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Autopsy on an Empire:
The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union

By Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Chapter One: How Did It Happen?

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Early in the evening of December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev walked across the hall from his Kremlin office and entered a room decorated with pecan-colored woodwork, light green damask wall coverings, and marquise curtains. Normally this room was used to receive visitors, but this time a television crew was waiting.

Gorbachev seated himself behind the table opposite the cameras, and when the Kremlin chimes had completed seven peals, began his final television address as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the past, most of his addresses had been taped in advance. This time, he went on the air live.

"I am ceasing my activity in the post of president of the USSR,"he announced, and though the meaning of his statement was clear, his choice of words seemed strange. They implied that the position of president in a state called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was still in existence. It would have been more accurate if he had declared that the collapse of the state he headed had eliminated the job he had previously held.

AUTOPSY ON AN EMPIRE

Following his twenty-minute statement to the nation, he walked back to his office and was surprised to be told that the Soviet flag had already been lowered from the Kremlin. He had assumed that this would happen later, maybe at the end of the year, not within minutes of his resignation. The Russian tricolor of white, blue, and red horizontal stripes was on hand to be hoisted in its place, but there was a problem. The color guard had trouble fitting it to the harness and fumbled frantically before making a secure attachment and raising it, in convulsive jerks, to the top of the mast.

Thus the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics passed into history precipitously, with hasty and careless preparation, but nonetheless conclusively.

The new flag marked the birth of a nation-state, but the transfer of authority was not yet complete. For centuries, Russian tsars had been crowned in the Uspensky Cathedral, located a few dozen paces from the Soviet president's office. The crown and scepter, symbols of imperial rule, had been held in custody in the Kremlin armory after Tsar Nicholas II was deposed and subsequently murdered. In 1991, however, the emblem of authority was more than symbolic. It was no less than the key to Soviet nuclear weaponry, which had a far greater destructive force than any Russian emperor could have imagined. The pomp and ceremony of a coronation were no longer necessary to underscore the ruler's power. Besides, the recipient, the president of Russia, was an impatient man.

Two days earlier, Presidents Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had agreed that they would meet in Gorbachev's office immediately after the resignation announcement to effect a transfer of the devices and codes which controlled the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

As with the flag replacement, the manner of the transfer failed to meet Gorbachev's expectations. When he returned to his office he was met not by Russian President Yeltsin but by the minister of defense. General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov explained that Yeltsin had been offended by some of the remarks in Gorbachev's farewell address and had refused to meet him as agreed. There was no point in arguing or prolonging the agony. Gorbachev directed that the briefcase with the infamous nuclear"button"be given to Shaposhnikov.

Other empires may have shattered under the pressure of war or revolution, but the Soviet Union expired quietly. Control over its nuclear weapons passed to a new master circuitously, almost casually. Within minutes, while most Americans were opening presents or preparing Christmas dinner, Russia replaced the Soviet Union as a nuclear power.(2)

The Russia that assumed control over all central Soviet institutions and would occupy the Soviet seat in the United Nations Security Council contained only slightly more than half the population of the previous Soviet Union. Henceforth, more than 140 million persons who were Soviet citizens when 1991 began would live in countries other than Russia. The three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - had been recognized as independent four months earlier. Now the other twelve former union republics were also on their own.

As soon as Gorbachev had finished his television address, David Chikvaidze, an assistant who had helped make the arrangements with the television crew, returned to his office on the floor below and sank into his chair. He had known what was coming, of course, but now it had happened. For two hours he stared at the wail deep in contemplation about the uncertain future.

Born and reared in Georgia, he was a brilliant young Soviet diplomat. Because of his cheery personality, his willingness to be helpful, and his perfect American English, he had become a favorite of Washingtonians during his earlier tour at the Soviet Embassy. Now he discovered that he no longer knew who he was. A proud and patriotic Georgian, he had served the Soviet government with loyalty and distinction. He regarded both Tbilisi and Moscow as home. He and his wife made sure their son spoke Georgian first and only then learned other languages.

