From Forced Marriage to a Family of Equals : Soviet empire: There is a solution for the inevitable loss of the non-Russian republics: Create a commonwealth, on the British model.

Liquidation of an empire is never a pleasant process, least of all for the emperor. Dissolution of a federal union is equally difficult. Nevertheless, those are the tasks that face Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Some American commentators have drawn analogies to Abraham Lincoln and the secession movement that led to the Civil War, but the situations are not parallel. The Soviet Union is not a historically unified nation; neither is it composed of constituent parts that voluntarily accepted central leadership. Today’s Soviet state is composed of Slavic Great Russia, two additional Slavic “republics” and a cobbled-together assortment of provinces largely inhabited by non-Russian, non-Slavic, and in many cases, nonwhite and non-Christian, peoples. Nearly all of the Soviet republics in which nationalism now threatens adhesion to Moscow were once sovereign states. In most of them, Russian is still a foreign tongue.

There is no good reason to cast Gorbachev in the role of Lincoln. Preservation of the Great Russian Empire, handed down from the czars to the commissars, need not be central to his goals and strategy. Indeed, unless the Russian officers of the Soviet Army are capable of ordering the same lethal force against citizens of the Baltic republics, Georgia and the Ukraine as they did against Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians, and unless Russian soldiers will shoot their Slavic kin, it is unlikely that the empire can be preserved in its present form. There are, however, two ways to lose an empire.

After World War II, the French fought a bloody but futile campaign to hang on to their holdings in Indochina and North Africa, at an enormous cost in money, lives and international standing.

In contrast, the British looked at the map, at the resources available to sustain an imperial renaissance and at their probable lack of success. Pretending that Britain made no attempts to postpone the inevitable would be unfair to those who fought to liberate their nations. Nevertheless, from the emancipation of India and Pakistan onward, the world witnessed a series of midnight ceremonies in which the Union Jack was slowly lowered and given into the hands of a representative of the royal family and the flag of a new nation snappily unfurled in the spotlight. In place of a global empire, Great Britain engineered a successful but loose commonwealth based on commercial ties and a certain amount of nostalgia.

This is an option worth President Gorbachev’s careful attention. A Soviet commonwealth could incorporate a free trade area, perhaps including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and extending to the Muslim crescent on the Asian border. While members of the Soviet commonwealth would be independent and sovereign, they might adopt a convertible ruble as a common currency. Most members of the British Commonwealth acknowledge the Queen as their own head of state; that is unlikely to work for a Soviet commonwealth, but neither has it proved necessary in the British one. Nations of the British Commonwealth do not share a common policy toward the rest of the world, but they do meet annually to discuss their differences with civility; a Soviet commonwealth could function similarly.

There is little alternative: In the shortest of terms--the end of 1990, or the end of next week--the network of buffer states known as the Warsaw Pact will cease to function. The two Germanys will merge; Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia will all have non-socialist governments inclined to look westward for industrial markets and supplies, and perhaps eastward to sell agricultural products. In the only slightly longer term, the Baltic republics will cease to function as provinces of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, all three will keep their historic and commercial ties to Russia, and Lithuania was a Russian province for more than five centuries before achieving independence after World War I.

By the end of the decade, the centrifugal force of nationalism will likely rip Transcaucasia--Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia--from the Russian empire. A commonwealth should benefit the new states and the old empire. It is difficult, however, to envision these regions being economically self-sufficient, except at the level of 18th-Century agriculture and 19th-Century industry. Their natural markets and natural sources of raw materials are clearly in Russia, not in the West.

More important to the survival of Russia (as opposed to the Soviet Union) is a continuing association with the Ukraine, which provides about half of the Soviet grain harvest, with Georgia and its mineral wealth and warmer-weather agriculture and with Slavic Byelorussia. Unfortunately for Gorbachev-as-Lincoln, the forces pulling these three republics away from Moscow are rooted in language, history and religion, emotional forces far stronger than the need for a joint economy. Barring civil war, the Slavic parts of today’s Soviet Union are likely to spin apart someday. The less tangible but more profitable ties of a commonwealth are, however, apt to prove more enduring than bonds imposed by force. Choosing commonwealth instead of union may be Gorbachev’s last option.