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The collapse of the USSR - a natural or provoked process?

Introduction

The question of the regularity of the collapse of the USSR is still debatable. At the same time, both supporters and opponents of the non-randomness of this event recognize the action of both economic and political factors as its causes.

Were the actions taken by the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) in August 1991 a coup d'état to prevent the democratic renewal of society and return to a totalitarian system, or was it a desperate attempt to save the social order enshrined in the Constitution of the USSR? There is no consensus on this issue. To what extent the agreement signed on December 8, 1991 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha was an unexpected or expected event, necessary or accidental, perhaps only future historians will be able to answer.

In any case, in my opinion, it should be recognized that both objective and subjective processes underlie the collapse of the USSR. Let's try to briefly describe them.

Analysis of the causes of the collapse of the USSR

Let's turn to history.

At the heart of the Bolshevik national policy developed by V.I. Lenin, lay the idea of ​​granting the peoples of Russia the right of national self-determination, the opportunity to decide their own future fate.

Instead of the Stalinist plan of "autonomization", Lenin proposed the idea of ​​uniting all the republics on equal terms into a single state. The main principle of this association was the equality of the states included in it and the freedom to withdraw from the Union.

The formation of the USSR was an attempt to revive a single state on the territory of the former Russian Empire. Objectively, this led to the strengthening of defense power, the formation of a single national economic complex, and the alignment of the socio-economic level of the former national outskirts of the country.

By the early 1980s, the Soviet economic system was increasingly faltering. There are also subjective reasons for this: dissipation of funds, construction in progress, numerous postscripts, embezzlement. But the main objective flaw of the economic model was the lack of material incentives for the producer to work.

The reform, which began in the summer of 1987, proceeded from the idea of ​​preserving the planned economy. Nevertheless, the result of the 1987 reform was the beginning of the formation of a private sector in the economy. But this process went on with great difficulty, since it required initial capital.

Over time, the country's leadership decided that it was impossible to do without a transition to a market economy. Gorbachev agreed to a phased transition to the market. At the first stage, it was supposed to transfer part of the enterprises to lease, ensure the demonopolization of the economy, and begin the denationalization of property. But the implementation of most of these measures was delayed until 1991-1995. None of the economic innovations worked.

The rapid decline in the standard of living (and this was quite natural) of the population since the summer of 1989 led to the growth of the strike movement throughout the country. The authorities sought to ease social tensions by mass food purchases abroad.

Since the Union Government delayed the solution of economic problems, the republics of the USSR began to develop their own programs of economic transformation (which can also be considered quite natural). A step was taken to aggravate national separatism and weaken the role of the Center.

The population of the country began to lose faith in the ability of the authorities to achieve change for the better. By the summer of 1991, Gorbachev's economic reforms had failed completely. This meant the complete dismantling of the economic management system that had been in operation for decades. However, it was not possible to create an economic system based on material incentives for the manufacturer. As a result, the old management structures were destroyed, and new ones were not created. There was a noticeable decline in production in the national economy. The collapse of the Soviet economy under these conditions was inevitable (objectively).

In the summer of 1988, the 19th All-Union Party Conference of the CPSU was held, announcing the start of political reform. One of the main provisions of the reform was the idea of ​​building a legal state in which the equality of citizens before the law would be really ensured. The introduction of this provision required the abolition of the sixth article of the Constitution of the USSR on the special role of the Communist Party. The crisis of communist ideology was on the face. In such an environment, people are looking for a way out on other ideological and political foundations.

The ruling elites of the republics set a course for the elimination of any form of subordination to the center, the acquisition of full power. People's fronts began to emerge in the Baltic republics, which became the first mass independent organizations.

Thus, attempts to democratize the Soviet political system with the abolition of the sixth article of the Constitution of the USSR objectively led to a crisis and the beginning of the collapse of the union power structures. No new models of statehood were proposed instead of them.

The democratization of public life could not but affect the sphere of interethnic relations. The problems that had been accumulating for years appeared in sharp forms as soon as freedom wafted.

Transcaucasia became the zone of the most acute interethnic conflicts. In 1987, in Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), mass unrest of Armenians began, which made up the majority of the population of this autonomous region.

In May 1988, popular fronts were created in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. If at first they supported "perestroika", they soon announced secession from the USSR as the ultimate goal. The Supreme Soviets of the Baltic republics decided to declare the national languages ​​the state languages.

In Yakutia, Tataria, and Bashkiria, movements were gaining momentum that demanded that these autonomous republics be given union rights.

The leaders of the national movements, in an effort to secure mass support for themselves, placed special emphasis on the fact that their republics and peoples "feed Russia" and the Union Center. As the economic crisis deepened, this instilled in the minds of people the idea that their prosperity could be ensured only as a result of leaving the USSR. For the party "tops" of the republics, an opportunity was created for a career and growth in well-being.

A "parade of sovereignties" began in Georgia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, the RSFSR, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The real danger of the uncontrolled collapse of the USSR made it necessary to look for ways to reform the Union. As a result, M. Gorbachev announced the development of a new Union Treaty. The main idea of ​​this document is the idea of ​​broad rights for the union republics, primarily in the economic sphere. The center was transformed from a governing body into a coordinating body. The signing of the new Union Treaty (scheduled for August 20, 1991) meant not only the preservation of a single state, but also the transition to its real federal structure, as well as the elimination of a number of state structures traditional for the USSR.

This was followed by clashes between the army and the population in Vilnius, as a result of which 14 people were killed. These events once again compromised the Allied Center.

Some of the top leaders of the USSR perceived the preparations for signing a new union treaty as a threat to the existence of a single state and tried to prevent it. On the night of August 19, 1991, the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) was created in Moscow. The members of the GKChP explained their actions by the desire to prevent society from slipping into a national catastrophe, to maintain a single state in accordance with the results of a national referendum. By decrees of the State Emergency Committee in a number of regions of the country, mainly in Russia, a state of emergency was introduced, rallies and demonstrations were banned, the activities of democratic parties and organizations were suspended, and control over the media was established. However, the members of the State Emergency Committee did not receive the necessary support from the country's population, and in Moscow they met with active opposition from democratic forces. As a result, the attempt of the members of the State Emergency Committee to save the USSR led to the opposite result - the disintegration of a single country accelerated.

On December 8, 1991, the denunciation of the Union Treaty of 1922 was announced and the USSR ceased to exist. The agreement on the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was signed on December 8, 1991 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha by the leaders of three republics - Belarus (S. Shushkevich), the Russian Federation (B. Yeltsin) and Ukraine (L. Kravchuk). Later, at a meeting in Alma-Ata, 8 more republics joined the Commonwealth.

Conclusion

An analysis of the economic and political situation in the country by the end of the 1980s allows us to conclude that there is a certain regularity in the events that led to the collapse of the USSR.

In my opinion, the objective reasons for the collapse of the empire should be sought both in the economy and the political system of the country. Perestroika never touched on national problems, the national-state structure of the Soviet Union. The leadership of the USSR and allied bodies imposed their guidelines on the use of natural resources and the economic, social and demographic development of the republics without due regard for their own interests.

The August events only accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In conclusion. No empire has lasted forever. The USSR is no exception.

Short description

The prologue of the collapse of the USSR was the liberation of the former union republics from the omnipotence of the union center, which controlled all aspects of their lives. For decades, our country has proclaimed the formal equality of all the union republics, which were considered sovereign, but in practice everything looked quite different. The question of the existence of the USSR as a single state came close to society by the beginning of the 90s of the last century.

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………....3

Topic: "The collapse of the USSR"

2 The collapse of the USSR - a pattern or an accident………………………...21

3 The geopolitical position of Russia after the collapse of the USSR………………20

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….21

References…………………………………………………………………24

Topic: “The Formation of Christianity in Russia” ……………………………………25

Answers to control tasks……………………………………………………28

Introduction

The topic of the work is relevant, because at this stage of development and political transformations taking place in the Russian Federation and neighboring states, the successors of the former USSR, when the main characters of that period have already left the political scene, the interest in this period in Russian history has somewhat subsided, you can try to consider this time in the history of our state in order to find answers to the questions and problems that we have now.

The purpose of the work is a geopolitical analysis of the reasons for the collapse of the USSR.

As for the sources, the periodical literature of that time was used as the main ones, namely the newspapers Moskovsky Komsomolets and Arguments and Facts, some magazines - the international yearbook Politics and Economics, Business People, etc. The last two sources I trust somewhat more than newspapers, as these are serious publications. In addition, textbook sources are “History of the Soviet State by N. Werth” and “History of the Fatherland” (school textbook). But these sources cannot be used as the main ones for the reason that they reflect a certain ideological position, and comments that are free from this shortcoming are important to us. That is why I prefer to rely mainly on magazines.

In order to understand the processes that took place in the USSR and led to its collapse, it is necessary to consider the features of the development of this state, the form of government in the USSR, the state regime, the form of administrative-territorial structure, as well as some other problems of Soviet statehood.

"The collapse of the USSR"

1. August events of 1991 and their evaluation.

August coup- an attempt to forcibly remove M. S. Gorbachev from the post of President of the USSR and change his course, undertaken by the self-proclaimed State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) - a group of conservative-minded conspirators from the leadership of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the government of the USSR on August 19, 1991, which led to radical changes in the political situation in the country. It was accompanied by the declaration of a state of emergency for 6 months, the entry of troops into Moscow, the reassignment of local authorities to the military commandants appointed by the State Emergency Committee, the introduction of strict censorship in the media and the prohibition of a number of them, the abolition of a number of constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens. The leadership of the RSFSR (President B. N. Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) and some other republics (the Moldavian SSR, Estonia), and later also the legal leadership of the USSR (the President and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR) qualified the actions of the GKChP as a coup d'état.

The goal of the putschists. The main goal of the putschists was, according to their official statements, to prevent the liquidation of the USSR, which, in their opinion, was to begin on August 20 during the first stage of the signing of a new union treaty, turning the USSR into a confederation - the Union of Sovereign States. On August 20, the agreement was to be signed by representatives of the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, the rest of the future components of the Commonwealth during five meetings, until October 22.

The choice of the moment. The members of the State Emergency Committee chose the moment when the President was away - on vacation in the Crimea - and announced his temporary removal from power for health reasons.

Forces of the GKChK. The GKChP relied on the forces of the KGB (Alpha), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Division named after Dzerzhinsky) and the Ministry of Defense (Tula division of the Airborne Forces, Taman division, Kantemirovskaya division). In total, about 4 thousand military personnel, 362 tanks, 427 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles were brought into Moscow. Additional units of the Airborne Forces were deployed in the vicinity of Leningrad, Tallinn, Tbilisi, and Riga.

The Airborne Forces were commanded by Generals Pavel Grachev and his deputy Alexander Lebed. At the same time, Grachev maintained a telephone connection with both Yazov and Yeltsin. However, the putschists did not have complete control over their forces; so, on the very first day, parts of the Taman division went over to the side of the defenders of the White House. From the tank of this division, Yeltsin delivered his famous message to the assembled supporters.

Informational support for the putschists was provided by the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (for three days news releases necessarily included exposure of various acts of corruption and violations of the law committed as part of the “reformist course”), the State Emergency Committee also enlisted the support of the Central Committee of the CPSU, but these institutions could not have a noticeable impact on the situation in the capital , and for some reason, the committee could not or did not want to mobilize that part of society that shared the views of the members of the State Emergency Committee.

Putsch leader. Despite the fact that Yanaev was the nominal head of the conspirators, according to many analysts, Kryuchkov was the real soul of the conspiracy.

Opponents of the GKChK. The resistance to the GKChP was headed by the political leadership of the Russian Federation (President B. N. Yeltsin, Vice President A. V. Rutskoi, Prime Minister I. S. Silaev, Acting Chairman of the Supreme Soviet R. I. Khasbulatov).

In an address to the citizens of Russia, Boris Yeltsin on August 19, describing the actions of the State Emergency Committee as a coup d'état, said:

At the call of the Russian authorities, masses of Muscovites gathered at the House of Soviets of the Russian Federation (“White House”), among whom were representatives of various social groups - from supporters of anti-Soviet political organizations, student youth, intellectuals to veterans of the Afghan war. Three of those who died during the incident in the tunnel on the Garden Ring were representatives of various professions - an architect, a driver and an economist.