Until that moment, this had been no problem. He was Georgian and he was Soviet, and there was no contradiction. Would he now be forced to choose? He was happy to be Georgian, but he also considered himself part of a larger country, and that country no longer existed. What now? Should he, could he, stay in Moscow and become a Russian citizen? Should he go home to Tbilisi and hope to find a job there? Should he try to stay on m Moscow as a"foreigner"None of the alternatives was what he would have freely chosen.

My situation was totally different from David Chikvaidze's, but I too reacted to the news with shock and lengthy contemplation. My wife, Rebecca, and I spent December 25 that year in two places. Having celebrated Christmas away from home for many years, we wanted to see as much of our family as we could. So for breakfast we went to our daughter's house in Alexandria, Virginia, where her family, two of our sons, and my brother had gathered. Then, after exchanging gifts, we flew to Fort Lauderdale to join my mother and our youngest son, who had come from Tennessee.

Christmas is an important day for our family, descended from southern Protestant stock. Nevertheless, my thoughts that day frequently strayed from religion and family. I knew that a decisive moment was approaching in the Soviet Union. I had seen Gorbachev in Moscow just a week earlier, when I had found him seemingly reconciled to the inevitable but not fully comprehending the forces about to engulf him. I knew Yeltsin and the other Russian leaders well and considered many of them personal friends. I also knew their opponents and had friends among them too. But most of all, there were literally hundreds of Soviet citizens, from hairdressers and domestic workers to poets, professors, bankers, and legislators, about whom we cared, and cared deeply. We had lived among them for years and shared, at least vicariously, their sorrows and hopes; they seemed part of our extended family. They, like David Chikvaidze, would bear the impact of what happened in Moscow that day.

When we had finished dinner and opened the last gifts, I retired to an upstairs bedroom and plugged my laptop computer into the telephone jack to check on the news reports from Moscow. They would give me more details than television. This is how I learned about Gorbachev's resignation speech and the events in Moscow, including the new flag that had been raised over the Kremlin.

The enormity of what had happened soon sank in. I had expected the outcome, but I also realized that, with all my acquaintance with the society and its politicians and my own participation in some of these events, I could not explain with confidence just how it had happened. After all, the Soviet Union had possessed the largest military machine ever assembled on this planet by a single political authority. It had been governed by an apparently monolithic party with historically unparalleled instruments of compulsion. Tentacles of its elaborate bureaucracy had reached into every crevice of its subjects' lives. Its ideology had purported to reveal the secret of harnessing the very tides of history. How could such a state simply have destroyed itself?

If pressed for an answer, I could have said glibly that the system was inherently faulty, doomed to failure sooner or later; its leaders had been guilty of the most monstrous crimes against humanity, and history has a way of settling scores; the economic system was irrational and could not compete in the modern world; the ideology had lost its power to compel belief; the attempt to use military force to establish hegemony and to build"prestige"had been self-defeating - and on and on, for there were scores of plausible statements, each of which might well contain part of an answer but none of which would really explain how and why it had happened when it did.

I realized that while I probably knew as much about the political developments in Moscow during the past seven years as anyone not actually in the Soviet leadership, I could not give an honest answer to the questions the Soviet collapse raised Why did it happen at the end of 1991, rather than years later - or months earlier? What were the decisive events that had brought it about? Had a different outcome ever been possible? Could the Soviet system have modified itself so as to last for decades to come?

These questions nagged. If I could not answer them. who could? Historians, maybe, but only after Soviet archives were opened. the participants had written their memoirs, and several generations of scholars had sifted and analyzed the records. Many details would doubtless come to light in the future. Whoever pronounced judgment hastily was bound to be wrong on many points.

But even with their fuller information, future historians would hardly agree on the meaning of the changes. After all, we were still debating the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire - to say nothing of the origins of the First World War Such fateful convulsions have always produced a variety of interpretations.

Definitive answers might be impossible, but the questions remained important; if only to help us deal with the successor states.

