From the USSR‘s collapse to war in Ukraine, June 12 traces the making of a nation no longer content to be called post-Soviet
On June 12, 1990, the Congress of People’s Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian SFSR. Russia – then officially the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. It soon became a separate state as the USSR ceased to exist.
In Russia, the events of those days are still remembered with a complex mix of emotions.
Dissolution rarely makes anyone happy. For Russians, the largest ethnic group in the USSR, the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union became known as the “wild ‘90s.” This decade is also often referred to as “inglorious.” It was a time when an economic crisis comparable to a local version of the Great Depression was coupled with a precipitous rise in crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, and every conceivable social problem.
One aspect of the Soviet collapse particularly affected Russians. Millions of ethnic Russians found themselves outside the borders of the Russian Federation overnight. During the Soviet era, people had moved freely across the country for work, military service, or education, often without thinking of themselves as living abroad. After 1991, many suddenly became minorities in newly independent states. Their experiences varied greatly: in some places life changed little, while in others interethnic tensions, discrimination, or armed conflicts pushed people to leave their homes and start over elsewhere.
The former republics embarked on completely different paths. The elites, both in Russia and the other republics, were satisfied, since they could take unconditional leadership of the territories. But among ordinary people, views often diverged. A dozen hotspots flared up on the map, and in some other regions, like Crimea, the conflicts were simply postponed and erupted later. In fact, the current war in Ukraine is a war postponed to the 2020s, a war that could have begun in the 1990s; but back then, Ukraine simply didn’t have the resources for it.
One of the popular Russian internet memes shows the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, holding a telephone receiver. We see two pictures, in which his face changes from joyful to confused. The caption below the first picture reads, “Hello, descendants, are you on Mars already?”; and below the second, we see the caption, “..who is it you are fighting with?!”
So when we say that many people had mixed feelings about the events of June 12, 1990, clearly, they had good reason for it. The reality was quite apocalyptic.
However, 36 years have passed since then.
And we can now take a different look at some of those things.
The ‘90s have passed, as has the Soviet era. After the wild ‘90s, life returned to what could be called normalcy. And a lot of things happened in that period.
In 1998, when Russia was battered by a second terrible economic crisis in seven years, many felt that the Soviet system had been destroyed in vain. However, this too passed and was followed by a different period. Western observers may explain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s enduring popularity in various ways, but the simplest explanation is the most relevant one: prior to 2020 (i.e., the COVID pandemic and then the war in Ukraine) Russia lived in a way that made tomorrow seem better than yesterday. People felt confident that the future would be richer, calmer, more comfortable, more reliable. The new world turned a more humane face toward Russia.
While the ‘90s are remembered as “wild,”“troublesome,” and “inglorious,” the following decade has been dubbed the “booming ‘00s.” It’s true that the general rise in oil prices greatly contributed to prosperity; but oil prices rose throughout the world, and not everyone managed to convert this into increased prosperity for the population and the overall well-being of the country. The solutions weren’t always brilliant, but the country certainly established a much more coherent order than during the turbulent times of 1991-1999, and this order promised far greater prosperity and wealth than during the Soviet era.
In the 2000s, and even more so in the 2010s, the pressing social problems were brought under control. All the advantages provided by the liberal system of life became evident. The middle class grew; people acquired property, small and large businesses, became valued professionals, and were able to travel around the world.
The middle class grew, private property became commonplace, and international travel ceased to be a luxury. Russians increasingly compared their country with Europe and East Asia not from afar but through personal experience. In some areas, they eventually concluded that Russia had caught up with – or even surpassed – the standards they once admired.
The country could finally relax. People who felt nostalgic about the USSR still talked about a lack of scientific progress and the nation’s former military might, but expressed these feelings from the comfort of their privately-owned apartments and cars, or even from Europe, where in Soviet times they wouldn’t have been allowed entry.
The Russia of that time was not ideal; but for about 15-20 years the life of the average Russian was not that different from the life of the average European, and in some aspects it was even more convenient.
Personal experience means little when it comes to a country of 150 million people. But I’d still like to share a personal story. I grew up in the city of Perm, in Ural region, about 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow. In the ‘90s, all the clocks on public buildings in our city stopped showing the time. As a child, I thought that these clocks were purely decorative and were not supposed to show the time; but it’s just that growing up, I never saw them working. In the ‘00s the public clocks started working again. Sure, it may not be a very sophisticated argument, but it’s a vivid example that the country was really changing for the better.
People even began to wonder whether they really wanted the country to return to its Soviet borders. In the 1990s, such ideas often sounded attractive. But by the 2000s, many Russians had become less enthusiastic. Former Soviet republics were no longer seen as lost provinces waiting to come home. They were independent countries with their own interests, problems, and conflicts. Rebuilding the Soviet Union increasingly looked less like a dream and more like an enormous burden.
Relations with Ukraine turned into a separate tragedy. In the case of Ukraine, national boundaries were drawn without much attention to the people who lived there; in the border areas, everything was mixed to the point of confusion. The Russian city of Belgorod and the Ukrainian city of Kharkov were almost part of the same urban agglomeration; in Donbass, and even in Kharkov, the question of whether you were Russian or Ukrainian was almost always a matter of personal choice; it didn’t really matter because everyone was of mixed origin and the spoken language was Russian. However, until 2013, when a pro-Western revolution known as the Euromaidan took place in Ukraine, and then 2014, when pro-Russian uprisings shook Crimea and Donbass (at that time, Crimea became a part of Russia, but Donbass received only some minor support from Russia) – until that time, the general view of the problem was that the politicians were certainly scoundrels (who would argue with that?) but the peoples of Russia and Ukraine were fraternal. However, the events of 2014 created a huge rift; and in 2022, relations soured to such an extent that only time will be able to mend things, and someday we’ll have to “get to know each other again”…
…However, let’s come back to the main point. In the years following the collapse of the USSR, Russia learned to value itself as a modern nation. While this is often unclear to foreigners, Russia went through a long period of self-denial as a modern nation. People looked to the Soviet era as an example, and some (particularly intellectuals) – to the Russian Empire; as to the opposition intelligentsia, it criticized any version of Russia. In short, no one praised the modern Russia of 2005, 2010, or 2017. Yet, it was precisely this version of Russia that, historically, provided the most comfortable living conditions for the average person.
June 12, 1990, did not just open a new chapter in Russia’s history; it opened a whole new volume in its history. This was most often called the ‘post-Soviet’ era, which created a feeling of a certain secondary status in relation to the USSR. But time itself changes many things. Thirty-five years have passed since 1990. These years have included both the good and the bad. It was a turbulent era – even the part of it that seemed generally calm. The face of the country has changed several times during this period. The most recent and radical change occurred in 2022. No one knows what will happen when the war in Ukraine finally ends, and whether that will become another turning point. One thing is certain: Russia is no stranger to turbulent periods in its history.
