Why did the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia break up so easily when communism fell considering all those countries had been unified before the communist parties of the respective nation-states took over? For instance Russia had ruled some of the areas for centuries while both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia existed since 1918.
Yugoslavia was never anything but a bunch of warring factions held together by a strong authoritarian government. The second that was removed, the knives came out and everybody went at it. Ditto for the USSR. Czechoslovakia was a special case in that the two groups really didn’t hate each other much.
I’m currently reading about Russia in the last century, and my initial response to this thread is that nothing happens easily in that part of the world. 
Yeah, Czechoslovakia’s situation was different from Yugoslavia and the USSR. Czechoslovakia was composed of two friendly regions with cultural and economic differences that led to disagreements in their federal system.
Tito was the ONLY thing keeping Yugoslavia together. Once he died, the writing was on the wall.
If you consider Yugoslavia’s breakup easy, I’d hate to see a difficult breakup.
All three countries had nationality difficulties. For Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, it was almost since their inception.
Yugoslavia was a dream of intellectuals of a group who considered themselves “The Southern Slavs”. Before WWI, it was basically the Kingdom of Serbia (which fought for its independence from the Turks back in the 19th century), the area known as Macedonia which wasn’t really Serbian, but was controlled by the Turks. The Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs ousted the Turks in one war, then quickly had another to fight over the spoils. This happened only a few years before WWI.
The Croats were under the Kingdom of Austria and Hungary and what is now known as Bosnia was originally Turkish until the mid-19th century when Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece became independent. From that point in time, it was occupied by the Austrians in order to keep it out of Serb hands. The Serbs considered the territory theirs, and when Austria formally annexed Bosnia in 1909, Serbian nationalism reached a fevered pitch which culminated in the assassination of the Arch Duke of Austria which lead to WWI.
The state came together after WWI and was called “The State of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs”. Later, “The Kingdom of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes” which gives you the idea of whom was running the show.
Basically, the Serbs dominated the kingdom, the Croats, who thought of themselves as more civilized because they were under the European domination of the Austrians rather than the Turkish domination of the Ottoman Empire the Serbs were under, bristled at this second class treatment. For years, they insisted upon autonomy while the Serbs wanted a highly centralized monarchy.
In 1929, the king through a coup, claimed executive power, banned political parties, broke up the provinces based upon ethnicity into a bunch of smaller districts. All this was done in order to stem separatist tendencies. In 1934, the king was assassinated by a group of Macedonians separatists and fascist Croats. When Hitler came to power, the state was broken up. The Croat fascists ruled the region and killed all non-Croats. After WWII, Tito’s partisans took over the area and reformed Yugoslavia.
What held Yugoslavia together was Tito’s iron hand, his political skills, and the fear of Soviet domination that affected the rest of Eastern Europe. Tito’s Yugoslavia was one of the few communist states in Europe that wasn’t under Soviet domination. When Tito died, and the Soviet Union collapsed, the only factors holding Yugoslavia together disappeared. Serbian nationalism quickly grew, and the rest of the nation quickly split up into its ethnic pieces.
Czechoslovakia is rather more interesting. The Czechs and Slovaks have more in common that the Croats and the Serbs. But, again, it was a historical domination between two states that defined these two groups. The Slovaks were under Hungarian domination while the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were Austrian dominated. Later on, Hungary fell under Austrian domination, but the distinction remained between the two.
The Czechs thought of themselves as more cosmopolitan while the Slovaks thought of themselves as the heart of the region. Again, Czechoslovakia became a centrally run state (although quite democratic) which inflamed Slovakian nationalism. In 1928, Czechoslovakia divided itself into “4 lands”. (Two Czech dominated, one Slovakian dominated, and one Carpathian Ruthenian (forgot to mention them)). In 1938, the country became the Czecho-Slovak Republic. After the German invasion, the country broke apart. Hungary and the Soviet Union annexed what they wanted. The Slovaks became a German puppet state, and the Czechs areas became a German protectorate.
Again, after WWII, the nation was patched back together and held together by the Soviet army. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country again broke apart.
Russia is more interesting. During the 19th century, it was hit by both pana-slovism, which was a form of Slavic nationalism and separatist national movements in the various region. Many of the break away republics were actually only recently under the domination of the Russian empire. Georgia was an independent country until the early 19th century. The Armenians were under the Ottomans until after WWI. What is Azerbaijan was under Persian domination until early 19th century.THe Kazaks came under Russian domination mainly due to the Great Game between Britain and Russia for Indian domination. The Balkan states were under Swedish domination until they were annexed by Russia and had strong nationalistic tendencies. Remember they had a brief period of independence between WWI and WWII and their annexation by the Soviet Union was never officially recognized by the U.S.