But it was not such utilitarian considerations that nagged most insistently; here was a mystery I felt I should understand but couldn't. Any mystery is a challenge, but one so crucial to my own life and work was more than a challenge: solving it was an obligation. How could I make sense of my own life, devoted as it was to understanding the Soviet Union, if I could not understand the Soviet collapse? If the Soviet Union had been merely the final post in my Foreign Service career, I might not have felt the same, but I had spent most of my adult life directly or indirectly dealing with the Soviet Union.

Many persons take a keen interest in the country of their ancestors, and that is natural. But I had no such excuse for what turned out to be a lifelong love affair with Russian culture. The first Matlocks came to North America in the seventeenth century from Derbyshire, England. They were Quakers who emigrated for the sake of religious freedom. When I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1929, the family could no longer remember how long we had been there, and my grandparents were not sure whether the family had originally been English or Scotch-Irish. They were no longer Quakers, though we had relatives who were.

As I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, I had little direct contact with foreign cultures. Even so, I was fascinated by foreign languages and tried to learn some Russian on my own. But there was no one in Greensboro to tell me how to pronounce the letters, so I could not even memorize the alphabet.

Russian was not taught at Duke University when I entered in 1946, but my interest in the language increased when I read, not in class but on my own, Constance Garnett's translation of Crime and Punishment and other works by Dostoyevsky. It stirred my thoughts, imagination, and emotions as no other book had.

Later, when Duke added Russian to its curriculum, I registered for the first class. Rebecca and I were married before returning to Duke for our final year, and we both took courses in Russian history and literature. Duke at that time offered few such courses, but the quality of the teaching made up for the limited curriculum. John Curtiss, who taught the course on history, could convey the nuances of Russian historical development without skewing the evidence to fit some particular theory or national bias. In his first full-time teaching job, Tom Winner taught Russian language and literature with spellbinding gusto and introduced me to more than Russia. His dissertation was on Kazakh folklore, and I helped him proofread the final text. In this way I discovered the Kazakhs' tragic fate under Soviet colonialism, a topic that would eventually become one of my preoccupations.

By 1950, Rebecca and I had decided to go to graduate school and prepare for college teaching or the Foreign Service - or maybe both. After finishing the Russian Institute at Columbia University and teaching Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College, I entered the Foreign Service in 1956.

My first assignment was writing reports on internal Soviet developments. I was disappointed since I had hoped to go overseas, but the assignment turned out to be fortunate. I had a wider academic background in Soviet affairs than the more senior diplomats assigned to the office, and my work there brought a quick promotion and a favorable reputation with other Soviet specialists in the Service. After two years in Austria and one in Germany, I finally arrived at the American Embassy in Moscow in September 1961, thirteen years after I had registered for my first Russian course at Duke.

The Khrushchev"thaw"was just beginning, and some small cracks in the wall isolating Soviet citizens from foreign diplomats had appeared. Rebecca and I were determined to get outside the diplomatic ghetto and mix with Soviet citizens, at least to the degree we could without endangering them. We tried every approach we could think of to meet Russians, but usually after an encounter on a train or in a restaurant, say, the contact would terminate, sometimes with apologies that another meeting was just not convenient, more often without explanation Obviously the KGB had warned our acquaintances not to see us.

Only two things worked. First, we began inviting American and other foreign students from Soviet universities (exchanges were just beginning) to come to our apartment for informal evenings, and as we got to know them we encouraged them to brine their Soviet friends. The Soviet students who came were usually either police informers or political non-conformists who subsequently became dissidents. The latter normally could spot the former, and we quickly learned to exclude the more obvious ringers

We also learned that Soviet cultural figures eligible lo visit to the United States would be allowed to meet us before and after the visit and prominent Americans who came to Moscow as part of an exchange would be allowed to meet their Soviet counterparts. Thus. we were able to meet and entertain writers and scholars. particularly during Robert Frost's visit in 1962

By the time we left Moscow after a two-year tour, we had gotten to know several dozen people, including writers, artists. and theater directors, many of whom became friends for life. I had traveled to fourteen of the fifteen Soviet republics, and our family had grown from three children to five, one born in a Moscow hospital.

