and the creative professions in the recently annexed territories of the Western Soviet borderlands, the terror held the republican Communist parties’ ‘captive’, and this was also the case for the local intelligentsias. In attempts to consolidate a Soviet state that in two waves during the Second World War had annexed territories that were profoundly hostile to its rule, ‘high Stalinism’ meant the deportation of many thousands of political leaders, priests and church officials, professors, and journalists, as well as peasants and their families from Western Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These territories constituted the Soviet’s new ‘windows’ to the West, even though Western Ukraine and former Galicia bordered on Communist Poland, as did Lithuania, and Latvia was squeezed in between Estonia and Lithuania with Russia in the East. The brutality of the Stalin years involved constant uncertainty among the nomenklatura and the intelligentsia across the entire Soviet Union. The post-Stalin decades from the mid 1950s to the early 1980s followed another logic, first under the shrewd Nikita Khrushchev, then the popular but over time somewhat inert Leonid Brezhnev, and finally in the years preceding perestroika, the brief interregnum of Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. The constantly threatening Stalinist arbitrariness that prevented institutionalization was successively replaced by more stable patterns of governance, even though ‘earthquakes’ continued to occur.

While the centralization of the Soviet system remained firm on an ideological and theoretical level, formulated through the centralization of the Party-state, the local Party-states in the republics formed their own fiefdoms across the Soviet Union. More or less, depending on the diplomatic and strategic skills of the local leaders and the prevailing worldview in the Kremlin, the republican Party-states developed individual forms of political practice. Yet, the republican Communist parties constantly had to confront their in-between position. On the one hand, there was the desire to maintain relations with Moscow to guarantee some stability and mutual respect. On the other hand, a balance had to be struck to secure reasonable legitimacy and cooperation from the republic’s intelligentsia, to avoid the high societal costs of repression, and a stagnant society. For that purpose, the republican Party-states metaphorically ‘negotiated’ stability and their own survival at the intersections between the Centre and their local intelligentsias. We call this a triangular relation.

How did the Soviet triangular relationship of governance take shape in the Soviet periphery? The aim of this book is to analyse this question through a number of case studies of individual republics, with a focus on the post-Stalin or late Soviet decades, but also with consideration of the times preceding those decades, and what came afterwards. The triangular relationship is what shaped individual governance structures in the republics, creating not one but several Soviet governing ‘models’. How these negotiations over relations played out in the Soviet periphery is what concerns the contributors of this book, analysed in a number of case studies on the republican level that highlight the decades following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 until perestroika. The overall argument we make is that the local Party-states in the republics crystallized as a consequence of the triangular relationship with the central Communist Party in Moscow and the local constituencies – the intelligentsia and the creative professionals who constituted the potential to be the regime’s harshest critics but who could also be co-opted into support the Party-structures.

The republican party-states

The governance pattern that defined the Soviet Union was a triangular relationship. In the absolute centre of this triangular relationship was the local Party-state, the titular Communist Party, torn externally between the Moscow Centre and the All-Union Soviet Communist Party (the CPSU), and the national intelligentsia. The titular Communist Party had to manage not only the Centre in Moscow to which it was subordinated, but also the local intelligentsia which comprised educated professionals, intellectuals, and creative professionals whose brainpower and tolerance where important resources to safeguard. The local Communist parties also had to consider the internal arena, within the Party structures, which varied in the republics between corporatist, factional, and monolithic. Local parties also tried to play the important role of mediators – helping Moscow to control its territory while also promoting the intelligentsia’s interests from the other side. Yet, chapters in this book show that some members of the intelligentsia, technocrats, and even agents of the nomenklatura sometimes escaped their leaders’ will and established their own ties with institutions and agents in Moscow.

Kitschelt (1995, 1999), Gryzmala-Busse (2002), and Ekiert and Hanson (2003) have convincingly shown that the Party-states differed considerably in the Soviet satellites in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Furthermore, these scholars have shown how such differences influenced the simultaneous transitions to democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law, by creating varying human resources and skills, which could be adapted to a new institutional environment. The Polish Communist Party, for example, enjoyed a high degree of early professionalization and a ‘technocratic’ outlook in comparison with Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia (Gryzmala-Busse, 2002). As Gordon Skilling (1973) showed in his seminal work with relevance to the Prague Spring in the 1970s, since institutionalized opposition was not possible, rival factions instead developed within the Party structure.

