Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 30 – As Russians
and others approach the 25th anniversary of the Beloveshchaya
accords, many of them are certain to say that that agreement between the
presidents of the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belarus was the death knell for the USSR.
But in fact, Vadim Shtepa says, they didn’t “destroy” it because it had long
since ceased to exist.
The Russian, Ukrainian and
Belarusian leaders viewed this as just another effort by Gorbachev to hold on
to power, and they wanted to eliminate that chance by eliminating his
position. The Soviet president failed in
his efforts because “by virtue of his policy in 1991, he fell between Scylla
and Charybdis, between two fires.”
That is because, the regionalist
says, Gorbachev’s “previous project of a union of sovereign states as a federation, which was being prepared
for signature on August 20, was blocked by the putsch,” while his November
project for “the Union as a
confederation was cancelled by those who defeated the putschists.”
“The distinction between the
pre-August and the post-August projects of a new Union treaty,” Shtepa
continues, “consisted in the fact that the first anticipated a more centralized
system which gave critics the basis of calling it ‘a remake of the USSR.’” But
one aspect of it was especially threatening to the then-powers that be.
The pre-August version declared that
“all union posts must be occupied by persons delegated by the republics and not
by the former Soviet nomenklatura.” That change, Shtepa says, “can be
considered the ‘cadres’ cause of the putsch.”
The post-August variant, in
contrast, reduced the central powers to “an absolute minimum,” and although the
document didn’t include the term “subsidiarity,” that was what Gorbachev and
those who helped him prepare the document clearly were talking about. Indeed,
what that document would have put in place would have been something very like
the EU.
Moreover, Shtepa points out, “it is
interesting to note that in the draft of this Treaty was a direct citation to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and a requirement that its
signatories bring their legislation into line with the principles of that
document. That sets it apart from both the CIS Treaty and the Russian Federal
Treaty of 1992, neither of which mention it.
The CIS, he continues, “initially
was conceived as a coordinating institution like the European Union, but in
fact it turned out to be that only formally and could not prevent any conflicts
among the countries of the post-Soviet space or ensure that all its members
would follow democratic and legal norms.
Subsequent efforts to build “over
the CIS” via structures like “the Eurasian Union” did not have any real
results, “but only were evidence that a genuine post-imperial transformation of
the post-Soviet space had not occurred.”
And that means that up to now, “there has not arisen any common mutually
interested project for the future” given that “the actual ‘Russian-centricity’
of this space makes the role of other countries secondary and subordinate.”
That doesn’t mean that the
post-Soviet countries won’t cooperate in various ways: they are fated by
geography and history to do so, he says. The issue is “only about the model of
this cooperation and whether it is based on direct ties and possibilities which
a confederation gives or on the subordination to some archaic imperial
stereotypes.”
Unlike other post-Soviet states
which “began to construct new states, in part build on the experience of their independence
after 1917, Russia turned to its pre-revolutionary imperial history and
considered itself the direct successor of that.” But such a view gave rise to
thinking in categories of “the metropolitan center” and “the colonies” and made
real progress impossible.
“This was the historical paradox of
December 1991,” Shtepa argues. It seemed to many at the time that “Russia was
freeing itself from the Soviet past, but this ‘liberation’ led only to its
emersion in a still more distant past, with two-headed eagles, a government
role for the church, colonial wars and so on.”
Had the republics agreed to a
confederal arrangement, such a restoration of imperial thinking in Rusisa “would
have been impossible in principle.” Russia and its neighbors would have been “forced
to observe common legal norms as they are observed by EU countries, and the
wars with Georgia and Ukraine” would have been unthinkable.
And had that happened, it is likely
that “confederal thinking” would have spread across Russia, “significantly
raising the role of regional and local self-government” and eliminating the
drive for the reconstitution of any power vertical.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and
it appears to be true that “Russian political thought of those years was still
not ready for the format of a confederation.” But ideas like this one can
spread quickly, Shtepa concludes, noting that in 1989, Soviet police arrested
someone for carrying the Russian tricolor, but two years later, that flag had
become the official one of Russia.
