Annexations Can have Unanticipated and Even Fatal Consequences, Lukashenka Reminds Putin

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 1 – Alyaksandr Lukashenka says that 98 percent of Belarusians would vote against having their country become part of Russia. Given that, he suggests that Russia should join Belarus, the latest move in the dance the Belarusian leader and Vladimir Putin have been engaged in.

            The Belarusian president’s remarks on these two points come in the course of a meeting he had with representatives of the Belarusian people and media outlets (tvr.by/news/prezident/aleksandr_lukashenko_vstrechaetsya_s_predstavitelyami_obshchestvennosti_i_smi/).

            His statement that Belarusians are almost unanimously opposed to having their country absorbed by Russia is both true and welcome as yet another signal that however much the two countries may integrate, there will be strong resistance in Belarus to having this process ever reach the point where their country and probably their nation would be put at risk.

            But Lukashenka’s suggestion that Russia should join Belarus, an idea most in Russia and the West will view as ludicrous, is in fact an even more important negotiating point in this process. Many in Russia would like to have the Soviet-style social and economic system Lukashenka has maintained, and he is reminding Putin of that fact.

            What the Belarusian leader’s words on this point mean, if translated from his archly worded comment, is that if Moscow moves to incorporate Belarus, it will not only face serious opposition from the Belarusians but also unwittingly add supprt to those inside Russia now who are against Putin’s dismantling of state supports for the population.

            Annexations can thus be extremely dangerous, Lukashenka is suggesting. And while he does not mention it, one of the most important causes of the demise of the USSR was Stalin’s decision to annex the Baltic countries, Western Belarus and Ukraine, and portions of Romania into Moldova.

            Those were precisely the places where anti-Moscow national movements emerged 40 years later to challenge and then overthrow the Soviet Union.  And by making the comment he has, Lukashenka is reminding Putin of this: Stalin violated his own convictions at the ultimate cost to Moscow and its empire.

            The late Soviet dictator believed non-Russians who had not lived under the Empire would not tolerate being part of a Russian-dominated state for long. As a result, he did not move to include within the USSR countries that had gone socialist in Eastern Europe, Asia or Latin America (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/12/if-lenin-had-had-his-way-ussr-might.html).

Stalin violated his principled position on this point only when he occupied Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and parts of what is now Moldova and, when after a gap of 25 years, re-imposed Russian rule in the Baltic countries. And it was these violations that contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Had Stalin moved the USSR’s borders further outward, the Soviet Union likely would have exploded even earlier; but if it had survived in the form Lenin wanted, it would not be a Russian-dominated system but rather one in which the majority of its population would be speaking Chinese, certainly something that would give even the most pro-Soviet Russians pause.

The fight between Lenin and Stalin took place largely out of public view.  In his draft theses on the national colonial question for the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, Lenin outlined his view that as the revolution spread, so too should the borders of the Soviet state, an idea that the Red Army’s invasion of Poland may have made appear plausible.

Stalin registered his objections in two code cables, one of which was published in Soviet times but only once and by someone who did not die in his sleep as a result as a footnote in the third edition of Lenin’s collected works and one of which remained otherwise unpublished until after the demise of the USSR.

In both, Stalin made clear that national identities would remain powerful even after a socialist revolution and that trying to impose Moscow’s control on those who had never experienced Russian rule before would be a mistake.  He said that the Poles would never accept Soviet RUSSIAN rule and that the same would be true elsewhere.

In the event, Lenin was incapacitated and died not long after the USSR was formed, and Stalin was able to put his ideas into practice, ideas that gave birth to a world socialist system in which there were many states not one with the kind of diversity that he had no intention of allowing within the Soviet Union.