We spent the next seven years in Africa, but not because the State Department willfully disregarded area and language expertise. I had requested assignment to Africa because I wanted to witness the formation of new nations out of the colonial empires which were disbanding. I understood that the Soviet Union itself was an empire and sensed that what happened in Africa in the 1960S might someday be relevant to the Soviet Union itself. Furthermore, the Soviet rulers were certain to try to take advantage of the crumbling British and French empires. It would be interesting to witness the Soviet efforts to influence the fledgling nations.

We were sent first to Ghana, then Zanzibar, then mainland Tanzania, at a time when Soviet influence seemed to be growing. I made a point of getting to know most of the Soviet citizens sent out to those countries as diplomats, journalists, or teachers. Most of them, I found, were there to escape, if only for a time, the controls on their lives in the Soviet Union. Most were unhappy, and their relationship with the Africans was not close. I reported to Washington that their presence was more likely to be an inoculation against communism than a source of ideological infection.

In the 1970S I resumed working with the Soviet Union directly, first as director of Soviet affairs in the State Department in Washington, then as deputy chief of mission at our embassy in Moscow. It was the period of detente, and relations were easier than they had been in the 1960S. But they were by no means free. The KGB still tried to inhibit continuing contacts between us and Soviet citizens, and only some of the bravest (such as the poet Andrei Voznesensky and his novelist wife, Zoya Boguslavskaya) were willing to see us regularly. Nevertheless, our circle of acquaintances widened steadily before we returned to the United States in 1978.

In 1981 we were sent to Moscow again, this time for me to take charge of the embassy following President Ronald Reagan's inauguration. We stayed for most of the year, until Reagan's nominee, Arthur Hartman, arrived in the fall. This was a period of great tension in U.S.-Soviet relations: the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan a year before, the Senate had refused to ratify the treaty to limit strategic arms (SALT II), and polemics had become strident. Still we found that a remarkable number of friends seemed pleased to see us.

After two years in Prague as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, I was transferred to Washington to work on the National Security Council staffin Washington, responsible for relations with Europe and Canada, but with particular emphasis on the Soviet Union. I was asked to help devise a strategy to help lower tensions and reduce arms. When I was appointed, reporter Lou Cannon, who had never met me, wrote in The Washington Post that I was a"militant hard-liner."

The description was only partly true. I was indeed a hard-liner when it came to confronting the outrages of the Soviet imperial system and the false ideology of communism, which had been cynically imposed on a great people. I felt that we had no alternative but to demonstrate our determination and ability to thwart Soviet aggression. But I was not a hard-liner when it came to the Russian people and the other nations under the Soviet yoke. I thought their true interests were in harmony with ours, that they wanted to live in peace and freedom, and use their inherent creativity without the suffocating strictures of an omnipresent political machine. With a different political system, I was sure they would be friendly.

Unlike ideologues on both sides of the East-West divide, I believed that the Soviet Union could change and that we could encourage that change. President Reagan came to believe the same. The policy he approved combined firmness with a willingness to negotiate, and it placed respect for human rights at the top of the agenda. Just before Christmas 1986, the president asked me to go to Moscow as ambassador when Arthur Hartman s tour ended. I now had an opportunity to implement the policy I had helped formulate.

When I arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1987 for my fourth tour of duty, perestroika was still in its infancy. The new Soviet leadership was dissatisfied with the economy and wanted change but there was little evidence that reform would go beyond the earlier superficial"campaigns"that had flared periodically. only to disappear without a trace. No matter how radical policy pronouncements might become, little would change if they were not put into practice. This meant that if I was to understand what was happening I had to keep in touch with developments outside Moscow. I resolved to travel to both Russian and non-Russian areas of the Soviet Union as frequently as embassy duties would permit. I had already visited all but one of the union republics, but now I wanted to go to all I was permitted to visit (our own policy placed the Baltic states out of bounds for me) not JUst once but as often as possible.