The former head of the Yukos company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, claims that in 1991 he "went to defend the White House"

Background.

· On July 29, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and President of Kazakhstan N.A. Nazarbayev met confidentially in Novo-Ogaryovo. They scheduled the signing of a new Union Treaty for 20 August.

• On August 2, Gorbachev announced in a televised address that the signing of the Union Treaty was scheduled for August 20. On August 3, this appeal was published in the Pravda newspaper.
• On August 4, Gorbachev went to rest in his residence near the village of Foros in the Crimea.
• August 17 - Kryuchkov, Pavlov, Yazov, Baklanov, Shenin and Gorbachev's assistant Boldin meet at the ABC facility - a closed guest residence of the KGB at the address: Academician Varga Street, possession 1. Decisions are made to introduce a state of emergency from August 19, form the State Emergency Committee, demand from Gorbachev to sign the relevant decrees or resign and transfer powers to Vice President Gennady Yanaev, detain Yeltsin at the Chkalovsky airfield upon arrival from Kazakhstan for a conversation with Yazov, then proceed depending on the results of the negotiations.

• Beginning of the putsch. On August 18, at 8 o'clock in the morning, Yazov informs his deputies Grachev and Kalinin about the imminent introduction of a state of emergency.
• In the afternoon, Baklanov, Shenin, Boldin, and General V. I. Varennikov travel by Yazov's private plane to the Crimea for negotiations with Gorbachev in order to obtain his consent to the introduction of a state of emergency. At about 5 p.m. they meet with Gorbachev. Gorbachev refuses to give them his consent.

The Emergency Committee agreed that the group would go to the Crimea to Gorbachev in order to persuade him to make a decision on the introduction of a state of emergency. … Another purpose of our visit to Foros to see Gorbachev was to thwart the signing of the new Union Treaty scheduled for August 20, which, in our opinion, had no legal basis. On August 18, we met with him, where, as you know, we did not agree on anything.

- V. Varennikov, interview

• At the same time (at 16:32), all types of communications were turned off at the presidential dacha, including the channel that provided control of the strategic nuclear forces of the USSR. In a late interview with Gorbachev, it is stated that a group of guests cut the communication lines only in his cabin, and the facility in Foros and the lines in other rooms were working properly. In addition, communication in Gorbachev's cars, incl. the management of strategic forces also worked.
• August 19, at 4 o'clock in the morning, the Sevastopol regiment of the KGB troops of the USSR blocks the presidential dacha in Foros. By order of the Chief of Staff of the USSR Air Defense Forces, Colonel-General Maltsev, two tractors blocked the runway on which the President's flying equipment is located - the Tu-134 aircraft and the Mi-8 helicopter. In a late interview with Gorbachev, it is stated that in fact there was no blockade, because. "About 4,000 people in the nearest units and subunits were directly subordinate to me, and these were mainly units of my personal guard"

Development of major events.

• At 6 o'clock in the morning, the USSR mass media announce the introduction of a state of emergency in the country and the inability of the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev to perform his functions "for health reasons" and the transfer of all power into the hands of the State Emergency Committee. At the same time, troops were brought into Moscow and other large cities, politicians of the "democratic opposition" were put on the wanted list.
• At night, Alpha advanced to Yeltsin's dacha in Arkhangelskoye, but did not block the president and was not instructed to take any action against him. Meanwhile, Yeltsin urgently mobilized all his supporters in the upper echelon of power, the most prominent of which were Ruslan Khasbulatov, Anatoly Sobchak, Gennady Burbulis, Mikhail Poltoranin, Sergei Shakhrai, Viktor Yaroshenko. The coalition drafted and faxed out an appeal "To the citizens of Russia." B. N. Yeltsin signed a decree "On the illegality of the actions of the State Emergency Committee." Ekho Moskvy became the mouthpiece of the opponents of the putsch.
• Yeltsin's condemnation of the State Emergency Committee during a speech from a tank of the Taman division at the White House. President of Russia Boris N. Yeltsin arrives at the White House (Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) at 9 o'clock and organizes a center of resistance to the actions of the State Emergency Committee. Resistance takes the form of rallies that gather in Moscow near the White House on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment and in Leningrad on St. Isaac's Square near the Mariinsky Palace. Barricades are erected in Moscow, leaflets are distributed. Directly at the White House is the armored vehicles of the Ryazan regiment of the Tula airborne division under the command of Major General Alexander Lebed and the Taman division. At 12 o'clock from the tank, Yeltsin addresses the audience at the rally, where he calls the incident a coup d'état. From among the protesters, unarmed detachments of militia are being created under the command of deputy Konstantin Kobets. Afghan veterans and employees of the private security company "Alex" take an active part in the militia. Yeltsin prepares space for retreat by sending his emissaries to Paris and Sverdlovsk with the right to organize a government in exile.
• Evening press conference of the State Emergency Committee. V. Pavlov, who developed a hypertensive crisis, was absent from it. The members of the GKChP were visibly nervous; the whole world went around the footage of G. Yanaev's shaking hands. Journalist T. Malkina openly called what was happening a “coup”, the words of the members of the State Emergency Committee were more like excuses (G. Yanaev: “Gorbachev deserves all respect”).

• By order of the State Emergency Committee, preparations were made for the previously unplanned seizure of the building of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR by special forces of the KGB of the USSR. However, the generals responsible for preparing the assault began to have doubts about the expediency. Alexander Lebed goes over to the side of the White House defenders. The commanders of "Alpha" and "Vympel" Karpukhin and Beskov ask the Deputy Chairman of the KGB Ageev to cancel the operation. The assault was cancelled.
• In connection with the hospitalization of V. Pavlov, the temporary leadership of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was entrusted to V. Kh. Doguzhiev, who did not make any public statements during the putsch.
• For the first time in its recent history, Russia is creating its own Ministry of Defense. Konstantin Kobets is appointed Minister of Defense.

• On the night of August 21, tank units controlled by the State Emergency Committee carry out maneuvers in the area of ​​the White House (the building of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR). There are clashes between supporters of Boris Yeltsin and a military convoy in a tunnel under Novy Arbat. (see Incident in the tunnel on the Garden Ring)
• Alpha Group refuses to storm the White House. At 5 o'clock in the morning, Yazov gives the order to withdraw troops from Moscow. On the afternoon of August 21, the session of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR begins under the chairmanship of Khasbulatov, which almost immediately accepts statements condemning the GKChP. Vice-President of the RSFSR Alexander Rutskoi and Prime Minister Ivan Silaev fly to Foros to see Gorbachev. On another plane, some members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency take off to Crimea for negotiations with Gorbachev, but he refuses to accept them.

• Mikhail Gorbachev returns from Foros to Moscow together with Rutskoi and Silaev on a Tu-134 plane. Members of the GKChP were arrested.
• Mourning for the dead has been declared in Moscow. A mass rally was held on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment in Moscow, during which the demonstrators carried out a huge panel of the Russian tricolor; At the rally, the President of the RSFSR announced that a decision had been made to make the white-azure-red banner the new state flag of Russia. (In honor of this event, in 1994, the date of August 22 was chosen to celebrate the Day of the State Flag of Russia.)
• The White House defenders are supported by rock bands (Time Machine, Cruise, Shah, Metal Corrosion, Mongol Shuudan), which will organize the Rock on the Barricades concert on August 22.

Live Yeltsin, in the presence of Gorbachev, signs a decree on the suspension of the Communist Party of the RSFSR

Much later, in 2008, Gorbachev commented on the situation as follows:

One of the members of the GKChP, Marshal Yazov, about the lack of leverage to control the situation:

Architect of the design and construction cooperative "Kommunar" Ilya Krichevsky

Afghan veteran, forklift driver Dmitry Komar

Economist of the joint venture "Ikom" Vladimir Usov

All three died on the night of August 21 during an incident in a tunnel on the Garden Ring. All three were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Meaning. The August putsch was one of those events that marked the end of the CPSU and the collapse of the USSR and, according to popular belief, gave impetus to democratic change in Russia. In Russia itself, changes took place that contributed to the formation of its statehood, in particular, even during the events, on August 20, 1991, it had its own Ministry of Defense.

On the other hand, supporters of the preservation of the Soviet Union argue that a mess began in the country associated with the inconsistent policy of the then authorities.

2. Was the collapse of the USSR a regularity or an accident?

The reasons for the collapse of the USSR and the collapse of the Soviet Empire need an objective analysis, which in no case can be reduced to the identification of external (hostile) and internal (subversive) influence, i.e. to the conspiracy theory. The external pressure of the liberal-democratic West on the USSR was indeed enormous, and the activities of the "subversive elements" inside the country were extremely effective and well-coordinated. But both of these factors became decisive only in such a situation, when the existence of the Soviet Empire entered the stage of an internal crisis, which has deep and natural causes rooted in the very specifics of the Soviet system and the Soviet system. Without understanding these internal reasons for the collapse and their analysis, any attempts to restore the USSR (and even more so the creation of a New Empire) will be futile and unpromising. Moreover, any purely inertial conservatism in this matter can only worsen the situation.

Let's identify several factors that led the Soviet Union to geopolitical and socio-economic collapse.

First, at the ideological level, during the entire existence of the socialist regime, purely national, traditional, spiritual elements were never introduced into the general complex of communist ideology. Being largely de facto national-communist, it never transformed into de jure one, which hindered the organic development of Russian-Soviet society, gave rise to a double standard and ideological contradictions, undermined clarity and awareness in the implementation of geopolitical and socio-political projects. Atheism, materialism, progressivism, "enlightenment ethics", etc. were deeply alien to Russian Bolshevism and the Russian people as a whole. In practice, these propositions borrowed from Marxism (which, by the way, are rather arbitrary elements in Marxism itself, a kind of tribute to the old-fashioned positivist humanism in the style of Feuerbach) were perceived by Russian communists in the key of folk-mystical, sometimes unorthodox eschatological aspirations, and not as the rationalistic fruits of Western European culture. However, the ideology of National Bolshevism, which could have found more adequate, more Russian terms for the new socio-political system, was never formulated. Consequently, sooner or later, the limitations and inadequacy of such an ideologically contradictory construction had to have a negative impact. This especially made itself felt in the late Soviet period, when senseless dogmatism and communist demagogy finally crushed any ideological life in society. Such a "freezing" of the ruling ideology and a stubborn refusal to introduce into it components that are organic, national and natural for the Russian people, resulted in the collapse of the entire Soviet system. Responsibility for this lies not only with "agents of influence" and "anti-Sovietists", but, first of all, with the central Soviet ideologists of both the "progressive" and "conservative" wings. The Soviet Empire was both ideologically and actually destroyed by the communists. To recreate it in the same form and with the same ideology is now not only impossible, but also meaningless, since even hypothetically, the same prerequisites that have already led to the destruction of the state will be reproduced.

Secondly, at the geopolitical and strategic level, the USSR was uncompetitive in the long run to resist the Atlanticist Western bloc. From a strategic point of view, land borders are much more vulnerable than sea borders, and at all levels (the number of border troops, the cost of military equipment, the use and deployment of strategic weapons, etc.) After the Second World War, the USSR found itself in an unequal position compared to with the capitalist bloc of the West, grouped around the United States. The United States had a giant island base (the American continent), completely controlled and surrounded on all sides by oceans and seas, which were not difficult to defend. Plus, the United States controlled almost all coastal zones in the South and West of Eurasia, creating a gigantic threat to the USSR and at the same time remaining practically out of reach for potential destabilizing actions of the Soviet Union. The division of Europe into Eastern (Soviet) and Western (American) only complicated the geopolitical position of the USSR in the West, increasing the volume of land borders and putting it close to a strategic potential enemy, moreover, in a situation of passive hostility of the European peoples themselves, who found themselves in the position of hostages in a geopolitical duel, the meaning of which was not obvious to them. The same was true to the south in Asia and the Far East, where the USSR had immediate neighbors or Western-controlled ones (Pakistan, Afghanistan, pre-Khomeinist Iran) or rather hostile non-Soviet socialist powers (China). In this situation, the USSR could acquire relative stability only in two cases: either by rapidly advancing to the oceans in the West (toward the Atlantic) and in the South (towards the Indian Ocean), or by creating neutral political blocs in Europe and Asia that are not under the control of any from the superpowers. Stalin tried to propose this concept (of neutral Germany), and after his death, Beria. The USSR (together with the Warsaw Pact), from a geopolitical point of view, was too big and too small at the same time. Preservation of the status quo was only in the hands of the United States and Atlanticism, since at the same time the military, industrial and strategic potentials of the USSR were increasingly exhausted, and the power of the United States, the protected island, was growing. Sooner or later, the Eastern Bloc was bound to collapse. Consequently, the reconstruction of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact is not only almost impossible, but also unnecessary, because even in the event of (almost unbelievable) success, it will only lead to the revival of the obviously doomed geopolitical model.