Again, it was the Communist government’s iron hand that held the whole thing together. Once the Communist party weakened and the severe oppression ended, the country simply couldn’t hold together.
None of it was easy: it was decades in the making and crumbled from the inside out.
Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan, is a very interesting read on the various nationalities that made up Yugoslavia.
I have a old map of the Balkans, printed in Vienna in1944, that is quite interesting. Slovakia is there, but the Czech Republic seems to be part of Austria. Istria, half of Slovenia, and much of the present Croat coastline (in the Zadar region) is part if Italy, but Ragusa (Dubrovnik) is Croatia. A small part of present day Montenegro is also Italy (around Kotor). Kosovo is in Albania on this map. I really need to drag it out and give it a closer look one day.
There were some economic issues in Czechoslovakia as well. A lot of the state run industries were in the Slovak part: any sort of rational restructuring would hit the Slovaks harder. Simultaneously, some Slovaks resented their treatment by the Czechs: they said they wanted more respect. There was an election and economic reformers won in Prague (Czech). Rather than shove their plan down the throats of the Slovaks, they acceded to immediate Slovak independence.
Slovakia fell into tyranny, but democratized a couple of years later.
It’s a pretty clever strategy: if troublemakers want to secede, just let 'em.
You forgot Ruthenia again! After WWII, the Soviets lopped of this eastern tip of Czechoslovakia and made it part of the Ukraine. (One possible motivation was this gave the USSR a border with Hungary)
Basically, nations will split up if there are strong enough ethnic differences. Another example in British India, which split into India and Pakistan in 1947, and then split again when Bangladesh left Pakistan in 1971.
THE COMPLETE YES PRIME MINISTER
The Diaries of the Right Hon. James Hacker
[Bernard Woolley sent notes to both Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Richard Wharton, asking for a meeting on the subject of St Georges Island. Whartons letter in reply was kept by Sir Bernard Woolley in his private papers and given to us for this edition of the Hacker diaries Ed.]
If you had been writing this in the 1910s, you might well have asked why the Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway came apart so easily. Seems like a silly question now, doesn’t it? And those were democratic countries, without a strong totalitarian leader holding them together…
Unions between nations are always a balance between the forces driving them apart and the forces holding them together. When the balance tips too heavily in the direction of the forces driving them apart, the union cannot hold. In the cases of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the primary force holding them together was, well, force. The tsars had held the old Russian Empire together by force, the Communist Party held the USSR together by force. When the force was lifted, the center could not hold, and things fell apart. There was a little more holding Czechoslovakia together but not enough when the strains of rapid changes began to show.
An interesting side note: there was program on PBS a short while ago about the influence of the Beatles in the USSR and Russia. Many of the Russians interviewed actually credited The Beatles (and rock n’ roll in general) with being a big social factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet government.
Irreconcilable differences over lutefisk, I’m guessing?
good one bytergeist! have a lussekatter.
I recall reading Rex Stout’s The Black Mountain. Published in the early 1950’s it paints a fascinating picture of the ethnic groups in that region. Nero Wolfe was from Montenegro. The story introduces the reader to Albanians, Croats, Serbs, White Russians etc. Stout knew that region and it’s peoples very well.
Years later when Yugoslavia broke up, I already knew the various players and their centuries old hatred of each other. All from a book of fiction I had read in the 70’s.
You mean the Baltics. They seem to be confused rather commonly: just a few days ago someone posted here about the “war in the Baltics”.
Otherwise, no worries, your summary was great and very informative.
To this point, you can lay some of the blame on Stalin’s nationalities policy. Stalin made a big deal of administering Soviet peoples by nation, as he defined the term. This entailed establishing borders and local administration by nation, essentially defining the terms of the Soviet Union’s eventual dissolution. Without Stalin’s nationalities policy, you wouldn’t have had the ready-made post-Soviet borders you see today.
Stalin took a lot of flak from other communists at the time, who pointed out that nationhood was incompatible with Marxist thought and socialist ideals, and that the goal should instead to be the dissolution of these nationalist characteristics.
Given that this is Stalin we’re talking about, you can probably guess how that settled out.
Tito did much of the same thing, straining to give each of the Yugoslav states representation. Of course, the alternative would probably have led to civil war thirty or forty years earlier, so he probably didn’t have the choice in the matter that Stalin did.