Fully a decade has passed since Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the liberalizing policies that dramatically altered the fate of Soviet communism and led to the demise of the world's last great empire. The implementation of perestroika and glasnost unintentionally catalyzed forces that overwhelmed and destroyed the very system Gorbachev sought to repair, in what came to resemble a historically irresistible chain reaction. What propelled these events faster and farther than any Western policy-planning scenarios had ever conjured were the aspirations of subjugated nations – Balts, Ukrainians, and others – toward national self-determination and independence from Moscow. Speaking of another time and place, R. F. Foster, the eminent historian of modern Ireland, once observed that “belief in deliverance” remained distinct in the Irish mind through “the different layers of the palimpsest of historical experience,” a belief described by a fellow Irishman as the idea of “freedom as an end in itself and of independent government … as the solution of all ills.” Much the same spirit took hold throughout the USSR.

The initial reluctance of some US and European policy-makers to come to grips with the breakup of the Soviet Union (recall President George Bush's trip to Kiev on the eve of the August 1991 putsch, when he urged Ukrainians to avoid nationalist excesses and sign Gorbachev's proposed Union treaty) eventually ceded to the realization that national aspirations, far from threatening regional stability, strongly favored the democratic transformation of the communist bloc and were a logical extension of the nation-building processes that have characterized twentieth-century Europe.