On December 25, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, while the hammer and sickle flag lowered for the last time over the Kremlin. On the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, relations between Russia and the West are as tense as ever, but the democratic project has not failed yet, Ann Cooper, the American journalist and the first Moscow bureau chief of the National Public Radio (NPR), who covered the final five years of the USSR, said in an interview with LRT.lt.
There is no question that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most pivotal events of the last century. You had an opportunity to witness it from up close and report it to the rest of the world. Looking back, how do you feel about it?
I wasn't actually there on Christmas Day in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. I left at the end of September.
For me, and for many people who were in the Soviet Union in that era, the collapse was something that the country was moving toward for quite a while. Especially in August of 1991, after the attempted coup against Gorbachev… When that collapsed, you could tell where things were headed. You just didn't know exactly when or how it was going to happen.
Looking back on it, 30 years later… When I left, which was not very long before the official collapse, there was a lot of optimism and euphoria. In many, probably, most parts of the Soviet Union, people had been watching this process for years and welcomed the freedom that they began to have in those last years.
I'm sure there were some people who were frightened by the prospect and would have preferred to keep things the way they were, but in most republics, besides Russia, it was welcomed as a new beginning, a new possibility and freedom to start doing things in the ways these countries wanted to do them.
As we've seen with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They've turned to the European Union and NATO, and they’re very different from what they were as Soviet republics. They're also quite different in terms of their politics, press freedom, and freedom of expression from most of the rest of the Soviet Union
And what's happened in those three republics is much more what I would have expected to happen in quite a few of the other Soviet states.
You said that there was a sense of inevitability in the Soviet Union already in the summer of 1991 and in September when you left. But if you had to point at one specific moment, when did you realise that the collapse of the Soviet Union was imminent?
At the end of the August Coup in 1991. When that coup collapsed, it felt like this group of men were trying to roll things back, and they didn't succeed. And why didn't they succeed? One reason was that the Soviet public had moved on. And there was a message that “we don't want to go back to that”.
By and large, the country, meaning most of the republics, moved on and moved forward. And that's when you could feel that there was an attempt to pull it back – that attempt failed, so it's going to keep moving forward. And there's only one place this can go, which is the breakup of the Soviet Union.
There was talk about different coalitions, for example, that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus might be together in some sort of union. So, the details of exactly how and when it would break up, that wasn't so clear, but the fact that there was going to be a huge change, and it would no longer be the Soviet Union, that was very clear by the end of August.
When you left the Soviet Union, you probably had an opportunity to talk to people from different places from across the world. What was the expectation in the West about where the Soviet Union was going at that point?
First of all, once the Soviet Union collapsed, a lot of Western aid came in. I look mostly at the press and what happened there, and there were tens of millions of dollars spent on media training programs, helping to create and foster independent media in pretty much every one of the former Soviet republics.
The Cold War was such a time of tension and fear between the West and the Soviet Union, so there was definitely a sense of relief that that seemed to be over.
The Western governments were optimistic, they were very eager to see as many of these countries as possible become stable democracies with a lot of freedom, freedom of expression, the press, and religion – all the things that had not existed or had been very restricted under the Soviet Union. There was a desire to help these countries become democracies.
For a sort of the average person or the average news consumer who'd been reading about what was happening in the Soviet Union for five years… We had lived for so long with the Cold War that I think there was a kind of a sense of “thank goodness, that's over”.
The Cold War was such a time of tension and fear between the West and the Soviet Union, so there was definitely a sense of relief that that seemed to be over.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, was there also optimism that “the end of history” had come, and Russia would join the democratic club? In other words, where did you think Russia would be 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union?
I can’t say that I looked that far ahead. But, of course, I was quite optimistic about Russia.
When the coup collapsed in August 1991, you could see that further collapse was going to happen. In places of popular resistance, we often see a lot of optimism, a lot of euphoria, when leaders run out of the country and then things get really important. But often, they don't turn out the way we expected in that period of optimism, because somebody else comes in and grabs power or there's a power vacuum.
The difference I've always felt with Russia in the early years was Boris Yeltsin. He was a hero of that coup collapse in August 1991. No matter what you think about him today, he was a genuine hero in those events, and he then became a genuine, popular leader of Russia. And that was really important because at least to some extent, he had democratic instincts that changed over time.
How much did he change? That's a whole other discussion, but I think the fact that Yeltsin was there and that he could pretty smoothly take over leadership and have popular support, that was really important in that transition when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The optimism that was felt at the moment of collapse continued for some time under Yeltsin. And then it didn't. We saw that privatisation was a very corrupt process. The economy, which was already pretty bad, got much worse. These were things that he couldn't grapple with.
