Sunday, December 1, 2019

Lack of a Second Helsinki Final Act after 1989 Opened the Way to Disaster, Shtepa Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 29 – After 1989 and 1991, Western leaders assumed that the events of those two years in the direction of freedom and stability were “irreversible,” Vadim Shtepa says; and “they did not try to fix the changes in the world in a new international treaty like the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

            Had they done so, the editor of the Region.Expert portal argues, they could have put in place restraints like those of the original final act and limited the possibility that the changes of 1989 and 1991 would be challenged or even reversed (leht.postimees.ee/6837547/vadim-stepa-talvesoda-ja-berliini-muur-juubilaride-seosed; in Russian at region.expert/2anniversaries/).

            The 1975 final act was not perfect given that the Soviet system was preserved, “and Western countries, having signed this Act, in fact agreed to recognize the status quo of borders which arose after World War II. (In fact, the United States took exception to the occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.)

            But by promoting this agreement, the West succeeded in getting the Soviet authorities to declare that “the participating states will respect human rights and basic freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion and convictions.” 

            And while the Soviet regime certainly did not intend to live up to that principle, “it was fixed [by the Helsinki Final Act] as an international obligation of the USSR, and the Kremlin had to acknowledge its priority over its own laws about ‘the building of communism,’” Shtepa continues.

            As a result, “the dissident Helsinki Group which demanded the fulfillment of this obligation appeared in Moscow,” and activists in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states cited Helsinki in their struggles to achieve their ends.  Their demands played a key role in changing the political maps of the countries of the region in the late 1980s and early 1990s.


            But after those changes occurred, they were never fixed “iin a new international agreement” like the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. “’A new Helsinki’ was not then convened in which the new post-Soviet Russia would have had to recognize the new European borders and norms of international behavior.”

            And “precisely this,” Shtepa argues, “became one of the causes of [Russia’s] imperial restoration.”

            Unlike the other East European countries, “post-Soviet Russia ever more turned back to its imperial history,” as shown by the Chechen wars of the 1990s which resembled “the tsarist colonial policy in the Caucasus in the 19th century.” And then under Putin, Soviet elements were added to this Russian imperial tradition.

            These reflections about the need for a new Helsinki, Shtepa says, arise from the near simultaneous commemoration of two anniversaries this month, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 80th of the beginning of Stalin’s invasion of Finland, an event usually referred to as the Winter War.

            “It is interesting to recall that that war began not with the direct invasion of Soviet forces into Finland but with the establishment of a puppet ‘Finland Democratic Republic’ on the territory of the Karelian isthmus.”  That approach anticipates the hybrid wars that Putin has since launched elsewhere.

            “This tragic repetition of history appears as a direct consequence of the fact that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe did not insist that Russia recognize the fact that the world had changed. And therefore, unfortunately, it has changed again and in the opposite direction,” the Russian regionalist says.

            “For KGB Lieutenant Colonel Putin, who served in the GDR, the fall of the Berlin Wall became an historical defat. And therefore today, he is trying to turn history back to a time when the USSR considered itself ‘ruler of half of the world,’ if not still more.”  Had there been a Helsinki 2, Shtepa concludes, that would have been far less likely to have taken place.

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