Thirdly, the administrative structure of the USSR was based on a secular, purely functional and quantitative understanding of intrastate division. Economic and bureaucratic centralism did not take into account any regional, much less ethnic and religious characteristics of the interior territories. The principle of leveling and purely economic structuralization of society led to the creation of such rigid systems that suppressed, and at best "conserved" the forms of natural national life of various peoples, including (and to a greater extent) the Russian people themselves. The territorial principle operated even when nominally it was a question of national republics, autonomies or districts. At the same time, the process of regional-ethnic leveling became more and more distinct as the entire Soviet political system “aged”, which, by its last stage, was more and more inclined towards the type of the Soviet “nation-state”, and not the Empire. Nationalism, which largely contributed to the creation of the USSR in the early stages, in the end became a purely negative factor, since excessive centralization and unification began to give rise to natural protest and discontent. The atrophy of the imperial principle, the ossification of bureaucratic centralism, the desire for maximum rationalization and purely economic productivity gradually created a political monster out of the USSR, which lost its life and is perceived as a forcibly imposed totalitarianism of the center. Some communist theses of literally understood "internationalism" are largely responsible for this. Consequently, this aspect of the Soviet model, which operates not with specific ethnos, culture, religion, but with abstract "population" and "territory" should not be revived in any case. On the contrary, it is necessary to get rid of the consequences of such a quantitative approach as soon as possible, whose echoes are so tragic today in the issue of Chechnya, Crimea, Kazakhstan, the Karabakh conflict, Abkhazia, Transnistria, etc.

These four main aspects of the former Soviet model are the main factors in the collapse of the Soviet statehood, and they are responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It is quite natural that in the hypothetical reconstruction of the USSR, radical conclusions should be drawn in this respect and the causes that once historically doomed a great nation to a state catastrophe should be completely destroyed.

It is generally accepted that the collapse of the USSR was inevitable, and this point of view is shared not only by those who considered it a "prison of peoples", or "the last of the endangered species - a relic" - a "multinational empire", as an expert on interethnic relations in the USSR put it M. Mandelbaum in the preface to the almanac of articles published by the American Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of the collapse of the USSR.*

3. Geopolitical position of Russia after the collapse of the USSR.

Russian foreign policy at the end of the 20th century. has become more specific, forward-looking and taking into account geopolitical factors. But there are serious problems related to the possibilities of its implementation. They are due to such circumstances as: the mismatch of ideas in our country and abroad about the future of Russia, incl. about its positions in the world order; the risks of a new isolation of the country; the emergence of alternative geopolitical models that do not take into account or infringe on the interests of our state.

For a realistic assessment of the possibilities of Russian geopolitical projects incorporated in the country's foreign policy in the second half of the 1990s, it is necessary to once again analyze the features of the current situation. The geopolitical position of the state is determined not only by physical geography, but also by changes in the world geopolitical order, geo-economic processes. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia's geopolitical status declined. In the post-Soviet space, not excluding parts of the territory of the Russian Federation itself, external centers of power began to assert themselves. Disintegration processes have called into question the geopolitical subjectivity of Russia.

The current geopolitical position of our country in the world can be viewed from two points of view. In the first case, Russia is assessed as the geographical center of the global system (Heartland) and the integration core of Eurasia. The idea of ​​Russia as a kind of "bridge" between Europe and Asia is also widespread (this also has a philosophical justification: Russian thinkers, in particular N. Berdyaev, spoke of Russia as a "mediator" between the West and the East).

Modern Russia retains its geopolitical potential as the center of Eurasia, but with limited possibilities of use, which leads to its transformation into a regional power with a tendency to further decrease in geopolitical status. Economic weakness (according to IMEMO data for 1998, our country produces only 1.7% of world GDP), the lack of state will and public consensus on development paths do not allow the implementation of the Heartland model in its new interpretation: Russia as the integration core of Eurasia.

The geopolitical structure of the post-Soviet space is changing qualitatively, losing its original "rossocentrism". The CIS, which includes all the former Soviet republics except the three Baltic states, is very inefficient. The main factors holding back its collapse are the dependence of many post-Soviet states on Russian fuel raw materials, other economic considerations, and, to a lesser extent, cultural and historical ties. However, as a geopolitical and geo-economic center, Russia is clearly weak. Meanwhile, European countries are actively cooperating with the post-Soviet republics, especially Germany, Turkey with its attempts to restore the unity of the Turkic world "from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China", China (Central Asia), the USA (the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia), etc. new regional powers are claimed by Uzbekistan and Ukraine, in which Western geostrategists see a natural counterbalance to Russia and its "imperial ambitions" regarding the territories of the former USSR (Brzezinski's idea).

The post-Soviet states are included in a number of geopolitical unions that are alternative to the CIS (European, Turkic, Islamic and other types of integration). Their role is underestimated in Russia, where the conviction is still strong that "they won't get away from us anywhere." New regional cooperation systems are emerging on the borders of the Russian Federation. In some of them it takes all possible part - the Baltic, Black Sea, Caspian, Asia-Pacific systems, but in a number of cases the unification takes place without its presence. The countries of Central Asia are actively interacting. Meetings of the "troika" (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan) and the "five" (the same plus Turkmenistan and Tajikistan) regularly take place here, formulating their special interests. As an alternative to the CIS, this region considers its own Central Asian Union, Turkic integration (including Turkey) or an association of Muslim countries within the framework of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. A characteristic event is the meeting in Dushanbe (December 1999) of the heads of government of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, dedicated to the development of the Central Asian community in the 21st century.

An important geopolitical phenomenon is the consolidation of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan (the association is called GUAM); in 1999, Uzbekistan (now GUUAM) joined the process. This block is conceived as a geopolitical counterbalance to Russian influence in the post-Soviet space. Ukraine is very active here, whose leaders have repeatedly exchanged visits with the heads of the countries that made up GUUAM. Official Kyiv, with the encouragement of the West, is trying to play the role of a geopolitical alternative to Moscow. In addition, the experience of recent years shows that in Eastern Europe the ideas of an alliance of any configuration, but without Russia, are, as a rule, projects of an alliance against Russia, which means that the prospects for recreating the medieval Balto-Pontic belt ("cordon sanitaire" along its western border) should cause our state is concerned.

The important task of overcoming the transport dependence on Russia by the CIS countries is already being solved. For example, the Central Asian states are "cutting a window" to the Indian Ocean. The Tejen - Serakhs - Mashhad railway was built, connecting Turkmenistan with Iran, which gives the countries of the region access to this ocean (which is useful for Russia in the future, especially in the case of the construction of the North-South transport corridor along the relatively short route Kazakh Eraliev - Krasnovodsk - Kizyl56 Atrek - Iran). Options for an alternative communication axis connecting Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan are being considered. The idea of ​​the Great Silk Road (GSR) has been revived, which almost completely removes the southern neighbors of the Russian Federation from its influence on communications. It is unlikely that Caspian (Azerbaijani) oil will be transited through Russia: oil pipelines leading to Georgia (Supsa) and Turkey (Ceyhan) are now considered promising. Only oil exports from Kazakhstan can go through the port of Novorossiysk. In addition, the introduction of visas by Turkmenistan for Russians is also natural. The reason for such actions was given by our country itself, accusing Georgia and Azerbaijan of supporting Chechen separatists and initiating the process of establishing a visa regime with these countries. In fact, this means their withdrawal from the CIS.

As a result, the CIS members "scatter", reorienting themselves to other geopolitical centers. Only the Moscow-Minsk axis remains geopolitically stable: it consolidates the unity of Eurasia on a pro-Russian basis and prevents the creation of the Balto-Pontic belt. Russia is clearly moving towards the loss of the geopolitical role of the center of Eurasia. Based on this circumstance, many Western researchers already believe that the main global processes are determined by the relations between America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific Region (APR).

The geopolitical unity of the Russian Federation itself is in question, the National Republics develop their external relations, guided by ethno-cultural criteria. In a number of them, Turkish influence has increased, especially in the North Caucasus and in the Volga-Ural region (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan). In the republics with a Muslim population, the influence of Saudi Arabia and Iran is felt (to a lesser extent). Islamic countries even compete for such influence. The result of the geopolitical stratification of the Russian space was the actual "autarky" of Chechnya, and the North Caucasus as a whole became a risk zone within Russian borders.

Geopolitical problems are also connected with other regions of the Russian Federation. Thus, the Far East remains an abandoned outskirts of Russia and is forced to independently develop ties with China, Japan, etc. The exclave Kaliningrad region is in a difficult situation, while at the same time retaining the role of the country's western military outpost. In this problematic situation, the pressure of neighboring countries is increasing, claiming parts of Russian territory (Karelia, the Pskov region, the border with China, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands).

After the collapse of the USSR, Russia's access to the sea was severely limited. The role of geopolitical "windows" is played by: in the Baltic, St. Petersburg with the Leningrad Region (it is clear that the Kaliningrad exclave does not count here); on the Black Sea - the Krasnodar Territory (Novorossiysk) and the Rostov Region (attempts to revive Taganrog); in the Caspian - Astrakhan (Dagestan falls out because of ethno-political problems); in the Pacific Ocean - Primorsky Krai and (much less) Khabarovsk Krai, Sakhalin and Kamchatka. At the same time, it is important that the Baltic and Black Seas are classified as "closed", because the straits are controlled by other powers (hence the minimal geopolitical significance of the Baltic and Black Sea fleets). "Closed" is the Sea of ​​Japan. Therefore, the Kola and Kamchatka Peninsulas, the only territories of Russia with access to the open spaces of the World Ocean, are of particular military strategic importance: the Northern and Pacific Fleets are based here, respectively [Kolosov and Treivish 1992].

The role of our country as a transit hub is also becoming problematic. Actual international communications now bypass Russia. Communications between Europe and the Asia-Pacific region are mainly carried out by sea, bypassing its territory (sea transportation is quite cheap). Russian land communications do not operate either. On the other hand, the GSR is being recreated in the form of a trans-Eurasian corridor linking East Asia and Europe by land. Work begins on the implementation of the transport corridor project - "Europe - Caucasus - Central Asia" (TRACECA), which finds support both in China and Japan, and in the European Union (especially in Germany). The TRACECA project was approved in 1993 at a conference in Brussels (the leaders of eight states of Transcaucasia and Central Asia participated; later Mongolia, Ukraine and Moldova joined the program). And in September 1998, a meeting of the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria was held in Baku, where an agreement was adopted on the development of a transport corridor, transit and communications.

Thus, the trans-Eurasian corridor, due to geopolitical changes at the end of the 20th century, should bypass the largest state that considers itself the center of Eurasia - Russia. The most important highway of the future is supposed to be laid from China through Kazakhstan (Kyrgyzstan), Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia to Turkey and further to Europe (through Turkey and Bulgaria or through Ukraine, Moldova and Romania). Theoretically, its "northern" version is still possible from Europe through Belarus or Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan with access through Turkmenistan to Iran and the Indian Ocean, i.e. simpler in terms of the number of boundaries to be overcome. But the West today supports the option of bypassing our territory, preferring not to make its relations with the Asia-Pacific region dependent on an unstable Russia (despite the fact that the internal political stability of a number of GSR countries is even more doubtful). Russia is paying such a high price for the geopolitical disintegration of the USSR space with the loss of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, its "soft underbelly".

