What a difference a day makes for Russia
Today is 38 years since Ronald Reagan’s ‘tear down this wall’ speech, which ushered in the most free and fair election Russia has ever had, says Eliot Wilson
There is such a thing as coincidence, and sometimes a specific date arises again and again in the same context. Today’s date, 12 June, was like that in the final years of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.
(There is a ready-made conspiracy theory for those inclined that way: it is also the feast of St Leo III, the 9th century pope who refused to make additions to the Nicene Creed which would have – and eventually did – split the Eastern and Western churches.)
Let us start in 1987. President Ronald Reagan, 76 years old and well into his second term, was visiting West Berlin for the commemoration of the city’s foundation 750 years before. It had been divided from north to south and was still under military occupation dating back to the Second World War. To the East was the Soviet Sector, while free democratic West Berlin comprised the French, British and United States Sectors.
The prospect of Reagan’s visit was not popular among West Berliners, and 50,000 protestors took to the streets on the day before his arrival. West Berlin was a mecca for leftists, radicals and anyone who felt part of a counter-culture, while Reagan was the epitome of American militarism and power projection.
At 2.00pm, the president made a speech from a dais in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Standing between Reagan and the iconic monument was the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart—more commonly referred to as the Berlin Wall. His address, drafted by White House speechwriter Peter Robinson, was a challenge to the relatively new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had promised reform of the USSR through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). America, Reagan declared, welcomed openness and freedom, but he wanted his counterpart to go further.
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
The President’s speech was received without much fanfare at the time, only later becoming mesmerisingly symbolic, but perhaps it had set in motion a series of events, a trend which flowed against the Communist countries. Reagan left office in January 1989, and at the end of that year, his successor, George HW Bush, met Gorbachev for a summit in Malta. The Eastern Bloc was fracturing, its population keen for more freedom, and the repressive one-party states were increasingly losing their grip on power. The two leaders agreed at the summit that the Cold War was effectively over.
Events moved quickly. At the end of 1989, Hungary had abandoned Communism, the East German government had resigned and opened the Wall, and the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu had been overthrown and executed. In February 1990, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union voted to allow multiparty elections, it was agreed that Germany should be reunified and the Baltic states had declared their independence from the crumbling Soviet Union.
12 June 1990. The Soviet Union was in theory just that, a union of 16 Soviet republics, in practice all subject to a centralised autocracy. By 1990 it had been agreed that states could secede, provided two-thirds of the people so wished. The Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was elected in March and began its first session in May, with Boris Yeltsin, a 59-year-old apparatchik from the Urals, appointed as Chairman of its Supreme Soviet.
The fall of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was on life-support, its purpose long passed. The Russian SFSR was the largest and by far the most populous republic within the union, and on 12 June, the Congress of People’ Deputies formally adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian SFSR. This established Russia as a wholly sovereign state, voluntarily part of the Soviet Union but lacking no autonomy, and Yeltsin, as head of the Supreme Soviet, became head of state. 12 June 1990 is still celebrated as Russia Day, the legal creation of the country as an independent entity.
A year later, in 1991, the Russian people had decided by referendum to have an executive president. On 12 June, the country held its first presidential election, and its first broadly free and fair election ever. Boris Yeltsin, choosing to run as an independent, won comfortably with nearly 60 per cent of the vote, while Gorbachev’s preferred candidate, the Communist Party’s Nikolai Ryzhkov, could only achieve 17 per cent. The other four candidates were nowhere.
Yeltsin, re-elected much more narrowly over Communist Gennady Zyuganov, would be president for the rest of the decade, resigning on the last day of 1999. He was ailing and losing his grip on power; in August 1999, he had sacked his cabinet and chosen as prime minister and preferred successor a little-known former KGB officer, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 12 June 1991 remains the fairest and most free presidential election Russia has ever had, and when President Putin was inaugurated on 7 May 2000, nothing would ever be the same again.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink