Soviets Face Old Nemesis in Armenia and Azerbaijan

The trouble the Soviet Union is having with nationalists in Armenia and Azerbaijan is only the latest outburst in a tussle between communism and nationalism going back more than 70 years.

These two systems of belief and action are so incompatible as to be mutually exclusive. This is particularly so in the Third World countries where nationalism is still alive and well. In those countries to be called a “nationalist” or even a “good nationalist” is a compliment; in the West a nationalist is someone deplorable; in the communist world a nationalist is a criminal. In recent years in communist countries an increasing number of people have been jailed “for corruption and nationalist feelings.”

Communism fights nationalism because they are rival faiths, competing for the loyalty of the same constituency. Communism despises nationalism because it compartmentalizes and weakens communism’s worldwide loyalties based on class. After all, the communist anthem is called “The Internationale” and communism’s slogan is “Workers of the World, Unite!”

It baffles and enrages communists to see people of all classes uniting to fight and even die for the “freedom” of one particular tract of territory, often quite small, against people of all classes on the other side. For the communists, “national liberation” is not just a false cause, it is an illusion, the worship of a false god. For the nationalists, independence as such was an end in itself, while for the communists it was the last-but-one stage before membership in a worldwide union of Soviet socialist republics.

Because of this difference in objectives, no sooner did Third World countries achieve independence than the local communists, on orders from Moscow and Beijing, attacked them to try to capture the fledgling states. This was a pattern across Africa and Asia. The strategy was to try to set up liberated areas or, on the Chinese model, repetitions of Yenan, the remote stronghold from which the troops of Mao Tse-tung finally emerged to take over China. Indonesian communists tried this at Madiun in East Java in 1948 and the new nationalist government suppressed it with great brutality, feeding the party cadres into the boilers of railway engines. Burmese communists rose against the government there even before independence was achieved and 40 years later are still in the field operating out of their Yenan in northeast Burma. Soon after Indian independence, the communists in 1948 tried to set up a Yenan in Telengana, in central India, which the Indian army took three years to wipe out.

It was the Palestine problem, and Israel, that has divided and still divides Arab nationalism from communism. Russia supported the creation of Israel as vigorously as did the United States, as a means of pushing Britain out of the area and in the hope that Israel, as a different sort of Yenan, would provide an example of socialism to its Arab neighbors. Since then Arab-Soviet relations have always been equivocal. It is only recently and with obvious reluctance that Moscow granted full recognition to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Arab nationalism’s major cause.

The Soviet Union, after its inauspicious beginnings with the newly independent Third World, recovered somewhat under Nikita S. Khrushchev when, around 1954, it decided that it could do business with bourgeois nationalists as long as they remained nonaligned--that is, nonaligned against the West. But after 19 years, in 1973, the Soviets found that this policy did not produce worthwhile political dividends; there was a move towards giving special favors to those governments that had become Marxist-Leninist like Cuba, Ethiopia and South Yemen. Under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, however, there has been a broadening of Soviet Third World policy to include friendly relations both with independent nationalists along with favoritism to the Marxist-Leninist regimes. Post-Mao China follows much the same mixed policy line.

Having achieved an uneasy, changeable compromise with nationalism outside its borders, the Soviet Union could have believed that it had also solved the problem of nationalism within. This was because the policy of granting wide powers of self-government to the various Soviet nationalities--propounded by, of all people, Josef Stalin--seemed to be working. Under the 1924 constitution, the Soviet Union was to be a federation and the non-Russian ethnic republics were granted, in addition to administrative authority, many of the symbols of national independence--a flag, an anthem, the use of the local language, the encouragement of local culture and folklore and so on.

But these concessions were contradicted by Moscow’s firm centralized control of political and economic life maintained through the presence of the Russian army and political police, of Russian party members in all key positions and most impressively through the implantation of Russian settlers. These were particularly conspicuous and particularly resented in the Asian republics. At present European immigrants amount to 41% of the population in Kazakhstan and 31% in Kirghizia.

Nationalism, the desire of a people to rule themselves, did not fade away inside the Soviet Union and the nationalities were not satisfied with what, in reality, amounted only to local autonomy. This was particularly true for peoples along the southern periphery of the Soviet Union with memories of independence in the not-too-distant past. Above all the independent countries of the Third World set an unsettling example for the Asian and Caucasian Soviet republics where, in some cases, there were racial, linguistic, historical or cultural links with the neighboring independent states. Nothing could stop the southern non-Russian peoples from knowing more and more about the Third World states, and the more these Soviet peoples knew the more they wanted to have what those outsiders had: independence.

So for the past 20 years, at least, Moscow has been battling against rising demands for more and more local power. Repression has not worked: China, in Tibet, has yet to learn that lesson. But Gorbachev knows this and only last month identified nationalist feelings as a prime problem for the Soviet Union--which is why he has handled the Armenian-Azerbaijan problem with kid gloves, or almost so.

There would seem to be only one peaceful way forward for the Soviet Union, before matters get worse. This is to give nationalism its head, gradually, by devolving more powers upon the republics and diminishing Russian control and Russian presence. In other words, to make the Soviet Union into a genuine federation. Federalism has worked in the United States and in India, without which that country, so like the Soviet Union in its diversity, would by now have been split apart by strong local subnational loyalties. A man like Gorbachev can surely learn that since communism in the Soviet Union has not been able to beat nationalism, it might be better to join it.