Near total uncertainty prevails in the Soviet Union in the wake of the abortive coup last week. It is difficult to say what will happen there tomorrow. The Soviet Communist Party stands beheaded and immobilised. Mikhail Gorbachov himself has threatened to quit as President if he cannot ensure the survival of the Union in some form. This is no empty threat. Gorbachov has reason to despair when so unlikely a candidate for secession as Byelo-Russia declares itself independent.
It speaks for the pace and complexity of events in the Soviet Union that just as he was celebrating his victory over the coup leaders, on the one hand, and Gorbachov, on the other, Yeltsin had to issue decrees to ensure that non-Russian units in the Russian federation itself did not challenge its integrity and to acknowledge that millions of Russians living outside the Russian federation would need to be protected through changes in boundaries in case republics such as the Ukraine and Khazakhstan in fact secede.
One fact is, however, self-evident amidst all this confusion. Disintegration of the Soviet Union will spell enormous and endless trouble not only for the peoples in it but also for the whole world. It is inconceivable either that the breakup can be a peaceful and orderly affair, or that the world can be at peace when the heartland is in great turmoil.
The enormous territories known as the Soviet Union since 1917, and the Russian empire earlier, are without doubt the world’s heartland. There can be no question that turmoil there will spill over into the rest of the world. The region could be isolated before modem means of communication and transport had converted the world into one vast global village. That is no longer possible. Globalisation is now a reality.
Time is past for self-congratulation on the part of the West and anti-communists elsewhere. They have won a great victory, or, to put it more accurately, they have been handed down a great victory. But the price can turn out to be intolerably high if they are not quick enough to recognise that in the eclipse of Soviet power and disintegration of the Union is implicit the threat of the rise of a power vacuum of unprecedented proportions which can suck in the rest of us.
Similarly, the time is past for bitter regret and recrimination on the part of the faithful. It is pointless for them to continue to argue whether or not Lenin had stood Marxism on its head, or whether or not Stalin had distorted and perverted Marxism-Leninism, or whether or not Gorbachov or Yeltsin has acted as a saboteur. Communism, as we have known it, is dead. Even China has had to allow the market to operate and to court foreign capital.
The need of the hour clearly is to try to avoid the catastrophe which disintegration of the Soviet Union must bring about. This by itself is not an issue which can admit of partisanship. For it is only if the Soviet Union survives in some form can it make sense to argue what policies it should pursue.
The catastrophe may well occur. It may well turn out that passions and forces beyond human control have got released in the Soviet Union and that they have acquired an irresistible momentum of their own. The world may in reality have no choice but to cope as best it can with developments as they occur. The point, however, is that the rest of us must do what we can to avoid disintegration of the Soviet Union. All of us have a stake in its survival.
This ‘we’ doubtless means above all the United States and its West European allies. They alone have the power to influence the course of events to whatever extent it is still feasible. They have thrown away much of the opportunity that came their way by failing to recognise that the Soviet Union could well disintegrate and that it disintegration would also mean end of an orderly world for a long, long time.
They remained prisoners of the cold war and its rhetoric after it had become unnecessary. Even the violent upheaval in Yugoslavia did not alert them to the dangers ahead in the Soviet Union. They revelled when they should have been anxious.
The United States and Britain in particular linked aid to the Soviet Union with reforms favoured by them. They sent Gorbachov back from the meeting of the G-7 in London in July empty-handed and thus diminished. Clearly it did not occur to them that survival of the Soviet Union in one piece too was at stake and that in the new context of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and its near paralysis in Moscow, they could have no interest in the Union’s break-up.
That apart, however, the power of the West should not be exaggerated. One limiting factor has been mentioned. Passions among ethnic groups may become unmanageable, especially in view of the collapse of the Communist Party which was still the only agency capable at least of making the attempt to hold the Union together.
The second limiting factor is the pressure of public opinion in the West which has grown up on the self-serving diet of the right of self-determination in the wake of the end of Western empires in the fifties and sixties. This pressure accounts primarily for the recognition of the unilaterally declared independence of the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia by the European Community and its individual members. Statesmanship demanded that the recognition be withheld for the time-being. Western European leaders did not demonstrate the capacity for that kind of statesmanship. They have failed to take an overall view of the situation in the Soviet Union.
