Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 3 – One of the murkier periods of the last years of the Soviet Union
involves what Boris Yeltsin appears to have been planning to do to counter
Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to weaken the president of the RSFSR by elevating
the status of the autonomous republics within it to that of the union republics,
Vadim Shtepa says.
Gorbachev’s
move is well-known and was clearly intended to weaken the RSFSR by allowing the
non-Russian republics not only to sign a new union treaty but to exit the
Russian republic by gaining the right that the union republics had on paper –
and later exercised – to leave the USSR as a whole.
Nearly
a decade ago, Russian nationalist commentator Aleksey Shiropayev said that
Yeltsin in February 1990 had told the Urals Polytechnic Institute that “within
the RSFSR after a referendum could be formed seven ethnic Russian republics:
Central Russia, North, South, Volga, Urals, Siberia, and the Far East” (shiropaev.livejournal.com/34371.html).
Shiropayev
cites as his source, Russkaya mysl,
February 16, 1990. He further specifies that this publication appeared in New
York. At that time, there was a Russkaya
mysl in Paris but the one in New York appeared only the next year, raising
the possibility that this whole case is apocryphal, Shtepa, the editor of Region.Expert says (region.expert/7republics).
That is especially
the case because Yeltsin’s remark was not reported in any Soviet news outlet,
something perhaps not surprising given Gorbachev’s power and the extreme
sensitivity of any discussion of creating new republics, especially ethnic
Russian ones, even at the time of glasnost.
But let us assume that Yeltsin
really said these words, Shtepa says. “Theoretically,” that makes sense in the
context of his struggle with Gorbachev. But what Yeltsin appears to have been
proposing would have led to the end of a single Russian republic just as surely
as what Gorbachev was. Indeed, it would have destroyed it far more
fundamentally.
After the USSR disintegrated and the
Russian Federation gained independence, Yeltsin forgot about this possibility.
Indeed, he moved in the opposite direction, going to war against Chechnya and
banning efforts to form a Urals Republic from below, fearful of moves he was prepared
to use to come to power.
Shtepa cites the words of US-based
Russian journalist who is from the Urals that Yeltsin acted as he did against
the Urals Republic and other such projects precisely because his entourage
feared that the formation of a multitude of ethnic Russian republics would lead
to the disintegration of Russia (region.expert/new-ural/).
That logic had a
curious outcome: it ensured that Yeltsin’s successor would be even more
centralist and hostile to such ideas; but at the same time, it opened the way
for the idea of “’seven Russian republics’” to take on a new life in the form
of the federal districts headed by presidential plenipotentiaries Vladimir
Putin created early on in his rule.
While Putin has no such intention,
these proto-republics could acquire new powers and new importance in a
post-Putin world and become the basis for a federation or confederation of Russian
and non-Russian republics, Shtepa concludes. Stranger things have happened as
Yeltsin’s reported words in 1990 show.
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