True, there are vulnerabilities in the emerging belt of small states south and southwest of Russia's borders. Ethnopolitical instability is characteristic of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the PRC, bordering on the Central Asian countries. The place of docking of the high-speed railway with Chinese communications has not been determined. This is claimed by Kazakhstan, which is already connected with China in terms of transport, and Kyrgyzstan, which can be supported by Kazakhstan's geopolitical rivals (in this case, it is necessary to build roads in the highlands of the Tien Shan, which the Chinese are ready for). A special position is occupied by Iran and Armenia, pushed aside from the GSR. They insist on using their land communications, but other project participants, for geopolitical reasons and with the support of the West, suggest using a ferry crossing from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan (bypassing Iran) and a road directly connecting Azerbaijan to Georgia (bypassing Armenia). Finally, communication between Georgia and Ukraine is planned to be carried out by sea, since land communications pass through semi-independent Abkhazia and Russia.

So, on the southern outskirts of the post-Soviet space and in Southeastern Europe, a "new Rimland" is being formed, enclosing the "Eurasian Heartland" in a semicircle. Russia, on the other hand, turns out to be a deaf northeastern corner of Eurasia, located on the sidelines of trade routes. Existing communications, such as the Trans-Siberian, are poorly used as a transit "bridge"; the prospects for their reconstruction are unclear (although Japan has shown interest in the reconstruction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, it is investing money in the reconstruction of the roads that make up the Silk Road). At the turn of the century, Russia makes little use of its "triple" geopolitical potential: the integration core of Eurasia, a transit state and a developed economic center. In the meantime, we have to talk only about potential, prospects, opportunities, and not about decisions, actions and achievements.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we summarize the results and draw the appropriate conclusions.

The implementation of economic reforms, followed by the abolition of the USSR and the gradual transition to a market economy, caused an abundant flow of conflicting arguments about the collapse of the so-called. Soviet empire. But it should be noted that the collapse of the USSR was not the collapse of the classical empire. Once again, we note that the collapse of a unique multinational country did not occur due to natural causes, but mainly at the will of politicians pursuing their own goals, against the will of the majority of peoples living in those years in the USSR.

In 1978, Collins put forward several general provisions regarding the territorial expansion and contraction of states. When, two years later, Collins, having formalized his principles and given them a quantitative form, applied them to the Soviet Union, his conclusions completely ran counter to the generally accepted point of view. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many American politicians and interest groups expressed dismay at the supposedly rampant Soviet military build-up that threatened the United States and its allies. Collins, on the other hand, foresaw the onset of a period of instability in the USSR, partly due to the excessive military-imperial expansion of the Soviet state. In the long term, such instability could lead to the disintegration of the "Russian Empire", incl. to the loss of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and to its own collapse. He foresaw that the disintegration of the central authority of the Russian state would be a prerequisite for the emergence of powerful ethno-separatist movements. The scientist noted that the formal mechanism for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union already exists in the form of 15 union republics that have nominal autonomy and their own state institutions. This federal structure, devoid of any significance under a strong central government, maintains ethnic identities and at the same time provides the organizational framework that allows truly independent states to form once the power of the center is seriously weakened. Collins believed that the disintegration of the Soviet Union he predicted was most likely to be led by dissenting communist politicians, and that these favorable structural opportunities would encourage some communist leaders to ally with regional ethnic groups.

Much of his analysis seems accurate and prescient today. The collapse of the USSR, however, was also predicted by other observers. But contrary to their expectations that it would be the result of a war with China or an uprising of the Islamic republics of the USSR, Collins for the most part pointed to the true causes of the collapse that occurred. The main drawback of the forecast was its time parameters. According to the scientist, the disintegration of the Soviet Union should have taken many decades.

Collins' analysis was carried out along three dimensions: a) the principles of this model as applied to the history of the Russian Empire in a long time period; b) applicability of the model to the collapse of the Soviet Union; c) its sources in Weber's social theory, as well as aspects of Weber's thinking that Collins may have overlooked. Collins lists five geopolitical principles that fix the factors that affect the expansion, contraction or stability of state borders over long periods of time. These principles concern mainly the ability of the state to wage war and control its population.

1. Advantage in size and resources. Other things being equal, wars are won by large and resource-rich states; therefore they expand, while the smaller and poorer ones shrink.

2. Advantage in location. States bordering militarily powerful countries in fewer directions, i.e. "marginal" are in an advantageous position in comparison with the states that have powerful neighbors in more areas, i.e. with "core".

3. Fragmentation of core states. Core territories facing adversaries on several fronts tend in the long run to fragment into an ever-increasing number of small states.

4. Decisive wars and turning points.

5. Excessive expansion and disintegration. Even "world" empires can be subject to weakening and long-term decline if they achieve excessive, from a military point of view, expansion.

So, more than 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Collins created a plausible scenario for the future collapse, based on the principles of geopolitics and ethno-political science. In terms of its external characteristics, this scenario seemed to correspond to what actually happened.

Collins's opponents, in particular the political scientist G. Derlugyan, argue that nuclear weapons, despite their "symbolic significance", lead to a deadlock "in interstate rivalry. Competition was imposed on the Soviet Union in non-military areas - economic, political, cultural and ideological production where America's significant advantages left him no chance of victory." The USSR basically ensured its territorial security in the traditional sense (which is why Gorbachev could afford to go for numerous unilateral initiatives in the field of arms control), but in the post-Stalin era, something more was required from Soviet leaders and from Soviet society, and, above all, associated with a change in the structure of the population (growth of the urban population employed in industry) concern for raising the level and quality of life.

Literature

1. Boffa J. History of the Soviet Union. M: International relations, 2004.

2. Butenko V. From where and where are we going. Lenizdat, 1990.

3. Weber M. Selected works. Moscow: Progress, 1990.

4. Derlugyan G.M. 2000. The collapse of the Soviet system and its potential consequences: bankruptcy, segmentation, degeneration. - "Policy", No. 2, 3.

5. Collins R. 2000. Prediction in Macrosociology: The Case of the Soviet Collapse. - "Time of Peace", Almanac. Issue. 1: Historical macrosociology in the 20th century. Novosibirsk.

6. International Yearbook: Politics and Economics, 1991

7. International Yearbook: Politics and Economics, 2001.

8. Sanderson S. Megahistory and its paradigms // Time of the world. Almanac. Issue 1. Historical macrosociology in the XX century / Ed. N.S. Rosova. Novosibirsk, 2000, p. 69.

9. Tikhonravov Yu.V. Geopolitics: Textbook. - M.: INFRA-M, 2000. -269 p.

10. Igor Ъ-Bunin. Union republics: putsch as an indicator of chemical composition // Kommersant, No. 34 of August 26, 1991.

11. Olga Vasilyeva. “Republics during the Putsch” // In the collection “Coup. Chronicle of Troubled Days. - Progress Publishing House, 1991.

12. Resolutions of the State Emergency Committee No. 1 and No. 2

13. B. N. Yeltsin. Biography. 1991-1995 // Website of the Yeltsin Foundation

FORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN RUSSIA

Following Kiev, Christianity gradually comes to other cities of Kievan Rus: Chernigov, Novgorod, Rostov, Vladimir-Volynsky, Polotsk, Turov, Tmutarakan, where dioceses are created. Under Prince Vladimir, the vast majority of the Russian population adopted the Christian faith, and Kievan Rus became a Christian country.
Far greater resistance was put up by the inhabitants of the north and east of Russia. Novgorodians rebelled against Bishop Joachim sent to the city in 991. To conquer the Novgorodians, a military expedition of the people of Kiev, led by Dobrynya and Putyata, was required. The inhabitants of Murom refused to let Vladimir's son, Prince Gleb, into the city and declared their desire to preserve the religion of their ancestors. Similar conflicts arose in other cities of the Novgorod and Rostov lands. The reason for such a hostile attitude is the adherence of the population to traditional rites, it was in these cities that elements of a religious pagan organization were formed (regular and stable rituals, a separate group of priests - sorcerers, sorcerers). In the southern, western cities and countryside, pagan beliefs existed more as a superstition than as an established religion. In rural areas, resistance to Christianity was not so active. Farmers, hunters, who worshiped the spirits of rivers, forests, fields, fire, most often combined faith in these spirits with elements of Christianity.
The dual faith that existed in the villages for decades and even centuries was only gradually overcome by the efforts of many, many generations of clergy. And now it is still being overcome. It should be noted that the elements of pagan consciousness have great stability (in the form of various superstitions). So many orders of Vladimir, designed to strengthen the new faith, were imbued with a pagan spirit.
One of the problems after the formal baptism was the education of the subjects in the Christian spirit. This task was carried out by foreign priests, mainly immigrants from Bulgaria, whose inhabitants converted to Christianity in the 9th century. The Bulgarian church had independence from the Patriarch of Constantinople, in particular, it could elect the head of the church. This circumstance played a big role in the development of the church in Russia. Not trusting the Byzantine emperor, Vladimir decided to subordinate the Russian Church to the Bulgarian, and not to the Greek hierarchs. This order was preserved until 1037 and was convenient because Bulgaria used service books in the Slavic language, close to colloquial Russian.
The time of Vladimir cannot be considered a period of harmony between power and society. The historical significance of this time was as follows:
Creation of conditions for full-blooded cooperation of the tribes of the East European Plain with other Christian tribes and nationalities.
Russia was recognized as a Christian state, which determined a higher level of relations with European countries and peoples.
The immediate consequence of the adoption of Christianity by Vladimir and its spread in the Russian land was, of course, the construction of churches. Vladimir immediately after baptism orders to build churches and put them in the places where the idols used to stand: for example, the church of St. Basil was erected on the hill where the idol of Perun and other gods stood. Vladimir ordered churches to be set up and priests assigned to them also in other cities and to bring people to baptism in all cities and villages. Two questions arise here - in what cities and regions and to what extent was Christianity spread under Vladimir, and then - where did the clergy come from in the churches? There is news that the metropolitan with the bishops sent from Constantinople, with Dobrynya, Uncle Vladimirov, and with Anastas went north and baptized the people; Naturally, they went first along the great waterway, up the Dnieper to the northern end of this path - Veliky Novgorod. Many people were baptized here, a church was built for new Christians; but from the first time Christianity was not spread among all the inhabitants; from Novgorod, in all likelihood, by water, the preachers went east, to Rostov. This ended the activity of the first Metropolitan Michael in 990; in 991 he died. It is easy to imagine how his death must have saddened Vladimir in his new position; the prince could hardly be consoled by other bishops and boyars; soon, however, a new metropolitan, Leon, was called from Constantinople; with the help of Bishop Joachim Korsunyan, appointed by him in Novgorod, paganism was completely crushed here. Here is a curious piece of news about this from the so-called Joachim Chronicle: “When they learned in Novgorod that Dobrynya was going to be baptized, they gathered a veche and swore everyone not to let him into the city, not to give idols to overthrow”; and exactly when Dobrynya came, the Novgorodians swept away the big bridge and went out against him with weapons; Dobrynya began to persuade them with affectionate words, but they didn’t even want to hear, they took out two stone-shooting cars (vices) and put them on the bridge; especially persuaded them not to submit to the chief among the priests, i.e. their magicians, some kind of Bogomil, nicknamed the Nightingale for eloquence.
The Russian Church, which developed in cooperation with the state, has become a force that unites the inhabitants of different lands into a cultural and political community.
The transfer to Russian soil of the traditions of monastic life gave the originality of the Slavic colonization of the northern and eastern Slavs of the Kievan state. Missionary activity in the lands inhabited by Finnish-speaking and Turkic tribes not only drew these tribes into the orbit of Christian civilization, but also somewhat softened the painful processes of the formation of a multinational state. This state developed on the basis of not a national, but a religious idea. It was not so much Russian as Orthodox.
When the people lost their faith, the state collapsed. The state disintegration of Russia reflected the ongoing disintegration of the ethnic system: although Russians still lived in all the principalities and they all remained Orthodox, the feeling of ethnic unity between them was destroyed. The adoption of Christianity contributed to the widespread spread of literacy in Russia, the enjoyment of enlightenment, the emergence of rich literature translated from the Greek language, the emergence of its own Russian literature, the development of church architecture and icon painting.
Since the Christianization of the ancient Russian society was an ideological action undertaken by the grand ducal authorities in order to illuminate feudal relations, the introduction of Kievan Rus to Christianity stimulated the socio-cultural development of our ancestors not directly, but indirectly. The development of the process of Christianization of certain types of socio-cultural activities was accompanied by simultaneous opposition to others. For example, while encouraging painting (frescoes and icons were needed for religious purposes), the newly established church condemned sculpture (there is no place for sculpture in an Orthodox church). Cultivating a cappella singing, which accompanies Orthodox worship, she condemned instrumental music, which was not used in worship. The folk theater (buffoonery) was persecuted, oral folk art was condemned, monuments of pre-Christian Slavic culture were exterminated as a “pagan heritage”.
Regarding the adoption of Christianity in Ancient Russia, only one thing can be said unequivocally: it has become a new round in the development of social relations of the Eastern Slavs.