This travel was strenuous. It was also immensely rewarding. Not only was it instructive, it gave me a chance to give an accurate account of the United States' position. The Soviet regime had justified its military buildup (never described in precise terms, lest the public balk at its enormous cost) to its own people as a response to U.S. threats: why not undercut this lie by showing us as the interested and caring nation we in fact are?

I was also aware that the various nationalities within the Soviet Union had proud and ancient traditions. They needed reassurance that we had not forgotten them. Many non-Russians were afraid of losing their ethnic identity within a homogeneous Soviet culture, Russian in language and Leninist in ideology. Members of these nationalities feared they would be forgotten by the world at large.

My trip in I963 to the three Baltic states with embassy colleague Jack Perry, who later became our ambassador to Bulgaria, had made a deep impression. We had contrived as often as possible to elude the smothering embrace of the official tourist organization to roam the streets and go into theaters and restaurants, meeting as many ordinary people as we could and talking at length to those willing to risk talking to us. One theme had recurred so frequently in these conversations that it had become the leitmotif of the trip:"Please, don't think of us as Russians. We are not Russians. We are Estonians [or Latvians or Lithuanians, depending on the location]."

We had known this, of course, but now we understood the anxiety behind the assertion. The iron curtain had throttled the flow of accurate information in both directions. The Baltic states, like the other"national republics"claimed by Moscow, were increasingly considered by foreigners to be part of"Soviet Russia."

I did not, of course, pretend that all Americans knew what was going on within the borders of the Soviet Union. But I knew that the sympathy and understanding I showed for groups whose human rights had been infringed represented a tradition as old as our country.

As my interest in the Soviet Union deepened, I tried to learn as much as possible of its languages and cultures. Although I normally used Russian, when I was in non-Russian areas I always tried to use the local language as well. I wanted to show that I did know that the nation I was visiting was distinctive, that I respected its national identity, and that my interest and respect were sufficient for me to go to the trouble to learn enough of their language to address them, if only briefly, in it.

Our people at the Voice of America went out of their way to help me prepare speeches in Georgian, Armenian, and Uzbek, while friends in Moscow helped out with Ukrainian, Belarusian Moldavian, Kazakh, and Chechen.

Each trip was a voyage of discovery, even in places I had already visited. As glasnost expanded, people became more frank. Taboo subjects became the center of conversation, and many people who could not have met us in the past were now allowed, and sometimes even encouraged, to talk to us.

Frequently Rebecca traveled not only with me but also on her own, as she was often invited to display her photographs and the tapestries she designed and made.

Our attention opened doors and hearts. People could sense that we were interested in them, and they responded with an interest in us and in America. We were candid with them, and they reciprocated. Consequently, we could sense mood changes and new attitudes as they evolved .

In communicating with Soviet citizens. we received crucial assistance from the Soviet media Once virtually closed to foreign diplomats, particularly Americans, Soviet newspapers. magazines. and television and radio stations began to interview us, and by 1990 hardly a day passed that we were not mentioned in the media.

In Moscow, we found to our pleasant surprise that we were becoming a part of Soviet society. Visitors, mostly Soviet, gathered at our residence, Spaso House, a dozen or more times a week for concerts, films, art exhibits, luncheons, and dinners - and later for discussions of political and economic problems When a new parliament was formed, the members frequently discussed issues at the dining tables in Spaso House before they reached the floor for formal debate.

As Soviet society relaxed and the tensions between our countries subsided, Soviet political leaders dealt with us more openly discussing their plans, their hopes, eventually even seeking advice, particularly on democratic institutions and practices. With the help of the energetic diplomats in our embassy we got to know virtually all the prominent politicians in Moscow and many of the most influential ones in regions outside the capital.

In 1989, President Bush asked me to extend my normal tour of duty. I agreed, but by the sprint of 1991 I felt the time had come for me to turn to other things. The four years l had been in the Soviet Union as ambasssador had been exhilarating but draining. I had witnessed the end of the cold war. Communism was clearly on its way out in the Soviet Union, which itself would either be transformed along more democratic lines or disintegrate. The tasks ahead for U.S. policy makers would differ greatly from those of the past.

