Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 7 – Despite the
Kremlin’s constant claims that the West was behind the destruction of the USSR,
Aleksey Portansky says, the facts are that Western countries did not want the
USSR to disintegrate and preferred instead that the union republics -- except
for the Baltic states -- agree to a renewed union under Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Moscow scholar – Portansky teaches
international affairs both at the Higher School of Economics and the Institute
of International Economics and World Relations (IMEMO) -- argues that to
believe that the West destroyed the USSR ignores the survival of that system in
the face of Hitler’s attack.
And in a commentary in “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” this week, Portansky says that he is inclined to share the views of
those who view Nikita Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956, an action that
ignored that while changes were needed, “the inhumanity and harshness of the
regime could be maintained only by a harsh leader” (ng.ru/ideas/2016-04-06/5_krah.html).
At the same time, he continues, the
Soviet economy “which had demonstrated such impressive mobilizational
capabilities during the war” turned out to be “absolutely unsuited” for competition
with the advanced economies of the West, especially given Moscow’s
over-commitment to its satellites.
These circumstances taken together “simply
could not fail to lead to what occurred at the end of 1991,” Portansky says.
And they, along with the detailed analysis provided by Yegor Gaidar, show that “the
Soviet Union destroyed itself because its economic model was not capable of
functioning over a long period of peace.”
“External factors” including Western
efforts to weaken the Soviet Union, he suggests, only “accelerated” the
collapse of the USSR. They did not cause it. Indeed, he writes, they were not
intended to do so.
“Among Western sovietologists and
Kremlinologists, only a handful predicted the collapse of the USSR, and their
opinion, as a rule, was not taken into account” by Western leaders. “Therefore, when in 1991, the disintegration
of the USSR suddenly appeared as a real scenario, Western leaders were more
inclined to feel a certain concern and even fear” given the Soviet Union’s
nuclear arsenal and the potential of its falling into the wrong hands.
That is why, Portansky says, then-US
President George H.W. Bush and other Western leaders “being realists and
pragmatists tried to support the efforts of Gorbachev to preserve the Soviet
Union with the help of a new union treaty” for all the republics except the
Baltic states whose inclusion into the USSR the US “never recognized.”
“In his well-known speech in Kyiv on
August 1, 1991, Bush extremely clearly spoke on behalf of that idea calling on
Ukraine and other Soviet republics to approve Gorbachev’s union treaty and
warning about the danger of suicidal nationalism.” Similar concerns about the
demise of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany were being expressed
in Europe.
Such reflections, Portansky says,
don’t fit into the current propaganda schema favored by Moscow. Indeed, they
undermine the latter, because “if one extrapolates the position of the West
toward the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact to today, it turns out that the
Wests in general did not rip Ukraine away from Russia” but rather acted in an
entirely different manner.
These considerations, the Moscow
scholar continues, “are not written for the defense of the West but rather to
introduce clarity” among Russia’s own citizens” about what was the real cause
of the disintegration of the USSR and to dissuade them from blaming those who
were in fact not responsible.
Obviously, the debate about 1991
will continue, Portansky says. “That is normal,” and it reflects an important
reality, one Deng Xiaoping expressed about the French Revolution. Even after two centuries, the Chinese leader
suggested, it is “too soon” to tell exactly why it happened and what it means.
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