Answers to control tasks.

Exercise 1.

1. What was the name in Russia of the participants in military predatory campaigns, immigrants from Northern Europe, the founders of the Old Russian state? Varangians.

2. The upper class of feudal lords in Russia in the 9th–13th centuries Boyars .

3. National Assembly in Russia in the IX-XII centuries. Veche.

4. Type of land ownership in Russia, a family estate that is inherited. Votchina .

5. Armed detachments under the prince in Ancient Russia, who participated

in campaigns, management and personal economy. Druzhina.

6. Council under the prince in the Old Russian state subsequently a permanent class-representative body under the Grand Duke. Boyar Duma .

a) under an agreement b) took a loan c) as a result of hostilities Answer B.

8. What was the name of the collection of tribute by an ancient Russian prince with a squad from free community members? Polyudie.

9. Conditional possession in Russia at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 18th centuries. Estate.

10.Unofficial government under Ivan the Terrible in 40-50s. 16th century Chosen council.

11. The highest estate-representative body in Russia, created by Ivan the Terrible in 1549 Zemsky Cathedral.

12. What were the names of the central, state governments in Russia? XVI in. - Boyar Duma, XVII in. - senate, XIX in. - Council of State.

13. The system of maintenance of officials in Russia at the expense of the local population. Feeding .

14. Form of dependence of the peasants: attachment to the land and subordination of the administrative and judicial power of the feudal lords. Serfdom .

15. What is the name of the policy of forced centralization, without sufficient political and economic prerequisites to strengthen the personal power of the king? Oprichnina .

16. What was the name of the systemic crisis of the Russian state at the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th centuries? Time of Troubles .

17. The process of transition from a traditional feudal society to a new industrial one. Modernization .

18. The type of state power characteristic of Russia in the 18th - early 20th centuries, when all legislative, executive, judicial power was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. Monarchy .

19. List the main directions of Russian social thought in the 19th century. a) those who advocated the development of Russia along the Western European path - Westernism, b) defending the original path of development of Russia- Slavophiles .

20. What are the main political and ideological currents of the 30-50s. 19th century Conservatism, liberalism, radicalism.

21. List the basic principles of the "theory of official nationality." Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality.

22. List the main trends of revolutionary populism: rebellious, propagandistic, conspiratorial .

23. A radical revolution, a profound qualitative change in the development of society, the transition from an obsolete socio-economic system to a more progressive one. The revolution.

24. A form of government in which the highest state power belongs to an elected representative body, characteristic of the Soviet period of development. Republic.

25. What was the name of the form of power of the working class in alliance with the poorest peasantry, established as a result of the socialist revolution. Dictatorship of the proletariat.

26. What was the name of the economic policy of the Soviet government?

a) from 1918 to 1921 - war communism policy,b) from 1921 to 1929. - new economic policy (NEP).

27. The transition of private enterprises and sectors of the economy to state ownership, the policy of the Bolsheviks in the early years of Soviet power. Nationalization.

28. The process of creating large-scale machine production, the introduction of machine technology in all sectors of the economy. Industrialization .

29.Transformation of small individual farms into large public farms. Collectivization.

30. A model of the socio-political structure of society, characterized by the complete subordination of a person to political power, the comprehensive control of the state over society. Totalitarianism.

31. The conditional name of the period in the history of the Soviet state from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. Thaw.

32. What is the name of the period of international relations from the second half of the 40s to the beginning of the 90s. XX century, characterized by the confrontation of two world socio-economic systems. The era of the cold war.

Task 2

2.a)2, b)4, c)5, d)3, e)1

6.1d), 2e), 3c), 4b). 5a).

7.a), b), d), g).

8.c) 1547, i) 1549, g), 1550, a) 1551, h) 1555, d) 1555, b) 1555-1556, f) 1565, e) 1613.

10.b), e), f), g).

11. 1-e), 2-d), 3-a), 4-c), 5-b).

a) 1714-Peter 1 founded the Academy of Sciences and the library,

c) 1721 - declared Russia an Empire.

d) 1708 - provincial reform, 1719 - founded 12 colleges

e) 1711 - the wedding of Peter and Catherine 1.

f) 1712 - Petersburg is the capital.

g) 1718 - established the Admiralty Board.

h) 1722 - approved the law on the order of public service in the Russian Empire and the report card in the bodies.

13.b), d), g), c), a, f).

14.a), b), e), f).

15.a), b), e).

16.a), d), f), i).

18. d), i), a), f), c), h), e), b), g)

19. c), i), k).

20. b), d), e), g)

22. c), d), b), g), a), e), h), f)

24. All-Russian Central Executive Committee - All-Russian Central Executive Committee

RSDLP - Russian Social Democratic Labor Party

GOELRO - short for State Commission for Electrification of Russia

VKP(b) - All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

VTsSPS - All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions

Red Army - Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army

CPSU - Communist Party of the Soviet Union

GKChP - State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR

25. a), b), d), g)

27. a-2; b-2; in 3; g-1; d-1; e-4; g-4; h-2; i-1; k-4; l-1; m-4

Election of B. N. Yeltsin as the President of the Russian Federation

Decree of the President of the Russian Federation "On the phased

constitutional reform and the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian

First war in Chechnya - 1994

Task 3.

Horizontally: 6 Impeachment; 3Christianity; 5. Entente; 7Unia; 9 Formation; 11 Rebellion; 13 Dictatorship; 15 Heretic; 17 Three fields; 19 appeasement; 21 Civilization; 23 strike; 25 Label; 27 Empire; 29 Perestroika; 31 Historiography; 33 Occupation; 35 Methodology; 37NATO; 39 Kholop; 41 Reformation; 43 Kamenev; 47 feudal lords; 49 Revival; 51 defaults; 53 Nevsky; 55 Nationalization; 57Donskoy; 59 Senate; 61 Monk; 63 Veche; 65 Romance; 67party; 69 World; 71 Rear; 73 Absolutism; 75 Ermak; 77 Repression; 79 Decree; 81 Opposition; 83 Five-Year Plan; 85 subjectivism; 87 Prince.

Vertically: 2 Theory; 4 Cathedral; 6 Industrialization; 8 Manufactory; 10 Gorbachev; 12 Tips; 14 Lot; 16Intervention; 18 Communism; 20 Crimean; 22 Rotation; 24 Polis; 26 Khrushchev; 28 war; 30 Abroad; 32 Strike; 34 History; 36 Kurchatov; 38 Periodization; 40 Castro; 42 Thaw; 44 Gilyarovsky; 48 drag; 50 True; 52 Covenant; 54 Yanaev; 56Oprichnina; 58 Revolution; 62 Stolypin; 64 Salavat; 66 Vyatichi; 68 Smerd; 70Community; 72 Atheism; 74 Orthodoxy; 76 Stagnation; 78 System; 79 Duma; 81 Terror; 82 Chronicle; 84 Tiun; 86 Life; 88 Plenum; 90 Hitler.

There is no particular need to prove the importance, topicality of holding a serious conversation on the topic "The collapse of the USSR: causes and consequences." It is obvious, if only because the collapse of the USSR is also part of our personal biography and drama, and at the same time, in my opinion, it is the most significant dramatic episode in world history.

There is no particular need to prove the importance, topicality of holding a serious conversation on the topic "The collapse of the USSR: causes and consequences." It is obvious, if only because the collapse of the USSR is also part of our personal biography and drama, and at the same time, in my opinion, it is the most significant dramatic episode in world history. Especially the history of the Russian people of the second half of the 20th century. And yet I will refer, in the form of a kind of proof of the topicality of the topic, to the authority of the famous “new Russian” billionaire and politician B.A. Berezovsky. In the summary of his treatise, entitled “From revolution to evolution without losing the country. Genetic Transformation of Russia: Economics, Politics, Mentality”, a treatise interesting with many ideas, the most interesting thing is, perhaps, that in his enlarged historical periodization of the “Transformation of Russia (USSR)” in the period from April 1985 to 1997 inclusive, he forgot to mention (or “lost”, using his terminology) the collapse of the USSR, one of the two great superpowers of the 20th century, an integral (and rather artificial, I would even say ugly) part of which was Russia, more precisely, the RSFSR, now the Russian Federation. One can, of course, in this regard, be ironic for a long time about Berezovsky's historical and political "virginity", but such irony will be unproductive. Moreover, it's stupid. After all, when such a very intelligent person, and, by the way, a philanthropist, with billions as if suddenly arising, “out of thin air”, forgets about such a historical “detail” as the “collapse of the USSR”, telling about the transformation of Russia at the turn of the 80s - 90s 1990s, then such alleged forgetfulness speaks of many very serious things. And there's no laughing matter here.

It is this “forgetfulness” about the great country (in which, by the way, he was born) that feeds - and not without reason - the views of those who believe that the collapse of the USSR is not accidental, and not accidental in the very sense that it is rather a consciously planned and implemented process, rather than a spontaneous one. By the way, I am not a supporter of such views and included this phrase in the title of the speech, I confess and repent, for the sake of poignancy. Although, of course, I do not think that this process was predominantly spontaneous, and even more so historically random. And if it is random, then only in the understanding of randomness in which it occurs at the intersection point of some necessary processes.

Now let's move on from politically sharp jokes - to an attempt at a sober, scientific understanding of some of the causes and some of the consequences of the collapse of the USSR. For me, this is not an easy, not fully (for myself) clarified problem.

First of all, I proceed from the fact that it was the USSR that collapsed, and not the Russian Empire, which was different in name. The Russian Empire, “recreated” as far as possible with Bolshevik fire and sword, by 1922, after the defeat of the so-called Stalinist idea of ​​“autonomization”, not only legally, but, so to speak, structurally ceased to exist. And today it can be argued (just today, of course, and not in 1922) that historically, with the creation of the USSR, that is, a state built, formally speaking, on a national-ethnic basis, some foundations were laid (albeit in the form of a formal or abstract possibility) for its collapse, which took place in the era of the great crisis of communism or, more precisely, real socialism. But in order for this possibility to be realized, many unrelated historical events had to take place, other internal inherent and acquired contradictions of the USSR as a great and multinational state had to unfold. Let's talk about them now.

The USSR, despite the international mentality of its creators, is still largely a Russian state. And, like everything Russian, it is literally woven from contradictions.

Indeed, according to the method, the nature of the relationship between the Center and the regions, between large and small peoples, the USSR is, of course, a unitary state, which is largely due to the rigidly centralized system of management of territories and the peoples living here that is characteristic of it (and its necessity cannot be therefore, reduce to the idea of ​​the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the mechanisms of exercising power arising from this). In addition, the USSR is a type of state structure, which in the second half of the 20th century received the name party-state in political science. Moreover, this is a socialist state, more precisely: state-administrative socialism (and not fascist Italy or Nazi Germany). From a managerial point of view, for such a state, not only in words, but also to a large extent in deeds, the principle of the so-called. democratic centralism (in one form or another).

