Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 18 – A compelling argument
can be made that the Soviet Union died when it did and not much later as its
supporters hoped because Stalin violated his own understanding and annexed the
Baltic countries, western Ukraine, western Belarus and Bessarabia via his Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact with Hitler.
In
his draft theses on the national colonial question for the second congress of
the Komintern 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 (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/12/if-lenin-had-had-his-way-ussr-might.html).
Stalin
registered his objections to such expansions in two code cables, one of which
was published in Soviet times 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and one of which remained unpublished until after the demise of the USSR.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.
Had
Lenin lived, he might have expanded the borders of the USSR far further than
did Stalin and caused that country to collapse even sooner; but even Stalin acted
against his own understanding during World War II and brought within the USSR two
regions, the Baltic countries and western Ukraine, that became the trigger for
the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And they did so not because of US
non-recognition policy, as important and inspiring as it was, but because the
peoples of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine eventually were able to
behave in exactly the way Stalin had anticipated, challenging the Soviet order
and becoming a powerful model for others to do the same.
Now the Apache Dances telegram
channel has made a similar argument. A century from now, it says, Western
sanctions will be viewed as almost a distraction; but Russia’s occupation of
Crimea will be recalled as the turning point from when everything seemed
possible for Putin’s regime to when everyone sensed it was going to fail (charter97.org/ru/news/2019/3/17/327190/).
“The Russian Federation today is surprisingly
similar in that regard to the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s,” although much
weaker in many ways, the channel writes. Its leaders keep making the same mistakes,
and today as then, everyone “intuitively feels” that the entire structure is “doomed”
even if most people avoid talking about that in public.
There is, however, one significant
difference. At the end of Soviet times, officials wanted the regime to be
destroyed because they hoped that they and their heirs could acquire property
and wealth if it fell apart. Today’s leading cadres in contrast are in a panic about
change; but that won’t be enough to prevent it, only to make the coming shift more
difficult.
These officials may be able to keep
things together for a time, the channel argues, but the longer they do so after
Crimea, the more complete will be the collapse. Historians of the future will
take note of all that, and they will point to the annexation of Crimea as the occasion
when all this began.
“The USSR fell apart as a result of
a whole list of problems. Crimea too can become precisely that point of no
return” about which future historians will speak. And they will view the annexation of Crimea
not as a victory to be celebrated but as a curse that should have been avoided.
Stalin at least understood that at
one point, although later he acted against his understand and his
interests. It is far from clear whether
Putin understands what he has done and why ultimately it will blow up in his
face or those of his successors. It may be that the current Kremlin leader
doesn’t even care.
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