Russian Empire Now Set to Collapse as Soviet One Did in 1991, Suddenly, Unexpectedly and over Western Opposition, Pekar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 19 – What happened in the Soviet Union in August 1991 is instructive as far as what is likely to happen sometime soon in the Russian Federation, Valery Pekar says, a sudden and unexpected collapse largely opposed by the West that kept the demise of the Soviet empire limited and threatens to do the same in the future for the Russian Federation.

            The Ukrainian commentator says that even with the turmoil that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost had unleashed, on day before August 19, “the empire seemed strong, had a powerful nuclear arsenal and half the world’s countries as its satellites” and only five months earlier, a majority of its people voted to preserve the USSR.”

            But within days, the occupied Baltic countries were again independent; the union republics beginning with Ukraine declared independence; and just over four months later, the USSR was no more, Pekar says (uaportal.com/section-mixed/news-godovschina-raspada-sssr-osnovnyie-uroki-19-08-2024.html).

            But then, he continues, “the empire survived, primarily because of the West’s unwillingness to allow its complete collapse,” a conclusion he takes from Slovak researcher Yuraj Mesik and his book about the ongoing demise of the Russian Empire over the last century (2023: The Year the Russian Empire Died, the full text of which is available online and discussed at georgiatoday.ge/juraj-mesik-on-his-latest-book-2023-the-year-the-russian-empire-died/).

            According to Mesik and his views are supported by Pekar, “the West saved the Russian Empire three times in the twentieth century.” The third time was in 1991 when numerous autonomous republics within Russia declared sovereignty and two declared independence, only to have their aspirations blocked by Moscow, with which “the West sided.”

            Today, the two argue, “we have the next phase of the collapse of the empire,” a collapse that has been “slow but is irreversible,” driven not by the personalities and policies of this or that leader but by underlying and objective causes: economic problems, difficulties in governance, failure in war, the decline of ideology and the rise of identities, to name only a few.

            Those processes are even further advances today than they were in 1991 and so there is reason to hope that the coming collapse of the Russian Empire will be the last phase in this process. But for that to be true, the West needs to recognize what is going on, support it or at least not oppose its full flowering as it did 33 years ago, Pekar and Mesik suggest.