This principle is even fixed in the Constitution of the USSR (both in Stalin's and in Brezhnev's) as the main principle of organizing the entire state and public life of the country. I say “even” because, in words or in the letter of the Basic Law of the USSR, the state in which we were all born is a federal state. Moreover, with serious inclusions of elements or principles of confederalism: for example, the right to secede from the USSR of union republics or “formulas” about “sovereign” states within a single federal state (which in itself is a clear inconsistency). However, it is quite obvious that, firstly, the principle of democratic centralism cannot, on a fair, equal basis, regulate relations between large and small nations (without prejudice to the small ones, but in our country it turned out that it cannot, without prejudice to the big ones, for example, for the Russian nation). In the same way, it is impossible to imagine the coexistence in practice of the principle of democratic centralism - with, say, a real right to secede from the USSR, well, let's say, one or two or three of the 15 republics that were part of the Union.

Another feature of all management problems in the multinational Soviet state (USSR) is a peculiar, I would say, paradoxical attitude to the national question: its content, forms, prospects for resolution, and even its very existence. In my opinion, the paradoxical understanding or the paradoxical misunderstanding of the national question - especially the Russian question as a national one - by the leaders of the USSR, especially Gorbachev, became one of the most important subjective reasons that exploded at the turn of the 80s and 90s of the multinational Union of the SSR.

The history of the theoretical attitude to whether or not the national question has been resolved in our country is instructive, what is meant by its solution, whether self-determination of nations is possible up to secession, i.e. before the formation of the “own” state within the framework of the federation and whether this right is extended to ... the Russian people, etc.

I will leave aside the very interesting and important for historians, philosophers and political scientists question about the attitude of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev to these problems and will tell on the material available to me, previously absolutely confidential information, about the solution of these problems in the historical period of L.I. Brezhnev -Yu.V.Andropov-K.U.Chernenko, as well as M.S.Gorbachev.

It is known that in order to get out of the impasse of the formula about the complete and final solution of the national question in the USSR (which clearly contradicted reality), a clause was introduced in one of Brezhnev's speeches that this issue was resolved in the form in which we inherited it from the past (pre-revolutionary past). Such a reservation, as it seemed to the ideologists of the CPSU, made it possible to slightly open the “taboo” over the analysis of those real problems, contradictions that in the 70s began to grow in the relations between various nations and peoples of the USSR under the loud crackle of anniversary speeches about the flourishing and rapprochement of all nations in the conditions of developed socialism. In fact, the scientific significance of this reservation was illusory, as evidenced by the relevant scientific literature of this period of Soviet history. I know, however, that the working group of the Politburo Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the preparation of a new, "Brezhnev" constitution of the USSR in 1977 tried to take a step forward in solving some real interethnic problems, to "expand" one of them, which, as history has shown, played a fatal role in the collapse of the USSR. I mean the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh.

As you know, Nagorno-Karabakh, after falling under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan after October 1917, the more it became a tangled knot of Armenian-Azerbaijani contradictions. A constructive form of easing this tension could be raising the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region to an Autonomous Republic. Such a proposal (based, of course, on numerous "letters of workers" - in this case, those who actually existed) was made. Its authors (and they were: A. Lukyanov, A. Bovin, Academician V. Kudryavtsev, Professor V. Sobakin) believed - and not without reason, that this long overdue problem could be solved without much, as they say, noise, within the framework of ongoing constitutional reform (adoption of a new Constitution of the USSR). The Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, however, rejected this proposal: the point of view that was popular in those years prevailed (from which, by the way, M.S. structural, status changes in the existing national-state structure of the USSR.

Life has shown the short-sightedness and short-sightedness of such a point of view. The spontaneously developing process of aggravation of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations around the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh led, as we know, first to the Sumgayit tragedy in 1988. Not only was it not stopped in time by M.S. Gorbachev, but it did not even receive a public, and indeed, any serious political assessment. The next stage of this drama in the context of the progressive weakening of the central government during Gorbachev's perestroika was the first bloody war in the Soviet and then post-Soviet space - the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the collapse, first "de facto" and then "de jure" of an important part of the USSR in the Caucasus.

During the “late” Brezhnev period, another attempt, unknown to the public, was made to move the attitude towards the national question, which was not only brewing, but gradually heating up, off the ground. As a member of that narrow group that finalized in January 1981 at the residence of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in Zavidovo the Report of the Central Committee to the XXVI Party Congress, I can report that in the first version of this report, which was sent to a member of the Politburo for the so-called. “to a narrow circle (i.e. not all and as if unofficially) on behalf of L.I. Brezhnev, in the section of the report devoted to organizational and party work, there was a proposal to create a new department within the Central Committee of the CPSU - the Department of Social and National Policy, as well as a proposal to create a State Committee for Nationalities Affairs within the structure of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (by analogy with the Leninist-Stalinist People's Commissariat of Nationalities). There is no doubt that the adoption of such innovations in 1981 could have played a positive role in preventing a threat that none of us was then aware of - the threat of the collapse of the USSR. However, both of these proposals were not included either in the final draft of the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU, or in the report itself. As far as I remember, these proposals were unanimously buried by almost all members of the Politburo from M.A. Suslov to Yu.V. Andropov and K.U. Chernenko inclusive. As you know, the department for national policy was nevertheless created in the Central Committee of the CPSU at the end of the 80s, when not only the USSR, but, as it turned out, the CPSU, had very little time left to live, and there were already very few real opportunities for saving them (if they still were, of course).

Theoretically or ideologically significant for those times, advances in relation to the national question were made at a time when Andropov-Chernenko controlled the party ideology and the entire party. I take these completely different people in a pair with each other because, in particular, it was in 1983, when Yu. it was clearly formulated that "the solution of the national question in the form in which it was inherited from the past does not mean at all that the national question is generally removed from the agenda." A little earlier, in Andropov's report on the 60th anniversary of the USSR, it was said that success in resolving the national question does not mean that all problems in interethnic relations have disappeared, that they must be resolved in a timely manner, otherwise they may worsen. In this spirit, the draft of the new version of the Program of the CPSU, on which serious work began only when Chernenko was elected General Secretary, said that at the present stage, i.e. in the conditions of the so-called. developed socialism, the national question is not removed from the agenda, it has its own content and forms, and so on. etc.

It is characteristic that it was M.S. Gorbachev, who in 1984-85. on behalf of the Politburo, he supervised the activities of the working group for the preparation of a new version of the CPSU Program (I was the head of that part of this group that outlined the internal problems of our development), and opposed even such flexible formulations. The text of the letter is stored in my personal archive - with the remarks of MS Gorbachev (addressed to me personally). It literally says the following: “when we talk about the national question at the present stage and that we are talking about it in the form in which it exists under the conditions of developed socialism, here, it seems to me, there is a subtext that we must avoid.” He easily imposed this point of view on the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU, where our program texts were discussed.

So “we” avoided the subtext by declaring through the mouth of M.S. Gorbachev at the XXVII Congress of the CPSU, which was still completely controlled by him, that the national question was “successfully resolved” in our country. But as soon as the old command and administrative “brakes” were weakened and the country’s monetary and financial system began to fall apart under the conditions of perestroika and for many other reasons, Sumgayit, Karabakh, January (1991) Baku, Vilnius, the Baltic complex as a whole, Moldovan - Transnistrian problems, etc. etc. And in the end - almost uncontrolled from the late 80s - early 90s, the collapse of the USSR.

The August putsch of 1991 plus the Belovezhskaya Accords led to the final collapse of the state, which, as it turned out, was built not on democratic centralism, as the creators of the Brezhnev constitution believed, but on the national-ethnic principle, which made it easier for the new ethno-political elites in the republics to disperse, which is completely constitutional under these conditions. from each other.

A few words about the conceptual features of the management of the multinational USSR, without which it is difficult to understand some of the causes and consequences of its collapse.

We noted that the regulation of interethnic relations in the USSR was based on the principle of unitarism in the form of a kind of democratic centralism. Its content in certain specific cases was interpreted by the party, more precisely by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Parties of the republics (except for the RSFSR, where the Communist Party did not exist until the 90s), and in difficult cases by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. No matter what they say today about this supreme body of party and state power in the USSR, it was a collective body. He, of course, was led by the Secretary General, endowed with enormous power, but objectively speaking, this power was less than the power and powers that the President of the Russian Federation has today both under the Constitution and de facto. The main tool, the main lever of management of this body in calm times (60-70s) was by no means repressions, not violence, but personnel policy, which quite flexibly combined professional-political and national-ethnic qualities, vertical and horizontal rotation across the country of these personnel, etc.

Another feature of the management of the multinational Union of the USSR was that there was virtually no legal basis for regulating interethnic relations, unless, of course, we count the general principles of the Constitution, in which assessments, boundaries and limits of what is permissible and unacceptable in interethnic relations were given.

However, in solving the national question, an enormous regulating (and effectively regulating) role belonged to ideology and propaganda and educational work, carried out very professionally. On the surface, two principles prevail here: friendship of peoples (or internationalism) and respect for the national dignity of small nations, non-discrimination against the so-called nationalists. Moreover, real conditions are being created, even privileged conditions for their national and cultural development within the framework, of course, of state socialist values. Despite the odiousness of many aspects of the propaganda and educational work of the party and the state in the spirit of these principles, their importance cannot be underestimated.

As for troubled, bad times, conflict relations between nations, they were unequivocally resolved with the help of not law, but force or the threat of its use (in various forms).

Were there any advantages to such a system of governing a multinational state? The main plus (inconceivable from the point of view of the 90s) is the absence of armed inter-ethnic mass conflicts, and even more wars, on an inter-ethnic basis. Is it a lot or a little? Probably the people who survived in such conflicts, and even more so those who died, will answer this question differently than those who were aloof from them, did not fall into this inter-ethnic “meat grinder” of the late 20th century.

Let's draw some conclusions. The reasons for the landslide (I emphasize: landslide) collapse of the USSR were predominantly subjective (political) in nature (and the role of the subjective factor in a totalitarian or authoritarian state is extremely high). Of these, it is worth highlighting:

1. Misunderstanding by the leadership of the former USSR of the contradictions of its state structure. And above all, the fact that the USSR in form represented a federation (with some even interspersed in its constitution - both Stalin's and Brezhnev's - confederate elements, for example, the right to secede from the USSR), but in fact it was a unitary, rigidly centralized state. No political efforts were made to overcome this contradiction, which sooner or later was bound to blow up the state.

2. The USSR is a multinational state. However, the legal basis for state regulation of ethnic relations was virtually absent. The CPSU tried to compensate for this basis, merged with state structures, built as a single interethnic or international organization, striving (for better or worse) to create the ideological and political basis of a single multinational state. With the liquidation, first of the legal, and then the actual role of the CPSU, that axial rod was pulled out, the structure that cemented interethnic relations collapsed, and another was not created.

3. Another contradiction, or rather a fundamental shortcoming of our former state system, was the orientation towards ensuring the priority of the so-called indigenous or titular nationality (with the exception of Russian). As a result, the formally proclaimed idea of ​​a union of equal peoples was replaced by the idea of ​​a kind of elected (“titular”, “nomenklatura”) nations.

In the context of a sharp weakening of the central state power, all this could not but cause the well-known “parade of sovereignties”, which contributed to the collapse of the USSR, almost collapsed the RSFSR, and objectively laid the foundation for the growth of Russian nationalism, capable of either demolishing everything that stood in its way, or (in its healthy form) to recreate Russia as a historically Russian, great, multinational state.

4. At the end of the 80s, i.e. Even during the years of Gorbachev-Ryzhkov's rule, the country's monetary and financial system essentially collapsed. After that, the collapse of the USSR was only a matter of time. August 1991 was just the last straw here. so-called. In this sense, the “Belovezhskaya conspiracy” was not only and not so much the cause of the collapse of the USSR, but rather a statement of this fact and its consolidation (quite hasty and largely unsuccessful).

