‘Disintegration of Soviet Union Began Long Before Perestroika and Efforts to Restore It Began Long Before It Fell Apart,’ Shusharin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 25 – The new wave of attention to the 1990s can only be welcomed, Dmitry Shusharin says; but so far, it has failed to lead many to understand that “the disintegration of the Soviet Union began long before perestroika and efforts to restore it began long before it fell apart” and have continued with little interruption since that time.

            The Russian commentator now living in Germany says that the disintegration of the USSR began and Moscow’s efforts to counter it began at least in 1986 when Moscow inserted an ethnic Russian as party leader there and the people of that republic took to the streets to protest (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66A22B9B847CA).

            No one should have been surprised by this pattern, Shusharin suggests, because it was a repetition or better continuation of what happened in what Russians call “the civil war” at the dawn of Bolshevik times. That conflict in fact was in fact “the first war for the restoration and much more cruel than under the autocracy unification of the empire.”

            “The war of the Red Army in Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Poland and the Trans-Caucasus was not a civil war,” he continues. “This was the aggression of the RSFSR against new national states and the war in Central Asia … was a direct continuation of the wars of Skobelev and the suppression of the Turkestan uprising of 1916.”

            According to Shusharin, what happened at the end of Gorbachev’s times and afterwards was an unchanged continuation of this, an effort by the Russians to suppress and Russify all the non-Russians and rule them ever more tightly from Moscow. Consequently, what has happened since February 2022 should not have surprised anyone.

            Another aspect of this must be recognized as well, Shusharin says. Moscow’s “aggressive policy toward Georgia and Moldova, the support of separatists there, and the non-recognition of the sovereignty of the former union republics all took place already in 1992” and not as a result of the coming to power of Vladimir Putin.

            Yeltsin accomplished something remarkable in destroying the USSR, but neither he nor those around him “proposed any new concept for the development of Russia and Russians in this new state. They didn’t pay any attention to those issues at all,” and neither did almost all of the intellectual elite.

            “As a result,” Shusharin says, “policies toward the former Soviet republics began to be formulated not according to the national interests of Russia which were never defined but by the claims of various business groups dominated by the security agencies,” and that has led to a repetition of the history of the early Soviet period.

            At a time when “no one in Russia was seeking to put in place a full-fledged democratic state,” the allies of the state that did emerge “were not the builders of new states but the leaders of criminal separatist formations within them.” And that has continued to this day, Shusharin argues.

            Putin “hasn’t come up with anything new if one looks back to that past and more distantly: he has simply “continued what Yeltsin began in in Abkhazia, Transnistria, Tajikistan and elsewhere in the early 1990s.” Tragically, “the world is adapting to this” as Moscow seeks to reintegrate “piece by piece” while the world “hopes to buy off” the anything but new empire.