Much like in East-Central Europe, local Soviet republican parties also established relations with dissidence, the intelligentsia, and the CPSU and central power in Moscow, which shaped significantly different trajectories, and spilled over into later liberalization, transition, state-building and democratization. Thus, local Party-states differed not only among the satellite states, they differed within the republics of the Soviet Union (Kaplan, 1988; Karklins, 1990). Hence, the interaction between the local and central Party-state and the local intelligentsia was pivotal to how the Soviet republics were actually governed. These relations echoed through time and put their mark on perestroika and later institutional transformation by shaping local social climates differently. Depending on if they were characterized by harsh repression, orthodoxy and instrumentalism, by idealism, or even pragmatism, and how they developed over time, various social and civil climates – political cultures – evolved.

The intelligentsia

The local Party-state constituted one node in the triangular relationship. Another was the local intelligentsia, that is the local elite(s) in the republics. Depending on how relations developed between the two, the activities of the intelligentsia ranged from everything from anti-Soviet opposition to non-Soviet initiatives to loyalty. Non-Soviet expressions of artistic, nationalistic, and religious dissent contrasted with anti-Soviet activities that were openly oppositional and signalled protest against the Soviet system, in the literature this is often addressed as dissent or dissidence (see Ramonaitė and Kavaliauskaitė, 2015). In line with the late Tony Judt (1988), we will, however, call the latter’s actions opposition, preserving the concept of dissidence for the broader umbrella of behaviour deemed as non-Soviet and non-conformist (Falk, 2011).

Whereas the intelligentsia’s anti-Soviet opposition has previously received considerable attention, existential resistance, perceived as dissent, has not (see Renwick, 2006). The former has, and rightly so, been admired as courageous and inspiring, not least when it comes to the examples set by particularly charismatic individuals such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Adam Michnik in Poland, Andrei Sakharov in the USSR, or Lagle Parek in Estonia. Nonetheless, a culture of pragmatism, including the tacit practice of compromise and co-existence between intellectuals and creative professionals with the Party-state, was formed in circumstances that were less antagonistic. Whereas anti-Soviet opposition and idealism often presuppose a stylized world in black and white, the presence of a substantial number of non-Soviet activities – ‘resistance’ that was based more in existential concerns – implied relations between Party-state and the intelligentsia and the artists that embedded a degree of compromise, nuance, predictability, and trust. How state-society relations developed affected the content and extent of primarily collectively organized and performed ‘non-Soviet’ and ‘beyond Soviet’ activities. For many, it meant creating a reality of one’s own, ‘our’ reality together with others, as opposed to ‘theirs’ – the representatives of the Party-state. Such a culture of pragmatism enhanced the capacity to perceive of society in less strong colours than black and white.

In the Soviet periphery, which is the focus here, the room for non-Soviet, existential resistance, among the intelligentsia during the post-Stalin decades varied profoundly. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms from 1985 onwards changed the Soviet climate in a more approving and open direction of civil initiative and tolerated pluralism, the republics covered in this book entered the last phase of Soviet existence carrying with them various experiences of collectively exercised existential resistance.

Negotiating stability

As archives have been opened and oral history sources collected, a gaze less coloured by the polarization of the Cold War has prevailed. Society, everyday life, power, and politics in the Soviet Union have become more open to inquiry and less to immediate condemnation and alienated ‘othering’. Research on the realities of Soviet life based on mainstream research sources instead of rumours, émigré collections, and ‘Kremlinology’ constitutes today a valuable and necessary part of modern European history writing. This book joins these efforts.

We build on archival and oral primary sources, interviews with participants of the existential resistance and anti-Soviet opposition and dissidence, as well as with participants of movements during perestroika, and during the later institutional transition. Memoirs and biographies, and literature in both the local languages and English have been included.¹ The, by now, vast literature on the Soviet Union and its satellites, their evolution and dissidence is included but cannot be fully covered here.

