COLUMN ONE : Perils of Liberty for Republics : Independence from the Soviet Union may produce half a dozen or more countries to add to the world’s list of economic and political basket cases.

Could they go it alone?

As more and more Soviet republics move to declare independence from Moscow, both Western policy-makers and Soviet officials have begun concentrating on an issue that they never had to think about before: Would independent republics be economically and politically viable?

To some, the question has an odd ring. The world is full of nations--from Bangladesh to Bolivia--that would flunk anyone’s test of economic viability, yet their claims to independence go without challenge. Indeed, some of the more extreme predictions of widespread hunger and disease this coming winter raise questions of whether the Soviet Union, itself, will be viable.

Nonetheless, the prospect that the push for independence could add half a dozen or more economic and political basket cases to the world’s already-long list has become a troubling possibility for Bush Administration officials and their colleagues in Western Europe. Even worse is the potential that longstanding ethnic enmities and border tensions--suppressed by years of Soviet dictatorship--now can break free and produce open warfare among newly independent neighbors.

“It’s like taking the lid off a pressure cooker too early,” says Condoleezza Rice, former White House Soviet specialist and now a professor at Stanford University.

“It’s potentially Yugoslavia plus,” Rice adds, referring to the fighting among rival ethnic groups there that has cost several hundreds lives over the last few months. “The implications for U.S. policy are enormous.”

Despite the current nationalist fervor, very few of the newly emerging nations breaking free from Moscow’s rule have ever truly been independent before. The Ukraine, for example, was an independent entity briefly in the mid-17th Century before being overtaken by the expansionism of Russia’s czars. To find an earlier example of Ukrainian self-rule, you have to go back half a millennium to the period when Kiev, now the Ukraine’s capital, was the center of the first Russian state.

In the Baltics, neither Latvia nor Estonia has known independence, except for a brief period between 1918 and 1940, when all three Baltic republics were crushed by Josef Stalin. Lithuania has more of a history of independence and was, in fact, a regional power in the 13th and 14th centuries. But most of the time since then, the Lithuanians have been ruled by outsiders, ranging from Swedes to Poles and--since the days of Catherine the Great--to Russians.

As for Byelorussia and Moldova, both of which have declared independence in the last week, neither territory has ever been self-governing. Most of what is now Byelorussia was formerly Polish territory. Moldova, formerly called Moldavia, was carved primarily from Romania, and many outside experts expect its citizens to seek a federation with their Romanian cousins, if they continue down the road toward separation from Moscow.

For all the republics, that road is littered with a daunting set of hurdles. And, except for the Baltics, U.S. officials and private experts say there is little prospect of large amounts of outside aid.

Short-Term Aid

European Community officials estimate that the Baltics will require between $2.5 billion and $3 billion in short-term aid to help their republics establish true independence.

No one has yet calculated the costs of aiding the other republics, in part because no one believes that either the United States or Europe is prepared to finance it.

Each of the republics starts out with some advantages. The Ukraine has fertile soil and a substantial industrial capacity. The Baltics have a skilled work force and close ties to Scandinavia. The Central Asian republics have substantial natural resources.

But whether discussing agriculture or industry, “this is a system that was deliberately designed by Stalin to rob the individual republics of any autonomy,” says Michael Claudon of Geonomics, an economic consulting firm in Middlebury, Vt., that specializes in the Soviet economy.

Soviet planning has led to extreme specialization by the republics. In the past, each has been directed to work on small parts of an overall economic system. And none--even the giant Russian Federation--has been in a position to see the whole.

“As things stand now, no one republic could build a bicycle,” says Claudon. “The tires are made in one republic, the frame in another, the wheels in a third, with the whole thing assembled in a fourth.”

The Baltic republics, whose independence is now being recognized by many Western nations, produce most of the high-quality machine tools that the Soviet Union has needed to run a modern economy--including equipment that is vital to production of military hardware. But those Baltic factories rely entirely on raw materials imported from distant republics and are dependent on energy supplies from Russia and the Ukraine.

The Ukraine, which is justifiably referred to as the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, produces more than a quarter of the Soviet Union’s grain. But under the Soviet system, much of that grain is stored in silos located near the major cities, including Moscow and Leningrad. If economic relations should break down, says James Chrisinger of the University of Iowa, Ukrainian grain could rot in the fields for lack of a place to store it, while consumers in Moscow would go hungry for lack of bread.

Still, the Baltics and the Ukraine are among the best-positioned of the Soviet republics to break away. According to a study produced earlier this year by Germany’s Deutsche Bank, only the Ukraine, the Baltics, Russia itself and perhaps Georgia have the potential for successful economic independence.

The Ukraine has both extensive agriculture and heavy industry. It also has crude rail links to the rest of Europe, unlike most republics, whose transportation networks lead only inward. Georgia’s advantages include a population that is attuned to free enterprise--unusual in the Soviet Union--plus access to the outside world through the Black Sea.

Planning in Baltics

The Baltics have carefully planned for their independence and already have begun to confront key issues such as currency conversion. Georgetown University economics Prof. George J. Viksnins, who has been advising Latvian authorities on how to develop a new monetary system to replace the ruble, says that at least some Baltic products may already be salable on international markets, including “small minivans that I have ridden in that compare favorably with General Motors minivans.”

