Violence Spreading across Post-Soviet Space Now ‘a Delayed Reaction’ to Demise of USSR, Yakunin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 15 – Thirty years ago, people around the world celebrated the fact that the disintegration of the USSR was so remarkably non-violent compared to the coming apart of other empires and assumed that Russia and its neighbors would be able to avoid the usual tragedies of the demise of empires, Vadim Yakunin argues.

            What has happened instead, the member of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation says, is a delay rather than an avoidance of violence. The conflicts to be seen across the former Soviet space were only put on hold because so many of the elites shared certain experiences and values (ahilla.ru/ujti-iz-obyatij-imperii/).

            According to Yakunin, the Soviet empire was “a threat not only and not so much to the world as to its own citizens” and that is why it came apart since as is well known “a house divided within itself will not stand.” Those divisions which tore it apart three decades ago are now resurfacing as the kind of conflicts entirely normal for the end of an empire.

            Russians need to recognize that and they also must recognize that Moscow can’t put the genie back in the bottle, the security affairs analyst says. “We don’t have the strength and resources” to do that; and trying to restore the past will only make the current situation worse by adding another element to the tension the demise of the USSR did not fully resolve.

            Russians can’t return to the past, and they shouldn’t want to because the Soviet system “claimed the lives of our most worthy citizens, those who had their own opinions, consciences, reason and faith,” Yakunin says in conclusion.