These new research perspectives brought a number of authors to the ‘Vilnius Symposium on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Issues’ in December of 2016 and to a follow up workshop in Kyiv in April 2019 to discuss common patterns and differences of political development in the Soviet republics. The result of these meetings was to establish the research collaboration for the preparation of this book.

The individual chapters look at political dynamics in the Soviet republics as the outcome of metaphorical ‘negotiations’ among and between three actors: Moscow, the local nomenklatura, and the intelligentsia, written by selected specialists in the respective republic/state. There is a variance between the chapters, in that while some focus on the entire triangular relationship, others spend more time on either the relationship between Moscow and the local Party-state, or the local Party and the intelligentsia. Therefore, the individual chapters approach the triangular relationship between the CPSU in Moscow, the local Communist parties in the republics, and the intelligentsias, ranging from Moscow’s outlook on the republics to Sharaf Rashidov’s ‘cotton affair’ in Uzbekistan. Although all the authors focus on governance, they still vary in their approach. Some authors paint a picture of the general aspects of governance over the post-Stalin decades in their respective republics (Bleiere on Latvia, Grybkauskas on Lithuania, Kazakevich on Belarus, and Bennich-Björkman on Estonia and Ukraine), while Loader’s chapter on the view of the periphery from Moscow singles out a wave of purges between 1958 and 1961. Other authors highlight specifically interesting individual manifestations of governance, framed as case studies. Casu concerns himself with how the succession of first secretaries in Moldova was determined over time, shifting between Moscow having the upper hand, and the outgoing leader being able to influence the choice of his successor. Blauvelt highlights how the Kostava-Gamsakhurdia Affair in Georgia, which featured prominently at the time, demonstrates the changed relationship between the Georgian Communist Party and the intelligentsia. The chapters on the Baltic States manage to question the still lingering wisdom of them as all highly dissenting. A strong discrepancy between Estonia and Latvia existed, where Latvia’s purge between 1959 and 1962 definitively shaped the local Latvian Party as Moscow’s loyal servant for decades to come and muted the intelligentsia. Estonia suffered a purge in the early 1950s, but thereafter managed to safeguard an Estonian-inclined Party that also protected the activities of the intelligentsia, most of them non-Soviet rather than anti-Soviet. Lithuania differs from the other two – the Party negotiated its relationship with Moscow skilfully, securing Lithuanian language-use and national symbols, but still encountered a somewhat hostile society (intelligentsia). The unfortunate developments in Ukraine in the 1970s, which put an end to what could have become a prolonged liberalization shielded by the Party much like in Estonia, is revisited through new material, which in today’s conflict with Russia is a useful reminder of Ukraine’s long struggle for national recognition.

Taken together, the chapters paint a picture of a landscape of comparative Soviet governance, which adds to our knowledge about how this vast state was held together and the local adaptions that took place. Drawing on archival material, oral sources, and official documents, the individual chapters provide a novel interpretation of their republic’s negotiated survival. By focusing on how the republican Communist parties were entangled in negotiations of survival and stability, with the Moscow-Centre on the one hand and with the local intelligentsias on the other, the individual chapters contribute to highlighting how central state, local state, and state-society relations played a crucial role. Local Communist parties faced a struggle to balance between Moscow and the local intelligentsia, their ‘constituencies’, and adopted quite diverse characteristics in the analysed republics (Kaplan, 1988; Karklins, 1990).

In Chapter One, ‘Purging in the Khrushchev era: “Red Cardinals” and nationalism in the Soviet Republics’, Michael Loader tells the history of the Moscow purges between 1958 and 1961, which were better coordinated and all-encompassing than was previously understood. Over a thirty-month period, the Department for Union Republics (later the aforementioned Department of Organizational and Party Work) was the instrument used to conduct a series of purges of regional elites in the republics. These purges were designed to remove local leaders promoting a purportedly nationalist agenda and to confront centrifugal tendencies within the Party’s republican branches. Loader argues that the targeting and removal of these leaders from the republics was part of a power struggle in Moscow, and constituted an attempt to weaken Khrushchev. Khrushchev emerged damaged by the purge of his allies in the periphery and was ultimately forced to abandon the decentralisation of the Soviet system in the new Party Programme of 1961. Connections between the Department for Union Republics, this wave of purges, and their impact on the Kremlin have been almost totally overlooked in the literature on Soviet politics during this period. The Department for Union Republics is an understudied component of the CPSU’s apparatus. The Department for Union Republics fell under the control of conservative hardliners within the Kremlin leadership in the late 1950s. Between 1958 and 1961, these hardliners were the architects of this series of purges, conducted by the Department for Union Republics, of regional elites in the Republics. What earlier appeared as individually conducted purges, through new archival material now figures as coordinated central action.

