ABSTRACT
Soviet history ended in a struggle between a decaying central state and incipient states rising in the republics. To borrow Hirschman's language, politics in the USSR moved from loyalty to voice to exit. 1 Nationalists and democrats, whose voices fell on increasingly unsympathetic ears in the central state, gradually abandoned Soviet politics in favor of republican politics. This change of political venue, which promised remedies unavailable from the Soviet state, created a dozen or more political communities arrayed against the center. By the beginning of the 1990s, the war of laws between the center and the republics had become a war of states.
