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

A very good case in point is how the regions reacted – that is, the republics. There is an
Estonian named Igor Grazin, who was one of the key members of the Estonian delegation
to the Supreme Soviet, the last two. He was half-Estonian, half Russian, a personification
of the Sovietization of the Baltic States. Grazin is an extraordinary international lawyer,
he was first in his class in several universities and law school, including Moscow and
ended up here, in the United States as a professor at Notre Dame. He went back to
Estonia as a legislator of an independent republic. His position was similar to that of
many Ukrainians and certainly those of the Warsaw state members from Eastern Europe,
that the Gorbachevian approach of regional autonomy was the right one. That was their
view, and that was the view of the Bush administration. However, Gorbachev had to go
further beyond rhetoric in order to make it work, and that was to give increasing
autonomy to the new elements that were in the political equation. It wasn’t simply
independence for nationalist tribes, but it was an inclusion of intellectuals, of artists, of all
of these people who had been kept out, and they were now part of the equation, and they,
in fact, were what were in the last two Supreme Soviets. That was the new Soviet Union.
The reality was there.
The leadership of the Soviet state structure – the bureaucracy, the apparatus – could not
adjust to that new reality. They resisted the internal changes that were necessary to
conform to the new realities. The outcome of the clash between the new reality and the
old structure was that the new reality, being much larger and more able, won the day.
The last several years of perestroika is an extraordinarily interesting period that, I think,
needs to be understood by those who are interested in the new Russia. It is necessary to
know the condition of the former Soviet Union at that crossover point, and the issues that
were at play. It is important to know what the perestroika group represented and what
independence of the nationalities or the republics meant, what the ideological changes
were, how they might have been otherwise, had the Soviet state kept together. So 1991
was an extraordinarily heady, yeasty, bubbling, kind of turbulent period. It was a real
search for an optimum solution in which there were society-wide struggles over the
fundamental law, many particular subsidiary laws, structures of government, including
state and local governments, cultural institutions and city governments. The intensity of
the society-wide participation in the creation of the new state was remarkable and
inspiring, to me as an American.
Q: You were in Moscow still?
MILLER: Yes, I was, a good deal of the time, up until 1993. In that period while I was
living there, and I was very closely involved with the key players in the drama, from
Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the leaders in the Supreme Soviet and Moscow city government
and even the clergy.
Q: It always struck me that one of the major problems with the Soviets – I mean, this is
obvious – was the economic controls. Were things happening there?
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