In Chapter Two, ‘The formation and development of the Soviet Latvian Nomenklatura: path-dependency, cleavages, and imposed unanimity’, Daina Bleiere shifts the focus from the centre to the periphery. In 1959, Latvia was one of the republics hit hardest by the purges examined in Chapter One. This constitutes the starting point of Daina Bleiere’s analysis of how the triangular relationship played out in the Latvian SSR. On 8 July 1959, the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party (LCP) condemned the ‘nationalist’ position of Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Eduards Berklavs and some of the other leading communists. The LCP First Secretary, Arvīds Pelše, and his successor Augusts Voss advanced the unanimity of the Latvian SSR’s nomenklatura, and this policy was appreciated by Moscow. The ensuing ‘cleansing’ of the nomenklatura, which went on until 1962, was a traumatic event for the entire leadership of the republic, and left Latvia bereft of overt nationalist tendencies for over two decades. Bleiere shows how cleavages that had remained hidden within the nomenklatura since 1959 surfaced during the perestroika. A final split occurred in April 1990, when the minority, supporting independence, left the LCP and founded the Independent Communist Party of Latvia.

In Chapter Three, ‘Patterns of succession: top-party elite recruitment in Soviet Moldavia and centre-periphery relations, 1940–1991’, Igor Casu sheds light on the power dynamics between Moscow and the republics when considering the appointment of the local parties’ most powerful men, the first secretaries. Whereas influence over these appointments was crucial from a republican point of view, Moscow had a parallel interest in securing republican loyalty, and at the same time as signalling respect for their autonomy. In Moldova, which is at the centre of Casu’s interest, from 1940 to the end of the Soviet Union, nine first secretaries and one temporary placeholder succeeded each other at the helm of the Communist Party of Moldavia. Given the incremental role played by the Party leader in the architecture of power, it is important to pinpoint what factors and criteria were behind the replacement and appointment of first secretaries. The top Party potentate was in charge not only of Party affairs, but also supervised key governmental institutions. This explicitly included the security and civil police as well as the army, making the local Party boss a real holder of power rather than the head of the government. Casu shows that the more successful the retiring first secretary had been in his office, the more chance he had to influence the process of appointing the person to replace him. Conversely, the less impressive the leader’s legacy, the less he was in a position to have a say, let alone dictate, the choice of his successor. In the chapter, this leadership recruitment pattern is illustrated through an examination of several individual first secretaries’ paths to power, including Leonid Brezhnev, Ivan Bodiul, Semion Grossu, and Petru Lucinschi.

Chapter Four, ‘The transformist: the evolution and adaptability of Sharaf Rashidov’s regime in Soviet Uzbekistan’, written by Riccardo Mario Cucciolla, examines governance in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. The long reign of First Secretary Sharaf Rashidov (1959–1983) is an emblematic case study to understand the origins, the evolution, and the crisis of the Brezhnevite system in the Central Asian periphery of the USSR. Rashidov was a master in achieving compromise among the Party’s factions, co-opting potential rivals, and marginalizing opponents, claims the chapter’s author. Under Rashidov the republic more than doubled its cotton production and strove to fulfil the republic’s production plan at any cost, including through the falsification of cotton production data. This became a matter of political stability, legitimacy, and survival for the Uzbek establishment. The elevation to Yuri Andropov’s General Secretary and his ‘moralization’ campaign coincided with an attempt to legalize, cleanse, and, ultimately, revitalize a system in which stagnation and fraud had reached unprecedented levels. In 1983, the so-called ‘Bukhara Affair’ exposed the level of ‘official corruption’ at the regional level, while Rashidov tried to marginalize these cases as isolated incidents to preserve the power structures in Uzbekistan, and to bend the Andropov’s moralizing course in his favour. Nevertheless, his sudden death in October 1983 would trigger a power struggle among local elites, which culminated in the Cotton Affair of the 1980s.

