1990 RSFSR Sovereignty Declaration Response to Moves by Baltic Republics, Moldova and Georgia, Baburin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 14 – A proposal by Sergey Baburin to move the Russian capital from Moscow to some small city in the central part of Russia is likely to attract more attention, but his words about the RSFSR Supreme Soviet’s 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty in which he worked as one of the drafters are far more significant.

            The Russian nationalist politician argues that “the Declaration of the State Sovereignty of the RSFSR,” the anniversary of which is now marked as the Day of Russia, “was our respond to corresponding documents about sovereignty or about independence by separatists in the Baltic republics, Moldova and Georgia” (business-gazeta.ru/article/704511).

            Only the naïve or those who wish to shift the blame to others can blame what the RSFSR did as a primary cause of the disintegration of the USSR because that declaration “presupposed the preservation of the Russian Federation as a legal state within a renewed USSR” rather than having the RSFSR go its own way, Baburin says.

            In preparing the draft of the declaration, Baburin says, he “insisted that the state power and sovereignty of Russia belong not to the ethnic Russian and other peoples but to a single multi-national people of the Russian Federation. For me,” he continues, “such a formulation was very important.”

            That is because had we “divided sovereignty within the country into Russian, Tatar, Mordvin, Yakut and so one parts, then the destroyers of the USSR would have been able to destroy the Russian Federation as well,” a danger that would remain if people don’t understand how such talk threatens the country. 

            Most of Baburin’s other comments in the course of a long interview as typical of those of Russian nationalists and imperialists like himself. But one stands out as very different. Instead of defending Moscow as the capital of the country, he urges that the Russian capital be shifted to the geographic center of the country and not to a major city but to a small one “like Washington.”

            Indeed, he says, the capital should ultimately become what is now a small city of perhaps no more than 40,000 which could be developed and expanded but which would not have the problems of corruption and imagery that Moscow represents both objectively and subjectively in the minds of many.