Dear Delegates, Congratulations on being selected to the Kremlin, one of VMUN’s most advanced committees. My name is Harrison Ritchie, and I will be your director for this year’s conference. I have been involved in MUN since Grade 10, and have thoroughly enjoyed every conference that I have attended. This year’s Kremlin will be a historical crisis committee. In February, you will all be transported to the October of 1988, where you will be taking on the roles of prominent members of either the Soviet Politburo or Cabinet of Ministers. As powerful Soviet officials, you will be debating the fall of the Soviet Union, or, rather, how to keep the Union together in such a tumultuous time. In the Soviet Union’s twilight years, a ideological divide began to emerge within the upper levels of government. Two distinct blocs formed out of this divide: the hardliners, who wished to see a return to totalitarian Stalinist rule, and the reformers, who wished to progress to a more democratic Union. At VMUN, delegates will hold the power to change the course of history. By exacting your influence upon your peers, you will gain valuable allies and make dangerous enemies. There is no doubt that keeping the Union together will be no easy task, and there are many issues to address over the coming three days, but I hope that you will be thoroughly engrossed in the twilight years of one of the world’s greatest superpower and find VMUN an overall fulfilling experience. Good luck in your research, and as always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me before the conference. Sincerely, Harrison Ritchie Director: Kremlin Fall of the Soviet Union Overview In the harsh winters of the late 1980s, the Soviet Union, one of the world’s two hegemonic powers, began to prepare for an imminent threat to state security. For years now, the Union had been producing nuclear weapons in an arms race with the United States. Now that conflict had finally reached the Union, however, many were surprised that the threat to Soviet stability did not come from its sworn enemies across the Pacific Ocean, but rather, from within the Union itself. Indeed, ever since Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary in 1985, discontent had been brewing within the Union’s 15 republics. Gorbachev is a reformist of the truest sense; unlike the General Secretaries that had preceded him, Gorbachev rode on a platform of political and economic reform. There was no doubt that the Soviet economy had stagnated, with both morale and productivity reaching a slow decline.1 Gorbachev’s predecessors had all previously ruled with an iron fist, quelling uprisings and controlling the flow of information that reached the general public. Seeing that this standard of rule no longer played to the benefit of the Union, Gorbachev, in conjunction with his Chief of Party Ideology, Alexander Yakovlev, developed the policies of perestroika and glasnost. These policies of economic and political openness, respectively, seemed to usher in a new era of Soviet Ideology - one that Gorbachev hoped would propel the Soviet Union into the 21st century as a superpower whose economy would either match or eclipse that of the United States. Things did not go exactly as Gorbachev planned, however; soon following the reformist bloc’s embrace of glasnost and the subsequent increased involvement of the different republics in Soviet decision making, anti-Soviet sentiments began to blossom, especially in the Baltic republics. Independence movements began to mobilize in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, beginning what might lead to the collapse of the entire Union. In VMUN’s 1988 Kremlin, Gorbachev has decided to call upon an emergency council consisting of important members of his Cabinet and the Presidents of major SSRs in order to discuss how to resuscitate the Union. Timeline March 11th, 1985 - Following the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev is elected to the illustrious position of General Secretary of the USSR May 1985 - Gorbachev makes a speech in Leningrad advocating political and economic liberalization. 1986 - Gorbachev continues to press for liberalization, stressing the importance of his ideologies glasnost and perestroika (meaning openness and restructuring, respectively). December 26th, 1986 - 300 working class Latvian youth gather in the country’s central square marching for Latvian independence. They clash with the military and lives are lost. January 28th - 30th, 1987 - Gorbachev advocates for a new policy of democratization (demokratizatsiya) at the Central Committee Meeting, suggesting that future Communist 1 Harrison, M.. "Trends in Soviet labour productivity, 1928-85: War, postwar recovery, and slowdown." European Review of Economic History 2.2 (1998): 171-200. Print. Party elections should offer a choice between different candidates.2 This policy is strongly opposed by the rest of the Central Committee, and is never implemented. May 6th, 1987 - Pamyat, a Russian nationalist group, stages a demonstration in Moscow. Authorities do not break up the demonstration, and