But other regions of the Soviet Union simply are too dependent on the rest of the system to survive on their own.

“The Soviet Union can be a nation with Lithuania or Byelorussia, and even with Azerbaijan or Georgia,” the Deutsche Bank study notes, but “none (of the republics) is likely to go very far without the other republics.”

Uzbekistan, for example, produces 61% of the Soviet Union’s cotton. But cotton requires large amounts of fertilizer, which must be imported from elsewhere. Also, the largely arid republic is highly dependent on other parts of the Soviet Union for food.

Azerbaijan contains much of the Soviet Union’s oil-refinery capacity. But the oil processed there must travel hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles from fields as distant as Siberia. The Azerbaijanis, who have spent the past several years in open warfare with the neighboring republic of Armenia, so far have not moved for independence, but the republic has a growing nationalist movement.

Armenia is a potentially wealthy agricultural region with some viable industries. But the republic is completely dependent on the outside for its energy supplies and, in addition, is landlocked.

As if those economic problems are not sufficient to cloud the prospects for future independence, the republics all face major political and social problems as they move to separate themselves from Moscow.

Although the republics, theoretically, were designed as national homelands for the major Soviet ethnic groups, in no case do the boundaries actually correspond to where different ethnic groups live.

60 Million Outsiders

Of the Soviet Union’s total population of roughly 287 million, about 60 million citizens live outside their “home” republics, according to U.S. government statistics. Included in those figures are an estimated 25 million Russians, whose presence in areas such as the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltics is the result of official policies--dating to the times of the czars--designed to “Russify” strategic areas.

At the same time, close to 20% of the population of Russia is non-Russian, including dozens of small national groups with semiautonomous regions of their own, some of which supported last week’s coup attempt in hopes of cutting a better deal than they have been able to get from Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Some analysts fear that that sort of ethnic dispersal could lead to fighting if independence moves come too fast. “There’s been a kind of feverish pitch to a lot of the hyperbole out of the republics,” Rice, the former White House specialist, says. While the Baltic republics have been planning their independence moves for years and are certain to go ahead, “with the others, when they take a good hard look at the consequences, it may cause a lot of the republics to reconsider.”

The Ukraine has longstanding border disputes with the Russian Federation--particularly over ownership of the Crimean peninsula, inhabited by large numbers of Russians--and with Lithuania. Russia also has an old border dispute with Kazakhstan to its south.

Already, some advisers to Yeltsin have begun suggesting that Russia might insist on border changes before allowing republics such as the Ukraine and Kazakhstan to break away. Those suggestions have brought furious rejoinders from republic leaders and have led to rising tempers on both sides.

For an example of what the future might hold, Sovietologists point unhappily to the Soviet south, the Transcaucasus, where Armenians, Georgians and Azerbaijanis have been locked in a series of near-civil wars for years.

The fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis began over the question of who has the right to control Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed piece of territory within Azerbaijan that is mostly populated by Armenians. But the warfare quickly spread, leading to large-scale rioting and killing.

Just to the north, in Georgia, the dominant Georgians have been fighting with two smaller ethnic groups--Abkhazians and Ossetians--who claim that they are as badly oppressed by the republic’s rulers in Tblisi as the Georgians are oppressed by Moscow.

Those tensions have been widely covered by the Western media.

But other conflicts, less known to the outside world, have been raging in the far corners of the now-crumbling Soviet empire.

In Lithuania, for example, a large Polish minority centered around the capital, Vilnius, has complained of ill treatment at the hands of the dominant Lithuanians. Far to the south, Uzbeks have been involved in bitter battles with Tadjiks over stretches of fertile land claimed by both groups.

Ethnic Warfare

What Soviet specialists fear most is the kind of grim ethnic warfare that is rending Yugoslavia today. The most positive outcome for the republics would be a somewhat looser version of the Union Treaty that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was trying to push before Soviet right-wingers engineered their coup--a revived federation that would give the republics substantial control over their own affairs but would provide for continued economic cooperation.

Gorbachev has opened negotiations with leaders of some of the republics to see if such a deal can be worked out. But the fevered pitch of independence rhetoric, plus the fears of Russian dominance sparked by Yeltsin’s expanded role, have made that task difficult.

To Rice, the people who will determine whether the union can be preserved or whether it will shatter into tiny parts are likely to be the Russians, Ukrainians and Kazaks. The “big three,” as policy-makers refer to them, are key to any attempt to keep the union together.

And although Western officials in the past tried to stay--at least officially--on the sidelines, they have begun openly telegraphing their desire for the Soviet Union to retain some sort of unity.

A Massive Task

Regardless of how the independence issue is resolved, officials and outside experts say, all the Soviet republics still face a massive task in trying to turn their economies into free markets and away from the stultifying central planning of the past.

Whether they are separate or united, the republics will have to cope with phenomena that they have never handled before, notes David Johnson of PlanEcon, a Washington-based firm that has specialized in the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

“Unemployment, bankruptcies, dislocations, inflation” are all ahead as the conversion to a free market takes place, Johnson says. Regardless of whether they go their separate ways, “all the republics are going to have to go through some rough adjustments.”