Hopefully, they would draw the line there. Their own interests demand that they do not encourage secessionism in any way and that they give leaders in the Soviet Union sufficient time to try and work out some kind of agreement which can avoid outright disintegration, bitter intra-ethnic conflicts within and among the republics, the rise of rival armed forces and all that this can imply.
The bloody clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Lithuania’s declaration that Russians will be allowed to stay on only if they carry Russian passports, and moves towards formation of independent armies in various republics provide the world enough warning of what awaits it if the Soviet Union falls apart.
It bears repetition that the Soviet Union contains over 30,000 of nuclear weapons and huge amounts of other weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological ones. Surely there is little warrant for the belief that all these weapons will come under the control of the Russian federation in case the Soviet state disappears and that other republics will not seek to gain control of some of them if only to keep the Great Russians suitably terrorised.
It perhaps lay within the power of leaders in the Soviet Union to avoid a total break-up before the coup. Though Yeltsin’s demagogic populism, backed by the West, had vastly complicated Gorbachov’s task in this regard, a new treaty of union had in fact been drawn up with the agreement of nine republics, including the Ukraine, the second most important republic after the Russian federation, and Khazakhstan, and was due to be signed on August 20. The coup a day earlier put paid to all that and much else.
The treaty contained any number of gaping holes. It could not be otherwise since it is just not possible to undo the intimate connections forged over centuries, especially in the last 70 years of Communist rule when an integrated economy was built on a planned basis. These gaps would almost certainly have led to interminable wrangles and no one can possibly say whether it would, in the final analysis, have worked. But there was a chance, however slender, that the process of give and take would have taken hold and proved effective over a period of time.
The coup leaders killed that little hope. They undermined the position of Gorbachov and they ensured the destruction of the Communist Party. And Yeltsin, objectively speaking (this Stalinist phrase is appropriate here), has acted as their ally. He failed to realise that Gorbachov’s position, diminished by the coup led by his friend and nominees, needed to be shored up and not further weak weakened, and that the Communist Party needed to be phased out and not destroyed at one stroke. He humiliated Gorbachov and virtually decreed dissolution of an already demoralised Communist Party.
The little hope of the pre-coup period has somehow to be revived. By refusing to accept declarations of independence on the part of non-Baltic republics, the West can possibly do that.
History is by its very nature selective and partisan. The history of the Soviet Union, and of Russia before 1917, has been particularly so in view of its crucial role in the containment of Western power. But it is vital that we now take a more objective view of it.
If, for instance, it is true that the Russian empire was converted into the Soviet Union in 1917 largely under Russian leadership, it is equally indisputable that Russians have been its worst victims. They suffered the most under Stalin for the simple reason that being the principal constituent, they had to be thoroughly pulverised if the Marxist utopia was to be built. The revolution had to be an assault above all on Russians and their tradition and so it has been.
Similarly, if it has to be conceded that the Great Russians were quite brutal in carving out an empire for themselves in the 18th and 19th century, it too cannot be denied that they did so not in search of adventure, profit and religious zeal, as was the case with West Europeans from the end of the 15th century, but in search of a measure of security. The Mongol invasion, occupation and rule for 250 years had been a searing experience for them.
A brief reference may be made to Russia’s western frontier as well. In the 200 years between the end of the Mongol rule and the rise of Peter the Great, Russia had to fight six wars with Sweden and 12 with Poland-Lithuania in self-defence. These wars lasted 85 years. Two of them were disastrous. Moscow itself was occupied in the Livonian war of 1558-83 and Russia appeared to have disintegrated once again. Napoleon’s invasion could not but have refreshed these memories. Stalin was certainly haunted by them and that explains, at least partly, his emphasis on military strength before World War II and his conduct during and after the war. The siege mentality can revive among Russians with consequences too terrible to contemplate.
Sunday Mail, 1 September 1991