In Chapter Five, Andrei Kazakevich analyses how the Belarusian nomenklatura interacted with Moscow over the course of its history as a Soviet republic that was known, at least overtly, for its conformity. In ‘The Belarusian nomenklatura: a political history 1954–1994’, Kazakevich claims that the Belarusian Soviet nomenklatura was exclusively loyal to the Soviet system. The Belarusian political elite sincerely trusted Moscow and tried to build an ideal Union republic. In contrast to neighbouring Slavic Ukraine, there were no visible national or religious movements in Belarus between the 1950s and 1980s, and unlike Latvia this was not because of a brutal, comprehensive, and extended purge. In Belarus, national communism in the local Communist Party never developed. Very few within the intelligentsia became dissidents, many of them non-Belarusians. Since the 1960s Russification and self-Russification was carried out consistently. Such political success, however, was not sustainable. After the post-war political leaders had left the scene, the Belarusian nomenklatura quickly experienced a leadership crisis. Simultaneously, in the mid-1980s, when perestroika was launched in Moscow, the Minsk City Industrial Group came to power in Belarus. Despite the absence of significant political challenges from Moscow or internal opposition, the group was incapable of consolidating long-term power. During the Soviet liberalization in late 1980s, the weakness of the democratic-minded opposition contributed to the Belarusian nomenklatura regaining power. Democratic aspirations were crushed a few years later by the victory of ‘outsider’ Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has ruled the country continuously since 1994.

Chapter Six, ‘The Soviet nomenklatura and cultural opposition during the Brezhnev period in Lithuania,’ is written by Saulius Grybkauskas. It studies the nuts and bolts of the inner workings of the Soviet Lithuanian nomenklatura, and its relationship to the Lithuanian intelligentsia. Lithuania was one of the few republics that managed to escape a purge from Moscow. Thus, predictability and stability characterized the Lithuanian SSR during the long reign of First Secretary Antanas Sniečkus (1940–1974). When he was succeeded by Petras Griškevičius in 1974, however, it affected the Party’s relationship with the local intelligentsia. Expressions of anti-Soviet sentiment in society, and the impact of a non-Soviet position on the nomenklatura network are in the centre of attention in this attention. Under the leadership First Secretary Petras Griškevičius (1974–1987) Soviet Lithuania developed in a direction that fostered growing antagonism on the part of the intelligentsia towards the pragmatic and sometimes cynical nomenklatura. At the same time, non-Soviet activities became more widespread. The activities of the non-Soviet opposition and even its search for informal collaboration with some members of the high-ranking nomenklatura with a cultural agenda (for example, to save Lithuania’s cultural heritage or to prevent an environmentally harmful industrial project) impacted the balance of nomenklatura networks.

Chapter Seven, ‘Ukraine: falling in and out of Moscow’s grace’, puts Ukraine’s post-Stalin decades in focus. Li Bennich-Björkman claims that there was a genuine period of liberalization negotiated by the Communist Party of Ukraine for the young intelligentsia in the 1960s, followed by a severe purge and cleansing between 1972 and 1974 that fundamentally changed the political-cultural climate. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Ukrainian Party nomenklatura under First Secretary Petro Shelest exercised a limited protectorate over the Ukrainian intelligentsia, shielding certain intellectuals from political threats and exercising a kind of benevolent patronage over the development of Soviet Ukrainian culture. Originally a client of Mykola Pidhornyi (Nikolai Podgorny), Shelest supported the coup against Khrushchev in 1964. As Ukrainian cultural politics developed, by the late 1960s he gradually fell from favour with Brezhnev and was removed in 1972. Western Ukraine – in the interbellum belonging to Poland (Galicia and Volhynia), Czechoslovakia (Transcarpathia), and Romania (Bukovina) and before 1918 was a part of the Habsburg Empire – became the West of the already-existing Soviet Ukraine. Firstly, occupied and annexed in 1940–1941, and then again after three years of German occupation in 1944, these western borderlands – together with Poland, Western Belarus, and the Baltic States – came to constitute Europe’s Bloodlands in the words of historian Timothy Snyder (2010). The 1940s were bloody and brutal here, in particular in Western Ukraine the armed resistance to Soviet rule (and between 1941 and 1944 to German rule) was extremely violent, and contested for several years by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its paramilitary branch the Ukrainian Provisional Army. For the entirety of its time in the Soviet Union, Western Ukraine nourished and manifested the strongest Ukrainian identity, affecting other parts of the republic, particularly the capital, Kyiv. The centre of non-Soviet intelligentsia activities shifted after 1972 from Kyiv to Lviv in Western Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalism and European identity continued to inspire and give meaning to intellectuals and artists.

