Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 27 – Yesterday,
Georgy Tuka, Ukraine’s deputy minister for the affairs of the occupied
territories, said on 112 Ukraina TV that he “considers the return of Crimea in
the next three to five years impossible,” a declaration which some are certain
to denounce as pessimistic.
However painful it may be, Tuka
continued, it is important to face facts and the facts in this case are these: “Crimea
will again be [de facto as well as de jure] be part of Ukraine when “centrifugal
forces arise again out of the economic crisis” that country is already facing (rbc.ru/politics/26/11/2016/5839f0b69a794785c5f2115b?from=main).
“Now,” Turka said, “this may seem
drivel and fantastic, but one should look again at the news tapes of the mid-1990s,
at how things developed in Kaliningrad, in Tatarstan and in Bashkortostan … and
then Chechnya exploded. We all have seen this with our own eyes” and we should not
forget it.
And he continued by asserting that “if
the world community does not reduce its pressure on Russia, we will observe all
of this in the next five to ten years.”
Tuka’s argument deserves close
attention because it calls attention to something that many in Moscow and elsewhere
have forgotten about one precedent that many are now invoking about Ukraine’s Crimea
– the West’s consistent non-recognition of the Soviet occupation of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania.
Between the time that policy was
proclaimed in Washington in 1940 and the recovery of Baltic independence in
1991 passed 51 years, but at various points during that period, some in the Soviet
hierarchy worried that the Baltic aspirations for the recovery of their
legitimate independence would have an unhealthy influence on the non-Russian
republics.
Some even thought, especially in
Gorbachev’s time, that it would be better to allow the Baltic countries to go
their own way before their ideas spread to Ukraine and elsewhere. That was
certainly Academician Sakharov’s position, but it was shot down by Mikhail
Gorbachev who wanted to hold everything and as a result lost everything.
A more serious, if less well-known
example of fears in Moscow about a Baltic contagion occurred in the late 1940s
when Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, quietly explored the
idea of allowing the Baltic countries to go their own way as Soviet-controlled “peoples
republics” like the East Europeans outside of the USSR.
Beria went so far as to have his
agents contact Baltic officials to compose lists of who might be the senior
officials in such nominally independent countries, and he certainly believed
that allowing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to go their own way in this limited
sense would ease East-West tensions sufficiently to undercut American plans for
NATO.
Not surprisingly, when Beria was
purged, he was condemned for his supposed contacts with foreign intelligence
services, almost certainly untrue, and his support of non-Russian nationalists,
something that was very much the case in the Baltic states and elsewhere in the
Soviet Union.
At least some in Putin’s Moscow
today know this record and recognize the dangers involved in holding on to
Crimea, although Vladimir Putin may be confident that he can do there what
Stalin and his successors in the Baltic countries could not because of the
differences in demography and history.
But as conditions deteriorate in the
Russian Federation because of Western sanctions over Crime and the Donbass,
some in the Russian elites may conclude that they have an additional reason to
give back what Putin stole: Not only would that end sanctions and ease their
lives but it would put off for a time at least the disintegration of their
country.
To see why that is so, they need
look no further than to the late 1980s when Gorbachev and the last Soviet
government failed to recognize the way in which aspirations for freedom and justice
in one part of an empire can spread and prove fatal for that empire as a whole,
if not overnight then at least in the fullness of time.
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