instead keep traffic out of the incoming demonstrators’ way. October 21st, 1987 - Protesters gather in Estonia to remember those who gave their lives in the 1918 war for Estonian independence. These protests culminate in a clash with the military, and marks the first time since 1940 in which the national Estonian tricolor is publicly visible. February 1988 - Close to one million protesters gather in Sverdlov Square in Moscow, declaring that Nagorno-Karabakh, a part of Azerbaijan containing a majority Armenian population, should be made a part of Armenia. Gorbachev refuses to make this change, and protests in both Armenia and Azerbaijan turn violent. April 1988 - Estonian Popular Front is formed, putting pressure on Estonian and Soviet governments to give the SSR more independence. May 1988 - Sajudis, the Lithuanian Popular Front, is founded. June 1988 - The Latvian Popular front is founded. June 16th, 1988 - In Estonia, Karl Vaino, leader of the Communist Party of Estonia, is replaced by the liberal Vaino Valjas. July 5th, 1988 - Armenian troops are sent to disperse protesters at Yerevan Airport; shots are fired and a student is killed. October 1988 - Gorbachev replaces the leaders of the Communist Parties of Lithuania and Latvia with the more liberal-minded Algirdas Brazauskas and Janis Vagras, respectively. Historical Analysis and Current Situation Considering the totalitarian power system and overall oppression of its citizenry that characterized the Soviet Union for most of its existence, it is of little surprise that when Gorbachev finally allowed for increased political participation by the Union’s general populace, protests began to take place almost immediately. Over 50 years of built-up anti- Soviet sentiments were suddenly unleashed, creating a sudden explosion of discontent that even Gorbachev could not have predicted. Indeed, when Gorbachev created his ideologies of glasnost and perestroika, he was not expecting them to be the facilitators of Union-wide collapse. The Soviet government had little experience dealing with large-scale demonstrations, so instead of facilitating and negotiating with independence groups, it instead defaulted to 2 Arias-King, Fredo. "The Perestroika of Demokratizatsiya." Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 13.1 (2005): 5-10. Print. violence.3 The rebellion in the Caucasus is a prime example of this abuse: in February 1988, protests began to spring up in Armenia and Azerbaijan, calling for the rejoining of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast with the Armenian SSR. Several weeks after protests began to take place, the Regional Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to secede from Azerbaijan and join with Armenia. Both the central Soviet and the regional Azerbaijani governments, however, did not recognize this vote. As such, the Armenian people continued to protest; by February 28th, more than a quarter of the entire Armenian republic’s population had gathered in the Moscow’s Sverdlov Square.4 As Armenia had previously been one of the USSR’s most faithful republics, the scale of demonstration that took place came as a surprise to the central Soviet government. Even as both protests and tensions between the Azerbaijani and Armenian governments continued to grow, Gorbachev refused to recognize the secession of the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast. Gorbachev did not completely stonewall the Armenians, however; instead of giving the republic its desired Oblast, he replaced the hardliner president with the reformist Suren Harutyunyan, who he hoped would be able to ease tensions between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. Harutyunyan, however, had an entirely different agenda. In fear of escalation of conflict, he quickly gave in to the protesters, allowing them to fly the outlawed national Armenian flag in Yerevan. The Supreme Soviet in Yerevan, headed by Harutyunyan, began to draft a resolution that would give its approval to the idea of the Nagorno-Karabakh's joining Armenia.5 Within a few weeks, Armenia had transformed into the leading figurehead up to which all independence-desiring republics would look to. The Armenian Nationalist Movement was quick to mobilize, staging protests in the Yerevan airport. On July 5th, Harutyunyan, again acting out of fear, sent in Armenian troops to clear these protests. Things took a turn for the worse, however, when shots were fired and a student protester was killed. There is no sign that these protests are going to stop anytime in the near future, so it will be up to the delegates of the emergency council to try to create a new peace between the Armenian and Azerbaijani SSRs before all-out war breaks out. Also of major importance are the three Baltic SSRs: Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. These states were the first to press for reform, and since 1987 have developed their own Popular Front independence movements. As these states have historically suffered the most abuse out of all the Soviet Republics, they have had a long-standing resentment for central Soviet rule.