Chapter Eight, ‘Between centre and periphery: Georgia and the Gamsakhurdia and Kostava affair’ by Timothy Blauvelt, turns the focus to the situation between the local Communist Party and the intelligentsia in Soviet Georgia. Based on archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, this chapter examines the context of the late 1970s in Soviet Georgia in which two prominent dissidents, Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava, were arrested and tried in order to understand why the regime broke the existing status quo in the relationship between the local state and Party leadership and the intelligentsia. In so doing, the chapter places the arrests in the context of official crackdowns on dissidents elsewhere in the USSR, on signalling by the centre to the periphery about the limitations on the extent of local national expression or perceived leniency towards dissident activities, and considers the significance of these events for the underlying power struggles as Eduard Shevardnadze consolidated his position as the new First Secretary of the Georgian SSR (1972–1985) following the ouster of the network of his predecessor, Vasily Mzhavanadze.

In the final chapter, Chapter Nine, ‘Pragmatic political practice: the Estonian Communist Party, the intelligentsia, and Moscow’, Li Bennich-Björkman argues that due to the developments in Estonia, liberalization in this ‘Soviet window on the West’ did not start with perestroika but had already started in the 1960s. Therefore, Estonia stands out as liberal in comparison to other republics during the post-Stalin decades. Estonia’s northern neighbour, Finland, still belonged to the Western world but experienced some crucial post-war restrictions.² Largescale collectivization of the countryside was enforced, and while Estonia had experienced some industrialization during its independent era between the Wars, the republic was predominantly agricultural and was designated to undergo heavy industrialization under the Soviets. Nationalist sentiments were possible to combine with Party membership, ensuring that the value structures between state and intellectual society partly overlapped. Reactions to the Prague Spring were visible after 1968 and temporarily shrank the available space for activity, but the well-educated intelligentsia and the creative professionals in Estonia experienced a significant space for self-realization and social interaction from the late 1950s through the 1970s that has no equivalent elsewhere in the Soviet Union. At Tartu University, the local Komsomol organization promoted what it believed to be openness and Estonian-inclined positions. Contributing to civil ‘infrastructure’ and civil resources among the intellectuals, the creative elite, and the Party authorities, this situation was of significant importance to Estonia’s somewhat privileged position among the republics. A prolonged period of liberalization characterized the Estonian SSR.

***

When the once omnipotent Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, it meant the end of an over 70 years long, unprecedented, experiment in forced unification for most of what, in 1944, became fifteen Soviet republics and remained so until 1991. For the three Baltic States, Moldova, and Western Ukraine, annexed during the Second World War, the Soviet experience proved shorter. For the fifteen independent states that once were republics governed from Moscow, sensitive and intertwined relations with contemporary Russia when it comes to security, trade, energy, and foreign policy remind us even today that though the Union is buried, imperial ambitions and aspirations of power are not. The Russian Federation is today a regional great power, and the Soviet Union is no more. Yet, how it was governed, and the many models of its governing practices, continue to echo in the many states that were once Soviet republics.

Notes

1 We are grateful to the following students and scholars in helping with translations: Sergiy Kurbatov (Ukraine), Aušra Terleckaitė (Lithuania), Zane Rozite (Latvia), and Külli Kuusik (Estonia).

2 After the Second World War, Finland was forced to sign the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948 to secure its independence, which imposed Soviet considerations on issues of Finnish security and foreign policy.

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