Russia Now Much More Imperial, Unitary and Anti-Western than USSR was Under Gorbachev, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 29 – In advance of Mikhail Gorbachev’s 89^th birthday and in recognition of what he tried to do, Vadim Shtepa, editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal, is republishing online the chapter of his book on the possibilities of Russia to cease being an empire (region.expert/gorby/ from ridero.ru/books/vozmozhna_li_rossiya_posle_imperii/).

            The Russian regionalist begins his survey of the events at the end of Soviet times and the beginning of the post-Soviet Russian state by observing that “it is an historical paradox that the present-day post-Soviet RF is a much more imperial, unitary and ideologically anti-Western state that was the USSR of Gorbachev’s era.”

            Among the points Shtepa makes, three are especially important to this day:

            First, those who launched the coup in August 1991 only to fail, nonetheless succeeded within the Russian Federation as a whole. “As before, there is here no treaty-based state. Rather all the very same imperial ‘vertical’ was completely reestablished” and these two things were carried out by the man who defeated the attempted putsch in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin.

            That course of events happened because Gorbachev, desirous of avoiding any conflict between “communist imperialists” of the nomenklatura and “democratic anti-imperialists” of the streets, waited too long to seek a new union treaty. Had he done so in 1988, he might have succeeded. By waiting, he did see the democrats grow in strength but he radicalized both.

            Second, Shtepa argues, “in 1990-1991, two centers of power – union and Russian – were de facto formed in Moscow.” The usual view is that the imperialist siloviki were in the first, and the anti-imperialists were in the second; but the situation in reality was very much more complicated than that.

            On September 6, 1991, the USSR State Council recognized the independence of the three Baltic republics.” At that time, the State Council consisted of the heads of the union republics who were acting in a confederal way.  But “parallel with this, Russian President Yeltsin was occupying himself with ‘strengthening the territorial integrity of the RSFSR.”

            He refused to recognize Chechnya’s declaration of independence or Tatarstan’s moves to greater autonomy. Thus, Shtepa writes, “while striving for the liquidation of the Union, Yeltsin on the other hand was reviving the imperial-unitary structure of Russia.” It is therefore appropriate that the symbol of the two-headed eagle appeared at exactly that time.

            “While recognizing the sovereignty of other union republics, the Russian power at the same time imposed a harsh unitarism within its own country. If in 1990, Yeltsin called on Russian autonomies ‘to take as much sovereignty as you can swallow,’ only a year later, he pursued exactly the opposite policy.”

            That has led to the situation Russia faces today. “If all 16 (at that time) autonomous republics within the RSFSR had acquired the status of union republics which would have opened for them the prospect to become independent states after the collapse of the USSR, the neo-imperial evolution of Russia would have been impossible.”

            And third, Shtepa writes, “after the August 1991 coup, all the Soviet nomenklatura massively ‘swore allegiance’ to Yeltsin.” Yeltsin himself took an action which symbolized this continuity: he had his office opened in the former building of the CPSU Central Committee on Staraya Square.

            Moreover, under Yeltsin, “the KGB building was not transformed into a museum of soviet terror as happened for example in Vilnius but remained the headquarters of the main Russian special service. [And] Yeltsin rejected the proposal of former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky to carry out the lustration of the Soviet nomenklatura.”

            All this meant that the paradox of the times continued: “In December 1991,, what took place was not ‘the destruction of the Soviet empire’ (as this is sometimes even today represented) but the failure of the confederal project and the birth of a new empire on the basis of the RSFSR.”

            “It is extremely indicative,” Shtepa says, that in the 1922 Federative Treaty, which Yeltsin signed with the heads of the subjects of the RF that already there were no references to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, democracy there wasn’t called ‘a common fundamental principle,’ and ‘a lasting peace’ was not proclaimed as the main international goal.”