Gorbachev’s Secession Crisis

For 50 years the United States has rightly refused to recognize the forcible annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that followed the Soviet Union’s infamous pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, regarding the Baltic states as captive nations and implicitly accepting their right to be independent. Now Lithuania, largest and most populous of the three, plans parliamentary elections on Feb. 24 that could clear the way for a referendum on secession. Not so long ago, Washington might have cheered. Today it is cautiously distancing itself from this prospect, referring to it as a Soviet internal matter. Trying to walk a fine line between principle and practicality, the Bush Administration has decided not to say or do anything to encourage Baltic secessionism at this time. That is a difficult decision, but a proper one.

What the United States would not be averse to seeing is steady Soviet political evolution that, along with assuring civil liberties and democratic freedoms, could bring autonomy to the empire’s 15 republics. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, after three hectic days of barnstorming in Lithuania, indicates that he’s ready to think about a similar goal in the context of a new federal system.

Even assuming that he means what he says, he can’t dictate a new political order; he can only recommend. There’s no assurance that those who hold the levers of power in the Communist Party, the army and various ministries who oppose decentralization or object to giving up the party’s monopoly would accept his recommendation or even let him to stay in office once he has made it.

It’s impossible not to be sympathetic to the sufferings of the Lithuanians and other forcibly annexed peoples and to their aspirations for self-determination. It’s also impossible to ignore the far-reaching and potentially destabilizing consequences if secessionism spreads; what’s happening right now between Armenians and Azerbaijanis hints at some of the ethnic and religious furies that could be let loose if Soviet national authority dissolves too quickly. There is of course nothing immutable about the Soviet empire; political change must come because change has become unpreventable. The hard but prudent questions that bear pondering have to do with the pace of that change, the environment in which it takes place and, above all, what harm--as well as what good--could be produced.