Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 27 – Ever more
Russians believe Lenin’s decision to divide the country into union republics
led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. That may be so, Aleksandr Khramchikhin says;
but wars since then have reflected the Bolshevik leadership’s division of
republics into two classes, union and autonomous.
In the current issue of Voyenno-Promyshlenny
kuryer, the deputy director of the Moscow Institute for Political and
Military Analysis says “the arbitrary delimitation of internal borders among
administrative-territorial units and the division of national formations into
two ‘classes’ could not fail to lead to numerous inter-ethnic conflicts” (vpk-news.ru/articles/54916).
“Many peoples of the ‘lesser’
category could not understand why they had fewer rights than peoples of ‘the
higher caste,’ the titular nations of the union republics,” Khramchikhin says. And
that led to conflicts, especially in the Caucasus, where autonomies within
Georgia and Azerbaijan sought to claim the rights that the nations of these two
former union republics had.
He describes the conflicts between
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, on the one hand, and Georgia, on the other, as well
as the one about Nagorno-Karabakh which has led to a war between Armenia and
Azerbaijan. And the Moscow analyst argues that “’the fighters against the
empire’ turned out to be much worse imperialists” than the Soviet state had
been.
The case of Karabakh is especially
instructive, Khramchikhin suggests, because it reflects the conflict between
two principles of international law, the right of nations to self-determination
which is the basis of the Armenian position, and the stability of
internationally recognized borders which Azerbaijan invokes.
In one respect this is funny, he
continues, “because the disintegration of the USSR completely violated the
principle of the inviolability of borders and allowed nations to realize their
right to self-determination. “It isn’t clear why the borders of former union
republics must be held inviolable” if those of the USSR were not.
“If the Union was so horrible, then
why was its artificial hierarchy of peoples sacred?”
At the same time, the Moscow analyst
says, “one must not forget that the disintegration of the USSR to an enormous
extent was the result of the ambitions of the first secretaries of the republic
committees of the CPSU who wanted to become presidents of countries” rather
than of national movements as such.
“A serious popular movement for
independence took place only in the Baltics, Western Ukraine and Georgia and to
a much lesser degree in Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
In the course of his essay,
Khramchikhin make three other arguments. First, he says that “it is extremely
instructive that all the conflicts and wars on the post-Soviet space at the end
of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s were not between the center and the
republics but among them or within them.”
But the heads of the union republics
were primarily concerned not about the independence of their countries but on
the preservation and enhancement of their own personal power.
Second, he argues that the widely
invoked notion that “all empires fall apart sooner or later” is a propaganda
claim rather than an objective reality. “Even the European colonial empires
could have survived to our days, possibly in
a somewhat smaller form, if the metropolitan centers had not destroyed
themselves in the course of two world wars.”
And third, Khramchikhin says that
while “the Russian Empire was somewhat larger than ‘the natural Russia,” the
Bolsheviks’ “artificial RSFSR “has turned out to be obviously smaller.” Moscow
needs to find a mid-range position, one that reflects what Russia should be as
in the minds of many in South Ossetia and Abhazia.
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