It was time for a new hand at the helm of our embassy in Moscow and for me to leave public service and resume the life of writing and teaching I had started before I had entered the Foreign Service. In April, I told President Bush that I wished to leave Moscow that summer. Eventually, we set the date of August II for our departure.

A week after I left Moscow, a cabal of his own associates confronted Gorbachev, then on vacation in the Crimea, with a demand that he transfer power to them. When he refused, the final act in the drama of the Soviet Union's collapse began. I watched these events from the United States, but I knew the people who were making news, and it was easy to imagine the situation. In spirit, I stood with my Russian friends to protect their White House and was beside Boris Yeltsin when he climbed on a tank to shout defiance at the plotters.

As the Soviet Union passed into history, I wondered what an obituary might say. If a person of dubious character had died, I would say"nil nisi bonum"and eschew an objective appraisal. But a political system is not a person. The death of the Soviet empire was no cause for mourning. Stalin had murdered more of his own citizens than the 20 million who perished as the result of Hitler's invasion and genocide. Millions of persons innocent of the slightest wrongdoing had been killed. Land had been seized from peasants and livestock from herders, crippling agriculture and creating famine. Successful farmers had been either executed or shipped to near-certain death in concentration camps for no other reason than that they had been successful and productive and thus bad examples for a collectivist society. Islands of autonomy in a totalitarian sea!

Whole nations had been deported on nothing more than the suspicion that they might have been disloyal or - in the case of the Koreans and Volga Germans - that they might someday be tempted to be disloyal.

The Soviet state had provided its functionaries with multiple instruments of coercion but no effective barrier to their arbitrary misuse. The only constraints had been those of practicality and calculations of political or economic utility.

Yes, it was an evil empire. But was this empire identical with the state that disappeared on December 25, 1991? Had not the old Soviet empire - the evil one - been so undermined that it had already given way in August 1991, with the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?

The treaty of association under negotiation subsequently aimed at a different state structure. Therefore, some - including many elected members of the Soviet parliament - would say that the choice in December 1991 was not between the Soviet empire and a group of independent republics but between a voluntary, democratic union and a congeries of independent states, many of them authoritarian or worse.

As I tried to compose the obituary in my mind, I realized that another question had arisen that I could not answer with confidence. What precisely was the state that had collapsed? The Soviet Union of old, which would have few mourners, or something else, which might have many?

One question did seem clear to me. That is, evil as the Soviet empire was, it was not an empire of evil people. The distribution of good and bad traits among Russians and other nations of the erstwhile Soviet Union was probably much like that among people of other nationalities and societies.

The Soviet system could bring out the worst in people but could not prevent remarkable acts of courage and nobility. While the Soviet system became an instrument of inhumanity in the hands of its leaders, it could not destroy a sense of justice and morality or the yearning for freedom. Few persons had the courage of Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to confront the Communist rulers head on - though the number that did was remarkable, given the terrible risks. But even for the majority, who refused to run great personal risks for possibly quixotic goals, tacit resistance, an unspoken refusal to conform, was far more common than active support for the regime.

When the possibility of change became real. most. though not all of the people who brought the Soviet system down had been participants in that system and beneficiaries of it, some at high levels. The questions posed earlier rise again: How could this be? How could a ruling party, with no effective opposition, destroy itself? How could a powerful military machine, without losing a major war disintegrate?

Before sleep overcame me, in the early hours of December 26, 1991 resolved to try to find the answers by retracing and re-examining the events that preceded the collapse. Before I proceed, I should disclose my biases.

When I went to Moscow as ambassador, my first duty was to represent my own country and its interests. These interests conflicted with much in the Soviet system and the policies of the Soviet government at that time, but they did not conflict with the real interests of the Soviet peoples. Our goal was to prevent Soviet aggression and remove the causes, not just the symptoms, of East-West tension. A government in the Soviet Union that would be responsible to its own people and protect their rights was the best guarantee we could have of a peaceful future. I thought, and hoped, that the totalitarian Soviet empire would eventually pass from the world scene, but I did not see this as an immediate prospect.

