Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 14 – Since Russia
annexed Crimea in 2014, one of the most important questions has been whether or
not Moscow might repeat that scenario and absorb another territory of a
neighboring state. At a conference in Yalta last week, Valentina Goydenko, a
Ukrainian specialist at Moscow’s Institute for the CIS Countries answers in the
affirmative.
Her reasoning is extremely
problematic given her tendentious misreading of international law and her equally
tendentious insistence that it was Moscow rather than the republics that ended the
USSR and thus should have but didn’t follow Soviet legislation about border
changes in the case of any republic leaving that entity.
But because Goydenko’s position almost
certainly reflects the views of many in the Russian capital, it merits attention
because it helps to explain why some there may be quite prepared to identify
and annex another Crimea either in Ukraine or elsewhere despite all the problems
it has led to for Russia itself.
It is “no exaggeration,” Goydenko begins,
to say that “the return of Crimea to Russia became the most important event for
Russia at the start of the 21st century.” Had that not happened,
Crimea would have become another Donbass “fighting for its life” and right of
self-determination (materik.ru/rubric/detail.php?ID=92492).
The head of the CIS Countries Institute
directly asks whether “a repetition of the Crimean phenomenon is possible?” and
she answers by saying that Soviet history created many more such places with significant
ethnic Russian populations that nonetheless remained outside the RSFSR, many of
which like the Donbass and Transdniestria want to “return.”
“When the USSR was established, the
Center with a generous hand cut off historically territories with an ethnic Russian
population and joined them to the union republics as a means of strengthening
the Union and preventing possible separatism on the part of the national
republics,” she continues.
“But when in 1991 the initiator of the
disintegration of the Union became the Center itself, the former Russian
territories with Russian population became hostages of the national regimes of the
independent states.” And instead of addressing
the issue through serious talks, Moscow acted as if the divorce could take
place overnight.
The difficulties Great Britain is
facing over the departure from the European Union – “Brexit” – shows how
difficult it is to “consider the interests of all sides” in such separations
and how wrong Moscow was to assume otherwise in 1991. The republics insisted
that Soviet borders remain unchanged, and the Russian government “silently”
agreed.
As a result, Goydenko argues, “the
USSR law of April 3, 1990, ‘On the order of resolving questions connected with
the exit of a union republic from the USSR’ was violated by the political
elites of the new states.” That law specified
that “in a union republic having autonomous republics, oblasts or districts
within it must conduct a referendum in each of them separately.”
Further, the 1990 law continued, “in
a union republic on the territory of which are places of compact settlement of
national groups who form a majority of the population of that locality, the
results of such a referendum must be considered individually.” And it
established a transition period in which all this could happen before the union
republics could leave.
“But this was not done in a single
former republic of the USSR,” Goydenko says; “and the Kremlin again was silent.”
The result is that “the territory of
the former USSR is rich with potential conflicts which like sleeping volcanoes
may under specific conditions make themselves known with new force. The cause
of these conflicts is the legal voluntarism, the shifting of administrative borders
among republics for political expediency and the unjust and rapid division of the
USSR.”
“We see,” Goydenko says, “what a
reaction there has been to the attack on Russian identity, culture and the
Russian language in a number of republics of the former USSR” and the attempt
to make these republics “hostile to Russia” and defenders of “the interests of
the West and pro-Western national elites.”
She argues that “the acquisition of
independence and the return of Crimea into Russia from the point of view of
international law is absolutely well-founded” because “the history of
international relations knows many precedents for the realization of the right
of nations to self-determination.”
Goydenko points out that between
1945 and 2011, the UN admitted 138 countries, “the majority of which were
formed by means of the realization of their rights through secession,” a claim
that is true if and only if one views the demise of empires as being about secession
from the metropolitan state as the CIS expert clearly does.
This suggests that for her, the disintegration
of the Soviet Union was not the end of an empire but rather secession, a point
of view that tragically and unfortunately was reinforced by one Western leader who
as early as February 1992 declared he would not recognize “any secession from
secession” in the former USSR.
And it further suggests that the
Anschluss of Crimea is not the unique act most of its defenders Russian and
otherwise have suggested but rather part of a larger problem and thus a
precedent for future Moscow actions elsewhere.
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