OPINION: Letter to the Editor – A Further Tribute to Peter Reddaway

Dear Bohdan Nahaylo! 

Thank you so much for your very thorough and moving “In Memoriam” devoted to our outstanding contemporary Peter Reddaway who passed away several weeks ago. He was both a scholar and a visionary.

I would like to share some previously unrevealed details regarding the considerable political and spiritual impact he had on events which transpired in the post-Soviet space during the critical years of 1989-1991.

All Soviet dissidents, as well as many of our friends in the West, were of course familiar with Andrei Amalric’s brilliant essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” (1970). All of us knew his famous verdict by heart:

“Just as the adoption of Christianity prolonged the existence of the Roman Empire for 300 years, so the adoption of communism extended the existence of the Russian empire for several decades.”

In 1989, as Amalric’s prophetic words became a reality before our very eyes, I came across a Peter Reddaway article analyzing this dramatic process. I was particularly impressed by one of his Amalric-esque observations on the nature of the Soviet empire.

“The Soviet incarnation of the Russian Empire,” argued Reddaway, “is radically different from the British or French empires. Its metropole is not Russia like France and Britain in case of their empires. It is (according to Amalric) an ideocratic quasi-religious empire and its metropole does not have a territorial nature. Its metropole are ideological institutions and security agencies imposed on every nation of the USSR, including Russia.

At that time, (1989-1911) I happened to be a kind of informal adviser to Boris Yeltsin. I organized his visit to Tbilisi after the April 9, 1989, massacre (the first attempt by the imperial metropole to crush the national aspirations of a Soviet republic by force).

On returning to Moscow, Yeltsin delivered one of his best speeches at the “Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR,” where he blamed Gorbachev and his imperial entourage directly: “I was there, I saw it with my own eyes. It was a crime. A crime committed by the Soviet state against its own people.”

The Amalric and Reddaway ideas that I shared with Boris Nikolaevich were wholeheartedly accepted by him. But that’s not all – he was inspired to mold a very organic and creative (and, as it turned out, hugely successful) model of political self-presentation.

From the spring of 1989, Yeltsin began positioning himself as a national leader, a rebel striving for the independence of his country – Russia – from the USSR, an old and decrepit ideocratic communist empire. From this political perspective, all the leaders of the national liberation movements in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic Republics were in essence becoming his brothers-in-arms.

In 1990 and 1991, imperial proponents attempted to stop the dissolution of the Soviet empire by force. Each time that happened, Boris Yeltsin, as President of the Russian Federation (elected in June 1990), used his considerable political clout to thwart them.

One of the more dramatic events along these lines transpired in January 1991when the KGB seized the Lithuanian TV Center (13 people died). The President of the Russian Federation immediately rushed to Vilnius, then to Tallinn, finally to Riga. There he co-signed, along with the leaders of all three Baltic Republics, treaties on the mutual recognition of each republic’s independence. His actions were then supported in Moscow by the largest ever (approximately one million participants) anti-communist, anti-imperial demonstration for Lithuanian independence.

The Peter Reddaway idea of mother-Russia rebelling against the Soviet empire alongside other republics was able to unify Russian society. The concept appealed both to the Eurocentric aspirations of liberals as well as to the patriotic feelings of those with a nationalist bent.

Yeltsin was extremely popular in those years. He was generally perceived as a genuinely Russian leader. On June 13, 1990, the Russian Parliament adopted “The Declaration of Independence for the Russian Federation” nearly unanimously.  Liberal and Nationalist deputies embraced each other after the vote. This was essentially a Declaration Dissolving the Empire. It certainly dissolved the Eurasian Empire which had existed for more than seven centuries, in various incarnations (Ulus Jochi, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union).

Students sometimes ask me who the author of this Declaration of Russian Independence was. I always reply:  Professor Peter Reddaway.

Thanks to his ideas, the process for the dissolution of the Soviet Empire (1989-1991) proceeded relatively smoothly. Think for a moment about a similar case: the break-up of that mini-empire in the south--Yugoslavia.

It took three decades for the imperial metropole to take revenge on Russia and unleash a crazy, doomed war, setting the stage for the 4th incarnation of a fallen Empire – Русский Мир.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.