I think it was and should still be a source of pride for the Baltic republics – how they conducted themselves, how they pressed their demands, and always did it peacefully.
Over time in the 90s, a lot of people in Russia thought things got much worse. And so there began to be this longing for the Soviet Union, thinking things were a lot more stable in Soviet times. Of course, there wasn't much food in the grocery store. But there was some food. The pay checks weren't very big. But people knew that there would be a pay check. So there was a lot of uncertainty and anxiety as the 90s progressed. And then Putin came along…
You mentioned that what happened in the Baltic states, you expected something similar would happen in other former Soviet republics. But, of course, this prospect did not materialise in most places. Why do you think that was the case?
The Baltics were late to become part of the Soviet Union. There was, to some degree, the memory of the pre-Soviet life. And once some freedom was given to people by Gorbachev, the Baltics were the first to grab that freedom and start agitating for independence. It was very important that it proceeded peacefully.
I think it was and should still be a source of pride for the Baltic republics – how they conducted themselves, how they pressed their demands, and always did it peacefully, calling it the singing revolution. I went there many times and the singing was important. I didn't speak any of the local languages, but I could still feel the unity that the people felt.
So, when they got their independence, they were much clearer about the direction they wanted to go in. And the EU was very clear about wanting to welcome the Baltic republics. I think the EU also wanted to welcome some of the other Soviet republics, but they were more divided.
What you've seen in elections in places like Moldova or even Ukraine, sometimes there's been a pro-Russian government in power, and then they're out of power, and a much more pro-Western government comes along.
In the West, there was a sense of triumphalism that we won. And that was not the right approach to take if you wanted Russia to embrace democracy.
Politically, some of those countries haven't resolved if they want to look to Russia or Europe, and sometimes they're looking in one direction, and sometimes in another. That didn't happen in the Baltics because they were looking in one clear direction.
Talking about Russia, could we say that the way it conducts its foreign policy, including the aggression in Georgia, Ukraine, and other places, is an expression of disappointment over the collapse of the Soviet Union and a wish to restore its former power and influence?
Very much so. In the 90s, there were a lot of factors that made optimism disappear and made some people want to go back to the Soviet Union. Some of it was economic. But there was also this loss of pride. The Soviet Union was one of the two superpowers.
But in the West, there was a sense of triumphalism that we won. And that was not the right approach to take if you wanted Russia to embrace democracy. We should have said “come join us, let's talk” as opposed to “we won”.
Psychologically that had a big impact so that when Vladimir Putin came along and started talking about the tragedy of the Soviet collapse and how Russia was still a very powerful country, it really resonated with many people and made them want to follow him.
In recent weeks, we've seen growing tensions with Russia’s military build-up on the border with Ukraine, as well as demands for NATO that it doesn't expand eastwards. So, 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, could we say that the democratic project has failed and there is no hope that that will change anytime soon?
I wouldn't say it has failed. I've been watching world events long enough to know that things always change. Hey, the Soviet Union collapsed! A lot of people thought that could never happen. But it did.
Russia is obviously the biggest and, in many ways, the most important of the 15 former Soviet republics. But if you look at the full spectrum, you've got the Baltics going in one direction, and you've got several countries, like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia, where things are going back and forth. But there is political competition, there are pretty free and fair elections.
And then there are countries like Belarus and Russia. It's very depressing to see what's happening there. But Putin won't be there forever. Lukashenko won't be there forever. I don't know what will happen after they leave. But there will be some kind of change.
I think it's much more complicated because you have to look at 15 different countries. So, it's very hard to say if it was a failure or a success. It was something in between. It was a success in some places. I would say it's failing in some other places, but I'm not going to say it's a failure yet.
There is a popular saying among journalists that “journalism is the first draft of history”. And, of course, you had this chance to report on very important historical events at the end of the Cold War. Did you feel like you were witnessing history at the time?
I went to Lithuania on August 23, 1987, for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact anniversary. For the first time, there was a gathering of several hundred people. It was not broken up and people were not dragged off to prison. For me, that was the first moment of understanding that I was watching history unfold here.
That was very early on. I couldn't have told back then how everything was going to play out. But it was the first time that people in the Soviet Union were talking about independence. That was a very radical and dangerous thing to be talking about up to that point.
But the fact that they could come out and talk about it, talk to me, a foreign correspondent, with my microphone recording their interviews, meant that something was changing. And along the way from there, I could feel more and more change. And this was all historic change.
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