Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe Soviet Union National Affairs JL His WAS A MOMENTOUS YEAR for the entire Communist world, as most of the East Europe states moved toward the abandonment of Communism, and the oldest Communist state, the USSR, underwent radical change. Mikhail Gorba- chev's policy of glasnost, or openness, opened many past and present issues to public scrutiny and debate. Economic, cultural, political, and social issues were widely discussed and thoroughly debated. Jamming of foreign broadcasts virtually ceased, and foreign non-Communist newspapers became more widely available. Several constituent republics of the USSR made moves toward dissociation from the federa- tion; spontaneous political activity spread across the country; the first meaningful elections since the revolution were held; a new legislative body convened and en- thralled the public with the kind of open discussions almost never heard before; and the leadership continued its attempts to reform the economic system. Thus, joint ventures with foreign entrepreneurs and firms continued to grow in number, as did cooperatives. The legislature granted farmers the right to lease land for long terms. On the other hand, the USSR suffered the consequences of a poor harvest in 1988, and there was no visible improvement in the standard of living. In the summer there were strikes of coal miners in Siberia and Ukraine, which forced government officials to negotiate with the strikers, something they had never done in the past. The government later passed a law permitting strikes, hitherto illegal, under certain circumstances. A Congress of People's Deputies was established as a new legislative body to which there would be partially competitive elections, the Communist party retaining control of at least a third of the seats. In the March elections, many party function- aries were defeated, including the party secretaries of the Leningrad, Kiev, and Lvov regions. Boris Yeltsin, who emerged as Gorbachev's political rival, won 89 percent of the vote to an at-large seat in Moscow, after attempts to keep him off the ballot failed. In Lithuania, the Sajudis national movement captured 32 of the 42 seats allotted to that Baltic republic. In May, as the attention of the public was riveted 337 338 / AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1991 on the proceedings of the legislature for the first time since the revolution, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected by the congress to the new office of president, winning 96 percent of the vote. However, conservatives managed to elect a much more conserv- ative Supreme Soviet, the legislative body which ultimately shapes legislation. In the elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, about 12 Jews were chosen. While none ran on a platform of representing Jewish concerns, some joined in an informal grouping after the elections with the aim of looking out for some basic Jewish interests. None of the eight Jews who had been elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1984 was reelected. The second session of the Congress of People's Deputies met in December and voted an economic reform package which delayed price reforms, seen by many as crucial to any effective reform. The same session, acting on a report from a commission headed by Alexander Yakovlev, voted to condemn the Nazi-Soviet treaty of August 1939 which, in secret protocols, had divided Poland between the two nations and had assigned the Baltic republics to the Soviet sphere of influence. The media discussed the possibility that article six of the Soviet constitution, which grants the Communist party a monopoly of power, would be revised, paving the way for a multiparty system. Some of the republics did not wait for such revision. In December the Baltic republics of Latvia and Lithuania legalized multiple parties. This was only one element in the growing separation of some republics from Soviet norms. Though the Supreme Soviet granted economic autonomy to the republics in July, this did not satisfy them, and they pushed for greater political autonomy. The nationalities problem continued to be one of the most troublesome. Clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis forced the government to administer the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region directly from Moscow, as of January, though later in the year it was assigned to Azerbaijan's jurisdiction, arousing the ire of Armenians. In Ukraine, the second most important republic, a national Ukrainian movement, Rukh, was founded. In Moldavia, the three Baltic republics, and Tajik- stan, the languages of the respective indigenous majorities were declared the official languages of the republics. Russians in Estonia and Moldavia responded by demon- strating in protest, as did Gagauz in Moldavia. In Georgia, Soviet troops killed at least 20 peaceful nationalist demonstrators in April, using a poison gas and shovel handles. Nationalist demands were couched in more political terms in the Baltic. In May the Lithuanian parliament unanimously passed a constitutional amendment grant- ing Lithuania