From the late 1980s I was often asked by Soviet journalists if I had ever believed that the momentous changes we were witnessing would occur. I usually replied,"Yes, of course,"and, after pausing to observe my questioner's surprise, added,"And I hoped my grandson would live to see them."

Throughout the perestroika period, I was intellectually and emotionally a supporter of democratic change in the Soviet Union. Such change was certainly in my country's interest, but it was even more in the interest of Soviet citizens. I thought it was important that the Baltic states be set free, since this was what their people wanted and since their annexation had violated international law and acceptable standards of international conduct. I did not feel that a Soviet Union based on consent rather than force would be a threat to the United States. Furthermore, I knew that a voluntary union could provide many benefits for its constituent parts.

With all my sympathy for the various nations trapped within the Soviet empire, I never rejected the idea of a union in and of itself. Independence is not necessarily the only way to realize a nation's potential and preserve its freedom. A voluntary union of limited powers, with democratic institutions and the checks and balances essential to an effective democracy, could have provided freedom and a framework for more effective economic development. This was as clear to me as it was to Soviet President Gorbachev, who toward the end defended the virtues of a voluntary union - at least in the abstract.

I felt, however, that such a union could come about only if the old state structure was replaced by a new one built by elected leaders at every geographical level. If the various nations that made up the Soviet Union were not convinced that a new union was in their interest, no amount of pounding by the old"Center"or cheerleading from abroad could forge a viable federation.

For me, the touchstone was democracy, defined not merely as free elections but also as a working system of government with limited powers, subject to the rule of law, that protects civil and minority rights. As an American, I had no doubt that such a country, whether a union of several nations or a smaller nation-state, would be a friend and a potential partner. An autocratic or totalitarian state, whether large or small, whether of the"left"or of the"right,"would be a problem, for its own people most directly, but for us all eventually.

A goal is one thing; getting there is something else. I knew I had no sure answers, and I doubted anyone else did. We were all. directly or vicariously, experimenting People change Societies change But never totally. Features of the past never disappear, either from individuals or from society. The most difficult and uncertain task in this maelstrom of change was to assess the strength of the new features as compared with the old. It was hard enough to do with individuals; it was much more difficult as one surveyed a whole nation, a whole society a whole empire.

I also felt that the United States would benefit if a democratic Soviet Union, or a democratic Russia, was prosperous. I never agreed with those few observers who argued that it was in our interest to keep Russia weak. I doubted that we could do so even if we wished, but I also thought we would be stupid to wish for a weak Russia. If democracy could triumph, a strong Russia would be good for all of us. If democracy did not triumph, Russia would suffer from many of the weaknesses that had destroyed the Soviet Union. In any event, it was a choice Russians would make. Americans could not decide for them.

I do not aspire to write a definitive history of the Soviet collapse - that is manifestly impossible this close to the event even if a history can ever be definitive. My account will also not try to trace in detail all features of perestroika or to chronicle U.S.-Soviet relations during that period. My focus will be on those events that are germane to a few fundamental questions: How did it happen that the Soviet empire collapsed when it did and as it did? What were the key events? Who, if anyone, bears the principal responsibility? Was it the Soviet empire that expired on December 25, 1991, or an embryonic successor? Was a democratic union ever a feasible possibility? And finally, are there lessons here for the future, or for the rest of the world?

My account will give scant attention to events and issues that do not bear on these questions, even though they may be important in other contexts. It will be an autopsy of the collapsed empire, not a biography. Since an autopsy is meant to fix the cause of death, the pathologist need not concern himself with every important facet of the deceased's life.

But even an autopsy should define what the patient's state of health was before the fatal illness ran its course or the fatal trauma took its toll. What can we say about the empire that fell to pieces in 1991? What held it together, and what sort of nations were in its thrall?