1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

Q: Well, why don't we talk about '91 and the end of the Soviet Union and continue from
there.
***
Okay, today is the 5 th of July, 2004. Bill, back to 1991. As you watched this, can you tell
the events that unfolded, all of a sudden the dissolution of the Soviet empire?
MILLER: Yes. Sakharov had died in 1989 and the moral compass and the intellectual
basis for a continued Soviet Union was lost at that point. The possibilities of working out
a new democratic rationale for the Soviet Union was lost with the death of Sakharov.
Sakharov was the only one who could have crafted a new viable confederation, a looser
democratic arrangement of states within the territorial framework of the former Soviet
Union.
Q: Why would Sakharov? He was a nuclear physicist and all of that. When you think
about all these nationalists running around from the Ukraine and from the 'stans and all
of that, and particularly when you think about the Baltic states, Sakharov may have been
an important figure, but ...
MILLER: Well, the debate at that time centered on the issues of whether it was possible
to have a confederation on new principles, principles of democracy, human rights, decent
civic and civil behavior. I would say up until the time of his death, certainly, the debate
was running in favor of a loose confederation. I say this because the issue of
constitutions, the war of laws, as it was then called, were in structural terms that focused
on this issue in 1989 and 1990. And the place in which this crucial structural battle was
being waged was the Supreme Soviet, the last two Supreme Soviets of the Soviet Union,
which were extraordinary in their character because of the quality of the people who had
been elected to serve there. They were the best from all of the regions of the former
Soviet Union, from Russia, Ukraine and the other republics and regions. They were
heavily peopled by the intelligentsia, of course, most of whom were democrats. It was the
most distinguished group of Russian figures and Soviet figures that had ever been
assembled in a Supreme Soviet.
Q: What caused this? You had had these guys with the steel teeth and these apparatchiks
who had controlled everything. How did they get bypassed?
MILLER: We've already forgotten how powerful the reform movement was. It was a brief
period of two years when this remarkable group of Russians were looking at the
possibilities of a great new future. After all, the Soviet Union was a country that was
founded on dreams, dreams that were almost never realized, of course. These dreams and
hopes perhaps were never intended by the Stalinists and the leaders of the Communist
Party to be anything ore than temporary illusions. But in those years, there were dreams
and hopes that seemed to have meaning and possibility. People were coming to Moscow
from all over the Warsaw Pact region. I can remember very well Dubcek coming to
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