4. The Collapse of the Soviet System
Let me now turn to the issue of nationalism. This goes to the very heart of the Soviet Union. The ideological base of the Union is the universal creed of Communism, but its territorial base is the Russian Empire. After the Revolution of 1917 the empire fell apart, a number of autonomous republics were established, and a civil war ensued in the course of which power was consolidated in communist hands and the outlying regions were once again brought under central control. It is possible to view the civil war as Moscow reasserting authority over its dominions.
Stalin, of course, became an absolute ruler with more power than the czars ever had. During and after the Second World War, he enlarged the territory of the Soviet Union by annexing the Baltic States and taking over parts of Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia, not to mention Konigsburg (Kaliningrad) and the Kurile Islands. In addition, he extended the sway of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe. In speaking of the Soviet empire, we usually mean the countries that the Soviet Union dominates outside its own borders; but there is a patchwork of nationalities within the boundaries of the Soviet Union which had been subjugated by the Stalinist system.
This is not the place to review Stalin's policy towards nationalities. Suffice it to say that he had no more respect for nationality than for any other human attribute. His only concern was to make his system work and he had no hesitation in moving people around on a very large scale. A high proportion of the population was deported from the Baltic States to other parts of the Soviet Union and replaced by ethnic Russians; similarly, millions of Koreans were moved from the maritime areas of Siberia further inland, ethnic Ukrainians replaced Poles in Lvov, Germans were deported from Kaliningrad, and so on.
When Gorbachev loosened the constraints, national resentments and aspirations began to find expression. That was what Gorbachev was hoping for: nationalist movements were his natural allies in shaking up the rigid power structure. He wanted to release spontaneous forces but in Armenia and Azerbaijan they turned against each other and posed a deadly threat to his policy of liberalization.
Nationalism has two faces. It is easy to distinguish between them. One is benign, cultural, seeking self-expression, and supportive of the aspirations of other nationalities. It is the nationalism that swept Europe in 1848. The other is primitive, violent, directed against other nationalities. It is the stuff civil wars are made of. The benign form fits in well with the concept of open society; the vicious form is the breeding ground of closed societies. What is difficult to understand is the way the two faces are related to each other.
There can be no doubt that nationalist movements during the Gorbachev era started with a benign face. They gave rise to the popular fronts which came to dominate political life in most of the republics. The popular fronts formed an alliance among themselves, the Interregional Group, that became, in effect, a parliamentary opposition pushing for more radical reforms (they qualify as left-wing in Soviet parlance, but right-wing in Western terminology). At the height of the Ngorno-Kharabagh conflict in September 1989, when Gorbachev issued an ultimatum threatening military intervention in order to lift the economic blockade of Armenia, the Interregional Group arranged an armistice, and once again (end of January, 1990) the Armenian and Azerbaijani popular fronts are getting together in Riga, Latvia, under the auspices of the Baltic movements to try to resolve their differences.
But nationalist movements have turned increasingly radical and vicious. Perhaps the most disturbing is the rise of Russian nationalism which, in contrast with that of the other republics, is clearly on the Right side of the political spectrum. It is called the United Workers Front and has a strong trade unionist, egalitarian element. It is hostile towards cooperatives and other profiteers, and feels that the Russians have been exploited by the universal cause of Communism and short-changed in relation to the other republics. It is opposed to all foreign, cosmopolitan influences and it seems to enjoy the support of a certain section of the bureaucracy. Its rise has been spectacular. At the time of the March 1989 elections it did not exist and all the candidates supported by Pamyat (a shadowy extremist organization) were defeated. Now the right wing is believed to have drawn even with the left wing in the Russian republic. A somewhat similar development can be observed in the republic of Azerbaijan, where the Popular Front seems to have split and a radical right-wing group has gained visibility by storming the frontier posts and provoking a bloody military reprisal.
Nationalism in the Baltics has quite a different character from that in the Caucasus and the Asian republics. The Ukraine is yet another story. The leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Kiev are artists and intellectuals, while the capital of Western Ukraine, Lvov, is inhabited by people who were given the apartments of Poles after the war: nationalism is taking a more violent form in Lvov than in Kiev.
One can try to draw a distinction between different forms according to the cultural level of the people involved. But I believe there is a more interesting historical connection to be found between the two faces of nationalism. I suspect that nationalism is following the same boom/bust pattern as economic reform, and for much the same reason. It is the failure of the benign, 1848-type of nationalism to produce positive results that is liable to lead to a radicalization of the movement. Well meaning artists and intellectuals get pushed aside and bigots and roughnecks take over.