Some consequences:

The collapse of the country's economy as a single national economic complex, which, for obvious reasons, was the main factor in the catastrophic decline in production and living standards in all the republics of the former Soviet Union, including the RSFSR (according to some estimates, a 50% drop in production in our country was caused precisely by this) ;

The Russian people, the largest, most numerous in Europe, contrary to global general integration trends, suddenly became a divided, torn nation (more than 17% of the entire Russian population of the former Soviet Union, i.e. about 25 million Russians ended up in states foreign to Russia , and some of them became foreigners deprived of internationally recognized human rights). For the first time in history, Russians turned out to be “nationalists”, including in the primordially Russian territories - Crimea, Northern Kazakhstan, etc.

The colossal geopolitical losses of the Russian state, which in many respects in this regard was discarded almost in pre-Petrine times.

All this puts before healthy socio-political forces and domestic business circles, incl. including large Russian capital, the task of reviving Russia. The essence of this task is the revival of Russia as a great power, otherwise, its main state-forming people - the Russian people - is doomed to historical extinction. Hence the significance of the Russian national idea, which has been historically worked out and so far objectively (and subjectively!) exists. Its components are: sovereignty, patriotism (Russian - up to self-sacrifice in the name of the Motherland), statehood (a special attitude towards the state and it (the state) - to the people). Finally, the idea of ​​human solidarity and social justice, rooted in Russian historical truth-seeking.

Representative power: monitoring, analysis, information, 1998. - Spec. release.

REASONS FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR

Yeltsin's press secretary P. Voshchanov called the reason for the collapse of the USSR as follows:

“Everything is much more complicated. You remember how in 1991 everyone was already talking about the transition to the market. But what is a market? New ownership relations and new owners. The struggle between the center and local political elites at that time was a struggle for who would play first fiddle in the historical division. This is the main thing in the tragedy.”

Everything is correct here, except for the word "tragedy". Gorbachev created a bourgeois SSG from the communist USSR: a multi-party system, the ban on the CPSU, the dispersal of the Politburo, the introduction of a market (literally capitalist) economy, and finally the very replacement of the USSR with Gorbachev's SSG.

As Gorbachev thought, he would be able to manage such a new bourgeois country. But Gorbachev knew history poorly: as soon as tsarist Russia collapsed as a result of the bourgeois February revolution of 1917, then immediately its national bourgeois subjects (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus) demanded national independence, since without it, the bourgeois system itself is in principle impossible.

Therefore, the SSG - in fact the Union of Capitalist States - was obviously Gorbachev's chimera: under state capitalism, the national elite rules. No one will share billions of dollars with the Center. As a result, Gorbachev repeated once again the history of tsarist Russia. As soon as he introduced capitalism, he immediately lost power over everything.

Whether Gorbachev understood this or not, he never said. But the fact is that he read the so-called "Burbulis memorandum" - after the name of the politician who replaced Gorbachev in his office, who is credited with authorship. This is supposedly a secret text of Yeltsin's advisers, which Gorbachev received long before the collapse of the USSR. The document has two important points.

1. “Before the August events, the leadership of Russia, opposing the old totalitarian regime, could rely on the support of the leaders of the overwhelming majority of the union republics, who were striving to strengthen their own political positions. The liquidation of the old center invariably brings to the fore the objective contradictions between the interests of Russia and other republics. For the latter, the preservation of the existing resource flows and financial and economic relations for the transition period means a unique opportunity to reconstruct the economy at the expense of Russia. For the RSFSR, which is already experiencing a serious crisis, this is a serious additional burden on economic structures, undermining the possibility of its economic revival.

2. “Objectively, Russia does not need an economic center standing above it, engaged in the redistribution of its resources. However, many other republics are interested in such a center. Having established control over property on their territory, they seek to redistribute the property and resources of Russia through the allied bodies in their favor. Since such a center can exist only with the support of the republics, it will objectively, regardless of its personnel composition, pursue a policy that is contrary to the interests of Russia.

The position is understandable and absolutely correct: the format of state capitalism does not fit into the outdated union relations. For example, today Russia, having received hundreds of billions of dollars on oil speculation (selling it at exorbitant prices), would have to distribute most of the profits to the republics of Central Asia, where almost as many people live as in Russia itself, although these countries have nothing to do with Russian oil reserves. have.

Gorbachev's exclusion from the Constitution of the USSR-SSG and the Constitutions of the republics for the Novo-Ogarevsky agreements of the socialist property of the people on the means of production (and the country's subsoil) meant that from now on the Latvian and Tajik have no rights to the diamonds of Yakutia and the oil of Siberia. This is the END of the USSR. The division of the previously public property and the public bowels of the USSR into national apartments INEVITABLY leads to the disintegration of the country into national apartments. This is an axiom. For we in the USSR were united by our common all-Union people's property. As soon as it was gone, there was no general. This is the same as dissolving a collective farm, distributing tractors and cows to the families of the villagers - and then waiting from the sky again for some kind of "integration" of the villagers.

And the most important thing is that only Russia is so rich in all sorts of resources, and there are many neighbors of Russia who want to have them either for free or at bargain prices. But today Russia is already a grated kalach, and its neighbors cannot be fooled just like that, and in Russia itself there is such an abyss of problems that thinking about neighbors without solving them is simply bad in relation to your own people.

In general, as we parted ways in national apartments, so in the foreseeable future we will be in them. In full accordance with the teachings of Karl Marx. After all, Marxism does not provide for the reconstruction of the USSR from countries that have been capitalist for almost 20 years and are not going to get rid of their capitalism, because they live better that way. And the most important proof of this is the fact that our bourgeois countries of the CIS are ruled or ruled in these two decades by former members of the Politburo, the Central Committee of the CPSU and simply members of the CPSU, and even former Komsomol functionaries. None of them in the CIS has ever hinted at the fact that the people should return their socialist property of the people to the means of production, return the CPSU to power and return the Politburo as a governing body of the country. That is, the leaders, the former members of the Politburo and the first secretaries of the republics, fully agree with the state of affairs where they became presidents. That's the main thing for them.

But what about the party? But what about the idea? Everything is forgotten. Which once again proves the rottenness of our USSR. Who would have thought that the leaders of the CPSU from the Asian republics would suddenly become, OPENLY AND OPENLY, having received the presidency, the main capitalists in their homeland, and their relatives - the owners of factories, TV channels, hotels, oil wells? This metamorphosis was evident in advance, we were simply too sure of our ideals of youth. Isn't it crazy - the son of a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU or the Politburo of the USSR - a dollar millionaire? And today this is the NORM for almost all the southern countries of the CIS.

WHO NEEDS A CONSPIRACY THEORY?

Why is the history of the collapse of the USSR not presented honestly in the mass of articles and films, but instead is monstrously distorted? Why are the main aspects missed - the Ukrainian referendum, the issue of the elimination of socialism in the USSR, Gorbachev's proposals to give autonomies republican status? Why is everyone reduced only to the "Bialowieza conspirators" and to the "intrigues of the West"? That is, to the Conspiracy Theory.

In my opinion, there are several reasons. I'll name the main ones.

1. The national elites of the CIS countries (former members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Politburo, employees of the party apparatus and the Komsomol, the directors' corps, etc.) during the collapse of the USSR became the owners of the very property that was "nationwide" in the USSR. And the collapse of the USSR hides a completely different secret - already really from the framework of the Conspiracy Theory: the topic of privatization. That is, the theme of the division of public socialist property (and such a division of it with the people is obligatory when the country abandons socialism).

Few people know that it was not Chubais who invented vouchers, but the Gorbachev administration was the first to prepare the introduction of vouchers in the planned JIT. It is difficult to judge what would have come of this, but, apparently, it would have been the same as with the Chubais vouchers, because the Russian privatization program largely repeated the one that was developed for the SSG by the Gorbachev team and was proposed for signing and implementation in the Novo- Ogaryov agreements.

In fact, the privatization program was drawn up by those who then controlled the property of the USSR - and drawn up in such a way that they would become its main owners.

However, a similar privatization in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the GDR had a fair character: all the socialist property of the people was counted and evaluated - and divided by the number of inhabitants of the country. As a result, the share of each family turned out to be quite large: using vouchers, the family became the owner of a small store or a significant shareholder of a large enterprise, and in the mid-1990s, the share of “income from privatized property” in family incomes in these countries averaged from 20 to 40% and higher. In Russia, as you know, Chubais's voucher was sold for a bottle of vodka. That is, the entire socialist property of the RSFSR, created over 70 years of Russian labor into the "collective piggy bank of a large collective farm", was reduced to 150 million bottles of vodka.

The population of the CIS countries was deceived: in some countries, a handful of people (the former party nomenklatura and directors) became the owner of public factories and resources, in other countries state capitalism (that is, the bureaucracy) became their owner. Here, in order to hide this outright theft of public property from their people, the new owners do their best to hide this issue from consideration. And that is why the collapse of the USSR is considered selectively only as an administrative collapse of the country, avoiding discussion of the topic of the collapse of the socialist formation - because this issue is directly related to the question of HOW our public property was divided. And therefore, the new owners are extremely interested in hiding the history of their dishonest appropriation of this property and blaming everything on the "Belovezhskaya Plots", or even better - on the CIA or the West. Like, "if only to get away from us."

2. The collapse of the USSR was a blow to the mentality of those who thought in "imperial terms". Recently, in Russia, the idea of ​​"Empire" has become very popular, and the USSR is already associated with "historical Russia" and the "Russian Empire", and in such myths the collapse of the USSR is erroneously presented already as the "collapse of Russia". It is clear that such an interpretation of the events of 1991 is not looking for real facts and reasons, but simply requires a mythical "anti-Russian conspiracy."

4. Populist leaders of the CIS countries (like, for example, Zhirinovsky with his LDPR party) speculate on the nostalgia of the marginal part of the population for the USSR - and therefore are also extremely interested in talking about the collapse of the USSR as a "conspiracy of our enemies."

5. Any executive power of the CIS countries itself is always interested in preserving the "Soviet traditions", because in the USSR there was no Civil Society capable of controlling it. The Soviet people have always been very easy to manage - like an obedient herd. Hence the cult of the USSR, the glorification of the USSR, the celebration of Soviet holidays and especially military ones - with the simultaneous scolding of Gorbachev's Perestroika and all its democratic achievements. Within the framework of this demagoguery, the lawlessness of the mid-1990s is blamed on Perestroika, and not at all on the rule of the new owners, who took away from the people their socialist property into their private or state-capitalist property. In this context, a true story about the history of the collapse of the USSR is simply impossible.

This specificity is fully reflected in the work of the structures of the CIS, where our unanimous desire for integration (as if recreating the USSR) is always declared, but in reality it is only about the formalization of our post-Soviet relations. For the real, and not in words, reconstruction of the USSR is a return to the people's socialist ownership of the means of production and subsoil, which, when carried out, removes all obstacles to the unification of countries. That is, complete deprivation. And without the transfer of property and subsoil to the people, the reconstruction of the USSR is impossible in principle.

There is only another option - when, during the unification, it is not necessary to break the property system, transferring it from private to national, and even more so international with the united republics. This option was proposed by Putin: in order for the peoples of other CIS countries to become, as in the USSR, also involved in the resources of Russia, they should enter into its composition simply as new provinces - for Russia no longer intends to consider its resources "all-Union".

Life, as we see, shows that no revival of the USSR is possible in principle, since Russia and its structures (Gazprom in the first place) do not intend to share with the "fraternal peoples". Unless - with the complete refusal of the neighbors from all their statehood, which, however, does not make them co-owners of Russian resources. For no "USSR" is being revived (that is, the most popular socialist property of all republics for all means of production and subsoil).

It must be admitted that Yeltsin's advisers were right. Russia, according to Putin's definition, is an energy country, the main source of its income is the sale of energy resources. If Russia continued to share these revenues with the CIS countries, being with them in some kind of allied relations, then they would really solve their problems of state building (with the obvious prospect of future independence) at Russia's expense. In this regard, the "divorce of the republics" was most beneficial to Russia itself. Those huge incomes that Russia shared with other republics have now become only its income - and today they allow solving many of the accumulated sores and problems of the country: the problem of poverty, and the problem of meager salaries of doctors and teachers, and bad roads, and much, much more .