the right to veto Soviet laws and to control migration to Lithuania. After the Yakovlev commission reported on the secret protocols to the 1939 Ger- man-Soviet pact, a million people formed a human chain stretching through the Baltic republics as a symbolic protest against what they saw as the illegal annexation of their countries by the USSR. In December the Lithuanian Communist party congress voted to declare independence of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. This was unprecedented and broke the strict hierarchical party discipline that had SOVIET UNION / 339 always been a counterweight to the federal structure of the state. Lithuanian party leader Algirdas Brazauskas went further when he declared the Lithuanian party's intention to "establish an independent Lithuanian state." Foreign Affairs The Soviet Union continued to move toward understandings with rivals, with Gorbachev successfully projecting an image of a benign Soviet Union. He an- nounced that the military budget would be cut by 14 percent and the armed forces reduced by half a million men and 10,000 tanks. When Poland elected a non- Communist government, the Soviet Union took no steps against that country. Gorbachev repeatedly assured East Europeans and the world that the USSR would not interfere in internal developments in the countries of the region and surprised many by keeping his word. Gorbachev visited Beijing in May in an attempt to improve relations with China. He tried to do the same with Japan. At the end of the year he met in Malta with President George Bush of the United States. Few concrete agreements were reached, but the atmosphere generated by the meeting set the stage for arms control and other agreements between the two countries; the meeting also seemed to establish a good personal relationship between the two leaders. This was the most politically exciting year in memory. It ended with the Soviet population watching anxiously as the East European states pulled out of the Com- munist camp, and as their own political institutions and personalities were being revamped and reshuffled with unprecedented speed. Relations with Israel As part of its effort to improve relations with the West, the Soviet Union took steps toward a better relationship with Israel. In January an Israeli basketball team played in Moscow for the first time in 21 years, and 175 Israeli fans were permitted to attend. A large number of Soviet Jews cheered the Israelis on. In the following month, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze met with his Israeli counter- part, Moshe Arens, in Cairo, just after Shevardnadze had met with PLO chief Yasir Arafat. Israel received good publicity in the USSR for its assistance on the spot to the victims of the December 1988 earthquake in Armenia. Later, about 60 Armeni- ans were brought to Israel for medical treatment in a project funded by the Ameri- can Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Armenians and Israelis spoke of establish- ing ties between the two peoples and their respective states. In August a commercial agreement was signed between the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In the United Nations, for the first time, the Soviet Union did not vote with the Arab states to deny Israel a seat at the General Assembly session. This was seen as a symbol of the Soviet desire to normal- ize relations with Israel. In a development that was bound to influence immigration 340 / AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1991 to Israel, about 25,000 Soviet citizens—most of them presumably Jews—traveled to Israel as tourists; they were provided with Russian-speaking guides and met with family and friends who had previously settled in the Jewish state. In August a prominent Soviet journalist, Alexander Bovin, wrote an article in Izvestia which called on the USSR to extend full diplomatic recognition to Israel. Shortly thereafter, another Soviet writer, A. Smirnov, published an article in the same newspaper arguing against immediate recognition. This illustrated the plural- ism that had come to Soviet public life and probably reflected debates within the policy-making elite. Anti-Semitism As political controls relaxed and ethnic tensions grew, there were increasingly visible signs of anti-Semitism at the grass-roots level. The government no longer seemed to churn out as much anti-Zionist and anti-Judaism propaganda as it had, but individuals and groups were openly expressing their hatred of Jews. Writers in Leningrad complained that Jews dominated the publishing houses and literary journals. Igor Shafarevich, a distinguished scientist, published an article entitled "Russophobia," in which he charged that the Jews, a "lesser people," live in their "own intellectual and spiritual world, detached from the people at large... an elitist group whose essential beliefs are antithetical to those of the people as a whole." He warned that if the " 'Lesser People' ideology were to succeed, it would spell the final destruction of the religious and national foundations of life." (Nash Sovremennik, no.

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