Failure is the feature that connects the nationalist movements with economic developments. If they produced positive results, nationalist movements would remain benign; and if it satisfied national aspirations, perestroika would have a chance to succeed. To be specific: the Baltic states are clamoring for independence. Having their own currency is an essential ingredient in that demand. But as long as the rest of the Soviet Union does not have a currency that fulfils the functions of money, introducing money in one part of the Union would cause tremendous disruption in economic relations with the rest of the Union. It is because these disruptions cannot be tolerated by the central authority that the demands for autonomy cannot be fulfilled. If the Soviet Union had a real currency, the legitimate aspirations of the Baltic countries could be fulfilled and perestroika could proceed at different speeds in different parts of the country. That is perhaps the only hope for perestroika to succeed at all. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union is not in a position to turn the ruble into a real currency.
I want to emphasize that there is nothing inevitable about the boom/bust pattern. It merely represents the course that events are most likely to take, the line of least resistance. If sufficient resistance can be mustered, the line can be interrupted at any point. Discontinuity is an inherent feature of reflexive patterns - otherwise, developments based on some kind of bias would be reinforced for ever. In the normal course of events a trend has to go quite far before sufficient forces are generated to correct the bias which sustains it; but trends can be broken at any time, especially if exogenous forces come into play. In this case, where could such forces come from? In my opinion, only from the West.
I shall try to be more specific and sketch out a particular path that the line of least resistance is likely to take. Needless to say, it is only one of many possibilities which happens to enjoy greater probability than others on the basis of facts known today; but, as events climb the decision-tree, the odds may shift. So there is no historic inevitability about my prediction.
There are two collisions visible today. One is between the clamor for autonomy and independence in the republics and the desire of the center to maintain the integrity of the Union. The other is between the left-wing orientation of the popular fronts in the republics and the increasingly right-wing orientation in the Russian republic itself. This is how the drama may play itself out.
In my opinion the center will not be able to resist the demands of the republics. Gorbachev has shown that he is reluctant to use force at the time of the first Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict. That was a watershed: the rule of terror was over and it was replaced by persuasion. Gorbachev is a master of persuasion but arguments cannot suppress the legitimate demands of the people - and the revelation of the secret clauses in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact have rendered the demands of the Baltic republics legitimate. Gorbachev has gone on record as saying that the Soviet Union cannot countenance the independence of the Baltic states. This puts him into an untenable position. Whatever compromise he manages to work out, it is bound to result in a further weakening of central authority. In my opinion, Gorbachev is more vulnerable in the Baltic republics than in Azerbaijan and the other Asian republics. In Asia he can use force, in the Baltics he cannot. Even if he were replaced by a hard-liner, Soviet rule cannot be maintained by force because the soldiers cannot be counted on to follow orders. There is simply not enough force in the Soviet Union today to cow the Baltic people into submission. What hardliner wants to be in charge if he cannot use force? Therefore Gorbachev's position is more secure than it seems: but the authority attached to his position is likely to erode. A weakening of central authority would merely accelerate the process of disintegration; Gorbachev's disappearance would make it final. It is impossible to predict how far the process goes, but it is quite likely that it will culminate in a break-up of the Soviet Union. After all, the Russian empire also broke up when the czarist regime collapsed.
The more independent the constituent republics become, the more likely it is that a reactionary nationalist regime will take over in the Russian republic. Such a regime will have a century old anti-Western and anti-Semitic intellectual tradition behind it. The similarity with Nazism is not incidental: they have common philosophical roots9 and they will have a similar sense of national injury to draw on. With the economy in shambles, the regime will have no choice but to follow a revanchist, expansionist policy. With atomic weapons widely deployed, one is tempted to conclude that a new Russian nationalist regime would pose a greater threat to the world than the Soviet Union ever did. The Soviet Union, as we can now see, was essentially moribund; while it managed to maintain a threatening posture, it was very careful how it moved because it was aware of its own fragility. The new regime would be out to prove itself; and the only means at its disposal would be military force. Fortunately, atomic arsenals become useless after a while (it has to do with the half-life of tritium), so the threat may be regional rather than global.
There is nothing inevitable about this scenario; but, if nothing is done to prevent it, it is what is most likely to happen. What should the West do? That is the question I shall address next.