And, of course, Yeltsin's rejection of Gorbachev's plan to divide the RSFSR into autonomous states was also fateful for Russia. The demonization of all previous rulers of the country, which has been a tradition since the days of the USSR, also seems unfair. Brezhnev, accused of creating a "period of stagnation", nevertheless removed the executions of dissidents from our lives. Gorbachev, guilty of the collapse of the USSR, nevertheless created the rudiments of Civil Society and democracy in our country with his Perestroika. Yeltsin, in creating an oligarch class in an unfair privatization, was also convinced that he was serving the good of Russia by ridding her of communism and cannibalistic communist ideas. There can be no unambiguous historical assessments here.

Except one. The USSR - as a complete dead end in the history of Human Civilization - had to disintegrate for its own internal reasons back in the 1940s. He was saved only by the victory over Nazism in World War II, which immensely strengthened the position of the USSR in the world and veiled the problems of the system in the eyes of the population. In the same way, today North Korea is "developing the last resources" from the fact of winning the war with the United States. This cannot go on forever.

I don't see any difference between Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. And if someone speaks of the collapse of the USSR as a "tragedy", then he equally calls the "tragedy" and the expulsion of Pol Pot from Kampuchea, who destroyed a third of the country's population in three years.

What is the collapse of the USSR for all of us: the administrative collapse of the country - or is it still the expulsion of radical communist cockroaches from our brains? Here is the question.

In my opinion, the second order is historically more important for us than the first. Therefore, the collapse of communism and the USSR with it is the greatest blessing and happiness for us, it is our return to universal values, to respect for human life and the human person. Let at least a hundred of the USSR disintegrate to achieve this goal - it's not a pity. For we are finally gaining a NORMAL state.

And when the homo impericuses lament that, they say, “the collapse of the USSR is a great tragedy,” then with such an approach, the collapse of the Third Reich is also seen by the homo impericus as “the greatest tragedy of the century.” In fact, the post-war Germans (whom the United States spent huge amounts of money on de-fascistization and de-imperialization) today consciously consider the collapse of the Third Reich to be their boon. The rejection of imperial ideas allowed Germany to create a Civil Society (without which an efficient economy is impossible), and to focus the energy of the masses on the improvement of their country - instead of diverting it to "external conquests" and militarization. As a result, Germany defeated by us, having lost a third of the male population and burned to the ground, has become the leading economic power FROM ZERO, and the average wages and pensions in this country we have defeated are orders of magnitude higher than ours, the WINNERS.

The paradox lies in the fact that the rejection of imperial ideas and the desire to “rule the neighbors and the world” leads to the concentration of the efforts of the nation and state funds for the improvement of their country. Which gives visible results in improving the quality of life in the country - and becomes, as in anti-imperial Germany or Japan, just the OBJECT OF NATIONAL PRIDE. The country becomes GREAT in terms of its weight in world politics - but GREAT not because of its imperialism, but because it was able to improve itself wonderfully - and this created its weight in the international arena.

Somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century, the greatness of the country began to be determined not by the power of its armed forces and the number of nuclear missiles, but by the size of average salaries and pensions - and the degree of individual freedom in the State. From the point of view of ancient ideas from the Age of Empires, the USSR was quite strong as an Empire, because it possessed an incredible number of tanks and nuclear warheads. Why did it fall apart?

Alas, it turned out that the strength of the country no longer depends on the degree of its militarization. The so-called "human factor" has become the main one: a person has ceased to be a "cog in the system", without respect for his personality and without the development of his well-being - any most powerful nuclear power is weak, like a colossus on clay feet.

Supporters of the Conspiracy Theory see in the "forces that destroyed the USSR" one or another "intruder", while placing the people of the USSR itself outside the process of History. This, of course, is a huge delusion: to see in the Soviet people only an obedient and brainless herd, in love with the USSR. In reality, the Soviet people were then terribly tired of Gorbachev's demagoguery - and were even more exhausted by the catastrophic crisis in the economy, empty shelves in stores, huge queues for everything vital and the introduction of a rationing system. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO LIVE LIKE THIS - that was the main idea of ​​that era, common to everyone's understanding.

In search of a better future, the exhausted Soviet people abandoned the USSR.

SO WHO DESTROYED THE USSR?

Let's return to this main question, which, in my opinion, has its own answer.

A combination of circumstances, chaos and chaos, a power vacuum, as well as the separatism of Ukraine and other republics - do not explain the most important moment: why did the RSFSR, as supposedly the “Soviet and Russian Empire” (as almost everyone in Russia now say), did not take any steps against collapse of the USSR? That's the question!

Gorbachev retrospectively finds that "the president of Russia and his entourage actually sacrificed the Union to their passionate desire to reign in the Kremlin," and cites an episode about which he was told by one of the deputies of the Russian Supreme Soviet, who was in the past in the circle of Yeltsin's supporters:

“After returning from Minsk in December 1991, the President of Russia gathered a group of deputies close to him in order to enlist support for the ratification of the Minsk agreements. He was asked how legal they are. Unexpectedly, the president fell into forty minutes of reasoning, with inspiration telling how he managed to “hang noodles” on Gorbachev before going to Minsk, to convince him that he would pursue one goal there, while in fact he was going to do the exact opposite. "Gorbachev should have been taken out of the game," Yeltsin added. This attempt to shift their measure of historical responsibility onto Yeltsin alone is typical of all Gorbachev's memoirs, just as the communists of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation stubbornly do not want to remember that it was they who unanimously voted for the collapse of the USSR. According to Gorbachev, the communists also had a hand in the collapse of the USSR, who almost unanimously voted for the Belovezhskaya Accords and for Russia's secession from the USSR.

Nikolai Zenkovich in the book “Secrets of the outgoing century” cited above writes:

“Why did the communists vote so unanimously “yes”? Many did it, probably reluctantly. The general mood was expressed by pilot-cosmonaut V.I. Sevastyanov, who was a member of the Fatherland faction, said with relief: “Thank God, the era of Gorbachev is over.” They voted not against the USSR, as deputies repent today, but against the incapacitated center headed by Gorbachev. And to get rid of it, they liquidated the state.”

Yes, there was a confluence of circumstances. But after all, a mistake is always EASY TO FIX! And after all, they tried to fix it - the State Duma of the Russian Federation on March 15, 1996 adopted a resolution to cancel the decision of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of December 12, 1991, which denounced the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR.

So what? Nothing. It turned out that another POWERFUL FORCE in Russia itself was extremely interested in the collapse of the USSR, which in 1996 spat on this decision of the State Duma, and in 1991 behind the scenes pushed the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR to denounce the Treaty on the creation of the USSR.

As always and in all cases, and in the history of the collapse of the USSR, we must ask the obligatory main question - who benefits most from this? The answer to it will name the main organizer of the EVENT. At the same time, as we will see, the collapse of the USSR itself is directly related to the collapse of precisely socialism in the USSR.

In his book, Zenkovich devoted two chapters to the collapse of the USSR, but did not name the main organizers of the collapse. And only in one sentence on page 571 does he give a “hint” to answer the main question (without realizing the essence of the topic here):

“Having retained 90 percent of the entire oil production of the former Soviet Union, Russia has lost 60 percent of its oil equipment production capacity, 35-40 percent of oil refining capacity and 60 percent of the oil cargo throughput of seaports.”

What does the phrase “Having retained 90 percent of the entire oil production of the former Soviet Union” mean? It really means that in the USSR and Gorbachev's SSG project this "preservation" was not envisaged, oil was placed under the control of the Center (as well as gas, diamonds of Yakutia and other resources). And Yeltsin, by the collapse of the USSR, did not “SAVE” at all, but for the first time TAKEN these “90 percent of all oil production of the former Union” from the USSR-SSG to himself in Russia.

My version of the retrospective of events is as follows. When the Gorbachev team proposed to the republics the creation of the SSG within the framework of the Novo-Ogaryovo agreements with the rejection of socialism, with the privatization of socialist ownership of the means of production and subsoil and its division through privatization vouchers, the RSFSR began to consider this prospect.

The results of the reflections are in the “Burbulis Memorandum” quoted above, but it is only a reflection of the generally extremely acute problem of PROPERTY that arose during the transition of the USSR from socialism to capitalism.

The draft of Gorbachev's all-union privatization already took into account the wishes of the party-director's nomenklatura to take possession of this public property, and it was precisely such privatization that took place in the CIS countries and in the Russian Federation after the collapse of Gorbachev's country. Apparently, it is wrong to call Russian vouchers “Chubais vouchers”, since Gorbachev invented them for the USSR-SSG. It was absolutely clear that the main profitable “commodity” of the USSR was energy resources.

In Gorbachev's JIT project, privatization was supposed to be ALL-UNION: that is, Gazprom's shares were to be divided among the republics, and Russian 90 percent of the entire oil production of the USSR was to be divided with the Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Moldovans, Asian and Caucasian republics - which together were more than the Russians themselves.

The injustice is obvious: Russia produces 90% of the oil of the USSR, which is the main source of income for the country of the USSR, but for some reason, when privatizing the USSR, the SSG must give it equally to the property of other republics. The directors of the energy-producing industries of the RSFSR, in discussing the planned privatization and in anticipation of becoming millionaires, flooded the government of the RSFSR with their letters, and it was on their basis that the “Burbulis Memorandum” was formulated.

As a result, the question was how, during the privatization of the USSR, the party-director corps of the RSFSR Snatch MORE. And much MORE came out in the situation when the RSFSR became a state independent of its neighbors - pretenders-freeloaders on Russian oil and gas.

And now, almost 20 years have passed since the collapse of the USSR, and we see that Russia's main income is the sale of energy resources, on which it grows immensely rich with the world's rising prices for them. The country's leadership defines the concept of Russia as an "energy power", the main governing force of the Russian Federation is Gazprom, and the billionaires of Russia are people of that party-director's corps who were at the origins of the privatization of Russia's mineral resources. Instead of Gorbachev's "division of the mineral resources of Russia between the republics", we see that the Russian Federation sells energy resources to the republics at world prices, and stops attempts to resent, although these "disturbances" are largely caused by the project of Gorbachev's SSG rejected by the RSFSR, where the mineral resources of Russia became equally privatized by all subjects THE USSR.

Strictly speaking, in a broad historical sense, the question is not who destroyed the USSR (if it was an accident and a temporary mistake), but who is preventing Russia from reunification into the Union for almost 20 years. The main obstacle to this is Gazprom and other energy companies of the Russian Federation, and personally their shareholders, dollar millionaires and billionaires. At the same time, their participation in the collapse of the USSR was the most important.

I repeat that the re-creation of the USSR is once again the unification into a common socialist exploitation of the mineral resources of our countries. The former "brothers" of Russia in the USSR have no such "special resources", except for Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, well, Kazakhstan. It is clear that these four ex-USSR republics absolutely do not want to make their subsoil again "common property" with their neighbors.

Of course, neither Yeltsin nor Putin, for the idea of ​​“recreating the USSR”, could no longer offer the CIS countries common ownership of the subsoil and energy production enterprises of the Russian Federation, since they belong to private owners and shareholders in the Russian Federation. I believe that the question “who destroyed the USSR?” and the question “who doesn’t need the USSR today?” - this is the same question, because all those who do not need the USSR today are equally involved in the events when the collapse of the USSR was carried out. For they became owners at that time.

But in any case, it should be recognized that the very epochal nature of the collapse of the USSR is so historically global that different points of view about these events are possible, and we will never find the “only historical truth”. Which gives full play to the most diverse concepts of the Conspiracy Theory - no matter how absurd they may sound. Some grain of truth, perhaps, lies in each such version of the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - an odious state that went down in history and Yuri Gagarin, and the famine in Ukraine, and massive illegal repressions of its population, and the victory over Hitler, and the adoption of a law on the execution of 12-year-old children for a handful of rotting spikelets "kidnapped" from a harvested field. Like everyone else in life, there was everything: both the gloomy, eerie, and something that you can be proud of forever. In any case, the USSR is something lived and experienced, and again we will never enter “this river” a second time.