CIS Today ‘an Anachronism that Must Be Reformed, Disappear, or have Russia as Its Only Member,’ Dikusar Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 18 – Initially, many analysts suggested that the CIS was either a space for the peaceful divorce of the former Soviet republic or a carcass around which a new imperial state would form. Now, more than 30 years later, Konstantin Dikusar says, it has become “an anachronism that must be reformed, disappear or have Russia as its only member.”

    The Moscow commentator says that Russia has only itself to blame for the fact that one after another the original CIS members have either left or are thinking about leaving because Moscow, having said all will be equal, has in Soviet fashion made itself “the elder brother” once again (politexpert.org/material.php?id=6800E14178F56).

    Instead of allowing countries like Moldova and Armenia to combine membership in the CIS with membership in other international groupings, he continues, Moscow insists that they can’t be members of the CIS if they join others – and so over time, both these countries and all the other former Soviet republics save Russia will leave.  

    “The problems with the CIS come not only from the history of the establishment of this organization at the time of the disintegration of the USSR, but also from that element of domineering which Russia has in the CIS.” If initially it was the last perestroika project, now it is being used by Moscow in exactly the same way the August 1991 putschists wanted to act.

    Indeed, according to Dikusar, what Putin “did in Georgia and Chechnya and is now doing in Ukraine is precisely the policy that the putschists conceived in relation to the states that at that time were seizing their independence from under the treads of Russian tanks.” But the CIS can’t take place without a new perestroika in Russia.

    Otherwise, it will simply ceases to exist or have Russia as its only member.