Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 1 – On this, the
23rd anniversary of the day on which Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly
to become an independent state, a Marxist analyst is asking whether the
Republic of Tatarstan, now an autonomous formation within the Russian
Federation, is on its way to becoming a second Ukraine or a second Scotland.
In an essay on Forum-MSK.org, Sergey
Gupalo says that December 1, 1991, was a key date in the disintegration of the
USSR but notes that “the process of the collapse of the USSR did not begin or
end then.” It had roots in earlier Soviet policies, and it is continuing thanks
to those of the Kremlin now (forum-msk.org/material/region/10601961.html).
According to Gupalo who writes
regularly about ethnic issues from a Marxist perspective, the collapse of the USSR
began with Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th CPSU Congress in
1956. That both undermined the authority of “bureaucratic socialism” and buried
“delayed action mines under the idea of socialism in general.”
In 1991, part of those mines
exploded and with them the USSR and its “so-called sphere of geopolitical influence.”
But not all the mines went off then, and some of them are about to explode now
because of the state capitalist approach of Vladimir Putin which is not in a
position to deal with the sharpening of ethnic issues in the capitalist world.
The “highly developed multi-national
countries of Western Europe,” Gupalo says, are simultaneously pursuing
supra-national integration projects and facing sub-national challenges from
separatists be they Scotland in Great Britain, Catalonia and Basque in Spain,
and “in prospect” Bavaria in Germany.
Putin is in the same position as his
Western counterparts: he is pursuing supra-national integration projects even
as he faces increasing separatist challenges from within, challenges that he is
simply not able to cope with in an adequate way, according to the analyst.
“Tatarstan,” Gupalo writes, “is one
of the knotty points of the approaching objective disintegration of the part of
the USSR still legally regarded as not having fallen apart – the Russian
Federation.”
In the early 1990s, he points out, that
Middle Volga republic “almost became one of the variants of Chechnya.” There
was a massive growth of Tatar nationalism, and there were not especially clever
efforts by the federal center “to cut the Gordian know of problems in that
region by force.”
Fortunately, he continues, cooler
heads prevailed and things did not get out of hand. But now, “given the growth
in the inadequacy of various parts” of the elite, the situation in Tatarstan
and elsewhere is approaching again a revolutionary one. The only thing missing
so far is the subjective pre-condition of effective leadership in the
non-Russian areas.
But there is every reason to think
it will emerge given the economic crisis in which the republics as well as the
Russian Federation as a whole find themselves and given the inability of Moscow
under Putin to take the kind of decisions that would prevent or at least delay
another round of disintegration.
Gupalo suggests that only “the
development of the forces of a new socialism” will be able to prevent Tatarstan
from following the path of Ukraine, but he provides no indication of where such
“forces” might come from and thus no reason to expect that the challenge Kazan
presents Moscow is going to do anything but grow.
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