Seize the Moment by Richard Nixon

of confusing personal relations between leaders with political relations between great powers. Western policies toward Moscow should never have hinged so much on the fate of one man, even as remarkable a figure as Gorbachev. Fortunately for the Soviet people, the policy of backing Gorbachev “to the end,” as one policymaker urged, turned out to be as futile as it was foolish.
    Yeltsin has disproved Pushkin’s observation in the nineteenth century that rebellions in Russia tend to be senseless and violent. While the Russian president unquestionably hasthe eloquence and charisma to incite a crowd to violence, he took power through ballots, not bullets. In the aftermath of the coup, he has sought to advance democracy through parliament, not through purges. In speaking of the violence of revolution, Lenin often remarked that you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs. If a few bruises to Gorbachev’s ego were the cost of the peaceful triumph over the Soviet Communist system, it was a fair price to pay.
    The third fundamental error prevalent in the Western policy debate before the August revolution was that nationalism in the Soviet republics was an unmitigated evil threatening to unleash instability and violence. In fact, the new nationalists not only gave the democratic movement in the Soviet Union its initial momentum but also provided indispensable strategic depth to the forces resisting the coup. The only fully free elections in Soviet history have been conducted not by Gorbachev and the center but by democratic nationalists in Russia and other republics. Moreover, if Yeltsin and the reformers in Moscow had been the only obstacle to the attempted Stalinist restoration, the coup leaders could have found enough card-carrying killers within the Soviet security apparatus to prevail. It was the fact that the democratic resistance commanded the loyalty of tens of millions across all fifteen republics that caused the Communist system to suffer a fatal breakdown of its political will.
    In an age of nationalism, it was inevitable that loosening the Soviet Union’s totalitarian order would produce an outburst of nationalist feelings. Communism was premised on the idea of a worldwide workers’ revolution, in which the ideology transcended borders and nationalities. The failure of communism thus left the Soviet empire without a unifying ideology and gave the Soviet peoples an opportunity to reasserttheir national identities. Promoting democratic and market-oriented reforms while simultaneously fighting a rearguard battle to save the empire was impossible. The Soviet empire was put together and held together by force. The glue of the communist idea, which once enhanced unity, long ago lost its potency. Today, the new Soviet political order can remain intact only through the voluntary consent of the Soviet nations.
    Before the coup, some Soviet spokesmen tried to sell the line that the West should help Gorbachev hold his country together. Just as Lincoln waged the Civil War to preserve the United States, they argued, Gorbachev needed to take whatever steps were necessary, including the use of force, to preserve the Soviet Union. Their analogy—which, tragically, even some leading Western statesmen parroted—was fundamentally flawed. While the United States is a multinational society composed of free individuals, the Soviet Union was a multinational state composed of captive nations annexed against their will. Legislatures in each of the thirteen colonies ratified the U.S. Constitution before it came into force, while Lenin and Stalin ratified the incorporation of fourteen republics into the Soviet Union through the use of force. In addition, while the union in the American Civil War fought for the higher moral cause of abolishing slavery, the secessionists in the Soviet crisis struggled for the higher principle of abolishing communism, another form of slavery.
    The new sick man of Europe was