First Published: Frontline, Vol. 7, No. 6, September 25, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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A dangerous dialectic is playing itself out here as the status quo which has bound together the Soviet family of nations for over 60 years crumbles, and struggle builds over what shape the future order will take.
Last month a crucial card was played. The Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) published a draft policy document on reconstructing inter-ethnic relations in the USSR. A closely-reasoned, profoundly internationalist argument, it constitutes the clearest statement yet concerning the dimensions of the problem and the CPSU’s approach for solving it through an intricate balance between the rights of “peoples” and the rights of “the people.” This platform will now form the basis of discussion leading up to a forthcoming Central Committee conference on nationalities policy – a meeting which has been postponed so many times it is almost past counting but which, plainly, has got to be held soon.
The terms of the debate now raging in the Soviet press – and, sometimes tragically, in the streets – may sound familiar: Will it be federation or confederation?
Some Soviet republics, most particularly the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, are pressing hard for a fundamentally new deal, a confederal one, in which the powers of individual republics will outweigh those of the central government. Their arguments contain enormous justice: their historical grievances are numerous beginning with the way they were brought into the USSR, and running through the crimes of Stalinism and the negligence and stagnation of the Brezhnev era.
They are angry that their languages take second place to Russian, at least in the working world and political discourse, in their own republics. They are fearful their cultures and ethnic identities will ultimately be drowned by superior numbers of Slavic immigrants. And they claim that economic development on their lands has been lopsided during the Soviet years, accompanied by gross ecological mismanagement.
People of the Baltic republics have mobilized politically over the past couple of years, with huge popular front organizations, to demand complete sovereignty – including their own citizenship and currency – as the only guarantee of their national rights and security.
Against the old slogan, which one still often hears, that “strong republics require a strong center,” Baltic Congress deputy Klara Hallik recently retorted, “As for the strong center, I want to ask: What is it? Is it the 16th Republic in our country? If it has appeared, it has done this secretly, without any voting by the other 15 republics for it. ... ”
On the other side are the voices of integration, of Sovietism versus nationalism, which can sometimes sound equally frightened, and equally militant. “History shows that confederations are usually a temporary formation on the way to the creation of a federation or to disintegration,” write law professors N. Mikhaleva and S. Papidze in the newspaper Izvestia. “We do have a federation already. So, whatever is meant is obviously disintegration.”
Indeed, life is raising the spectre of disintegration rather forcibly these days. Looking around the USSR in recent weeks there were volatile political strikes in Moldavia and Estonia, staged by mainly Slavic minorities in those republics opposed to new – they say discriminatory – language and election laws. Meanwhile, Baltic peoples held massive demonstrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, an accord which they claim set the stage for their involuntary incorporation into the Soviet Union the following year. (In a related development, of incalculable significance in this complex political process, CPSU Politbureau member Alexander Yakovlev, writing in Pravda, described the pact as “a deviation from the Leninist norms of Soviet foreign policy, from Lenin’s renunciation of secret diplomacy.” It had involved, he wrote, a great power claim for “territorial-political recarving.” The long controversy over the existence of a secret protocol outlining these goals, is irrelevant to the present debate, he said, though there is no doubt such a protocol was drawn up, even though the original has never been found.)
Looking deeper, there are disturbing signs that almost all Soviet minorities are in ferment, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Meskhetian Turks, Kalmyks, Chechens, Balkars, and innumerable others are pressing old claims and seeking historical redress for wrongs done them under Stalin. Azerbaijanis and Armenians are locked in a conflict that looks increasingly like civil war, over the tiny enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now a new, though totally predictable, level of conflict has become activated. Small minorities in several republics are rising up to demand their own autonomy against the resurgent nationalism of Moldavians, Georgians, Lithuanians and others. In Moldavia, the tiny Gagauz people – numbering barely 140,000 – threaten to join Slavs in mass strikes against the new Moldavian language law which effectively requires them to know three languages to get by: Gagauz, Russian, and now Moldavian. In Georgia, the Abkhazian minority has been rioting for months against what they see as the great-nation chauvinism of the Georgians.
It is not wild-eyed to suggest an almost infinite regress of national, tribal and local conflicts. In fact, the nightmare that torments many Soviets these days is the breakup of the USSR into a swarm of medieval principalities.
The USSR, plainly, is an unfinished union. Some 120 nationalities, bound loosely in 15 national republics, 20 autonomous republics and 18 national districts, share a common history that contains more tragedy than joy. Modernization and integration have altered all past realities beyond recognition, yet have not resolved many basic problems. The present crisis of central authority – and unifying vision – almost inevitably fuels backward-looking, parochial, centrifugal forces.
Yet the extent to which Soviet development has done its work is little understood, or appreciated at this point. As Yuri Bromley, one of the USSR’s foremost ethnographers, writes in Pravda:
“The Soviet Union is a complex system whose parts are connected, besides political, by millions of other ties formed in the years of Soviet government, such as power, industrial, trade, social, cultural and scientific ones .... It is self-evident that no complex system can function without some form of overall control.”
And there is one living, breathing reality, which recent history has created, and which no national-exclusivist or confederal solution can ever adequately address: today, some 55 million Soviet people live dispersed across the USSR, outside of their allotted national territories.
All eyes in recent weeks have been trained on Estonia, where both the politics and the contradictions inherent in this crisis are already most highly developed.
Following the passage of a language bill in July, making Estonian the state language, the mainly Slavic minorities who comprise some 40% of the republic’s population, went out on strike. They viewed the new law – with considerable insensitivity – as an infringement on their right to live and work in Russian.
However, there is no monopoly on insensitivity: early in August the Estonian parliament passed an electoral law, with two- and five-year residency requirements, which effectively disenfranchised many recent arrivals to the republic. The minorities struck again, and suspended their strike only last week under pressure from Moscow.
The Slavic minorities in Estonia are not – this has to be pointed out – the representatives of an oppressor class or nation. They are immigrants, who have come to build industry and stayed to operate it. They comprise the bulk of the blue-collar workforce, while Estonians tend to be the farmers, intellectuals and service workers. During their recent strike, the minority demonstrated the practical implications of this class breakdown rather vividly: they virtually shut down industry, crippled transport and – but for the grace of the strike committee – would have switched-off the republic’s electricity as well.
The Estonian parliament – in a move that will not bring them credit in the minds of progressive people anywhere – responded by passing the first anti-strike legislation ever seen in the USSR.
The fate of the country, and perestroika with all its hopes, now hangs upon the outcome of the debate the CPSU has set in motion with the publication of its draft platform on nationalities policy. And its central, crucial point, is this:
“A citizen of a republic is simultaneously a citizen of the USSR. Privileges for some or infringement of the rights of others for reasons of nationality, religion, language or duration of residence are impermissible ... , A Soviet citizen should feel at home in any area of the country. Such is the supreme and final goal of all work to harmonize inter-ethnic relations.”
Fred Weir is the Moscow correspondent for the Canadian Tribune, from whose pages this article is reprinted. The Tribune is published by the Communist Party of Canada.