The Last Empire: Nationalist Surge Could Undo Soviets

The tragedy that befell the Armenian people a month ago and the relief effort following it have dramatically underlined two contradictory trends characterizing the Soviet Union today. The unprecedented Soviet openness in dealing with the calamity and their willingness to admit inability to face the disaster alone have marked a new phase in the long-overdue emergence of the Soviet Union as a member of the international community in good standing. For many observers, Soviet behavior after the killer quake is the best demonstration yet of the sincerity of Gorbachev’s “new political thinking” that seems to augur well for the future of East-West relations.

In stark contrast to this hopeful trend of international cooperation across ideological borders, the Armenian tragedy has failed to alleviate the deep national and ethnic divisions that have recently come to light in the region. Incredibly, it may have exacerbated them. Even as Armenian authorities accepted truck caravans with aid from archenemy Turkey, similar aid from Soviet Azerbaijan was turned back. Armenian nationalists continued to battle Soviet troops in Erevan and wild rumors about the sending of orphaned children to Russia created an explosive situation. Across the border in Azerbaijan, despite de facto martial law, Azeribaijani hoodlums continued to burn Armenian homes, and letters to Armenians gloated that “Allah has punished the infidels.”

How is it possible for two “fraternal” Soviet people to display such fierce animosity after 70 years of Soviet power? Two general answers are usually advanced as an explanation. The official view from Moscow is that the disturbances are caused by “corrupt elements, political demagogues and black marketeers” bent on destroying perestroika. A simpler explanation holds that Armenians and Azerbaijanis simply hate each other and always will. The first is, of course, nonsense; even the second provides only a partial answer. It does not tell us, for instance, why, until recently, the two peoples were able to live for decades in relative harmony--not only side by side, but often in mixed communities down to the village level.

For a more meaningful explanation one would have to go beyond narrow regional issues, important as they may be, and look at the re-emergence of nationalism as a powerful driving force of political behavior in the Soviet Union today. Keenly aware of the dismal failure of Marxist-Leninist socialism, the Soviet people have simply gone back to time-honored values such as nationalism and religion. And under a nationalist prism, their grievances, real or imagined, have come into much sharper focus. With glasnost these strong undercurrents have now come to the surface and unleashed powerful centrifugal forces that have not only burst the propagandistic bubble of the new Homo sovieticus toiling happily away in a socialist nation, but may present the greatest threat to the regime yet if not contained.

Looked at this way, the ethnic turmoil in the Transcaucusus becomes easier to understand. To Armenian nationalists, emboldened by glasnost and the perceived weakening of central authority, the time seemed ripe to fulfill the age-long dream of incorporating the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh into the motherland. To the Azerbaijanis, on the other hand, the Armenian efforts looked like little more than an impudent land-grab. Throw in historical antagonisms, heightened national sensitivities and legitimate local grievances and you have an explosion waiting to happen.

The violent upheavals in the Transcaucusus have also revealed two other trends troublesome for the Kremlin. Although the conflict is over local issues, failure to resolve it has led both sides to blame Moscow, thus revealing the essentially anti-systemic nature of nationalism. Secondly, in both republics the local party establishments have readily embraced nationalist agendas, more often than not in clear disregard of Moscow’s wishes, raising the specter of a nationalist fragmentation of the main instrument of central control itself. It is these trends, and the mass appeal of nationalism, that make the nationalist challenge to the Soviet system especially dangerous.

Historically such a challenge was inevitable, for when all is said and done, the Soviet Union has always been and remains a neocolonial empire. The only difference between it and traditional empires is the fact that the Russian people, as the dominant nationality, are only nominally the colonial master. The real ruler and beneficiary of the empire is the party bureaucracy which, though Russian in its majority, is multinational.

The list of grievances that have mobilized the nationalist challenge to Moscow is long. They range from political and religious oppression to economic exploitation and from rewriting national histories and Russification to the deliberate suppression of national cultures and languages. Though all of these are of long standing, they have become exacerbated by the serious malaise affecting the system, while the new openness and reform spirit emanating from the Kremlin have encouraged nationally minded elements to seek redress. The regime has come under nationalist attack in virtually every region of the country. In the Baltic republics, the cutting edge of nationalist dissent so far, mass nationalist movements organized in “people’s fronts” have called for cultural, economic and political sovereignty and have stopped just a step short of openly calling for secession from the Soviet Union.

Remarkably, most of their demands have been endorsed by the local parties. As just one example of the degree of popular support nationalist causes enjoy there, a petition protesting the new Soviet constitution collected 1.5 million signatures among Lithuania’s 3 million people in less than a month. In the Ukraine, historians have broken the long-standing taboo of discussing the famine that killed 7 million Ukrainians in the early ‘30s and have implied that it was genocide.

Particularly disturbing for the Kremlin must be the growing assertiveness of Soviet Muslims, the second largest population group after the Russians. Over the past two decades a demographic explosion accompanied by an Islamic revival has taken place among the more than 50 million Soviet Muslims--who also suffer a decline in living conditions--especially in Central Asia. The regime’s long-standing policy of forcing an essentially colonial monoculture economy on the region and declining social expenditures have extracted a huge human and ecological cost.

The last and most important pieces of the Soviet ethnic puzzle are the Russians themselves. Making up about half of the Soviet population and strongly overrepresented among the ruling elite, they are traditionally considered to be the main source of support for the regime. Yet, in a real sense, most Russians have also been treated as colonial subjects and are no better off than the rest. Their history has been rewritten, traditional Russian culture suppressed and the Orthodox Church severely circumscribed. Nor have they fared any better in the socioeconomic area. Vast stretches of the Russian heartland, abandoned by destitute peasants, are becoming wasteland.

It is no wonder that nationalism is finding a receptive audience among the Russians as well. So far the best known expression of Russian nationalist fever has been the emergence of the violently anti-Semitic and xenophobic Pamyat (memory) group, which has blamed the plight of the Russians on a “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” in language that would do Joseph Goebbels proud.

There is no reason to believe, however, that Russian nationalism would necessarily take a reactionary turn. Growing numbers of Russians are beginning to point to Marxism-Leninism as the real culprit and are turning back to the church and Russian traditions for inspiration. At recent mass demonstrations, the pre-revolutionary Russian flag was openly displayed for the first time, along with slogans such as “down with totalitarianism” and “freedom for all.”

Faced with this growing defiance, the Kremlin has shown uncharacteristic indecisiveness. It has been remarkably tolerant in places like the Baltic, yet it moved quickly to round up Armenian nationalist leaders after the earthquake. Such tentativeness is a symptom of the difficult choices facing the leadership. A decisive crackdown may buy Moscow some time but would certainly doom the prospects for reform without solving the problem. On the other hand, the further opening and decentralizing of the system necessary for perestroika to have a real chance would undoubtedly generate even greater nationalistic pressures.

The Soviet dilemma is the result of historically inevitable trends. What we are observing today is simply the beginning of the decolonization process in the last remaining empire. As with earlier empires, it is a process that cannot be reversed until it has run its course. Should the Soviet leadership realize and accept the historical inevitability of the process and move decisively to grant genuine autonomy to all nations, it may be able to rebuild the Soviet multinational state as a federation of equal nations. If not, sooner or later this last “prison of nations,” as Lenin called imperial Russia, will be rent asunder by its rebellious inmates.