NEWS ANALYSIS : Commonwealth a New Creature--With Echoes

As if they had plunged into a medieval ritual hailing a new monarch even while mourning the old king, the republics of the disintegrating Soviet Union are shouting, “The union is dead! Long live the commonwealth!”

It is a puzzling process, for everything and nothing seems to be changing. Some of the republics, such as Ukraine, that struggled so hard to break with the Soviet Union and establish their independence are now eager to join its successor.

So, what has been the point--just to change the name, to reshape the government structure, to strip power from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to write a new constitution?

All of this--and more.

Although it will occupy most of the same space--perhaps in time politically, militarily and economically as well as geographically--the Commonwealth of Independent States is a new creature.

Its philosophical foundation, oriented toward political pluralism and a market economy, is strikingly different from that of the Soviet Union. Its loose organizational structure should be the antithesis of tight Kremlin control. And it looks toward the 21st Century in the same way that the European Community’s new plans for political and economic integration do.

Yet, it is paradoxical that, in the same declaration in which they pronounced the Soviet Union dead last weekend, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus began to form their new commonwealth largely to do many of the things that the old state did.

On Friday, those three Slavic republics were joined by the five Central Asian republics, some of whose leaders had initially denounced the dissolution of the Soviet Union as unconstitutional but which now wish to become “founder-members” of the commonwealth. Several other Soviet republics, including Armenia, are likely to join next week.

This new state will thus look very much like the old one, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, then across the Eurasian landmass to the Pacific Ocean. Its population will be close to the 295 million that the Soviet Union had. Only Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the now-independent Baltic states, have broken away completely.

And its economy, based on immense natural resources and on a huge if aged industrial base, could, with its transformation from state ownership and central planning to entrepreneurship and market forces, once again become the second largest in the world.

The new state, too, will be a nuclear power, the inheritor of the vast Soviet strategic arsenal, retaining more missiles and warheads than the United States has.

What is changing in all this, and fundamentally so, are the basic goals and structure of what has been the Soviet Union, one of the world’s most powerful states. Even as the vast Soviet empire collapses, finally the victim of its own inherent flaws, the new commonwealth of nations is growing with the potential to make as historic an impact as its predecessor did.

This new commonwealth is, first of all, not Soviet, but as complete a break as its founders can conceive with the state socialism that the Bolsheviks, victors in the 1917 Russian Revolution, made the underpinning ideology of the Soviet Union.

In place of socialism, there will be nationalism, or rather many different nationalisms, as a defining purpose, though a new constitution must still be written.

Taught for three generations to think of themselves as Soviet citizens, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians will now begin to form nation-states, typical of Europe, and to pursue their own national development rather than class struggle and world revolution.

“Internationalism,” which the Bolsheviks believed would permit ethnic groups to live in harmony despite past enmity as well as spread the ideals of socialism, had deprived people of a motivating sense of self-identity, and, in that, greatly contributed to the alienation that gnawed at the Soviet system from within.

And just as the Soviet Union was formally established in 1922 to give socialism a state structure for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to develop, the founders of the new commonwealth intend it to promote an open democracy and a free-market economy.

Secondly, the commonwealth is not a union, subordinating its members to a strong central government. It is a pragmatic alliance of nations whose economies, security and peoples have become so mutually dependent over centuries that cutting them apart has for the most part proved impossible and unwise.

In the week when the European Community moved to integrate not only the economies but the political institutions of Western Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union seemed historically wrong, a refusal to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

But Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin and the other republic leaders asserted that only a voluntary union formed by truly independent states could work, as it had in Western Europe. The commonwealth they propose is close, in fact, to the European Community in its promotion of a common market, its desire to coordinate economic policies and its concept of mutual security.

Gorbachev was correct, the republic leaders acknowledged, when he insisted again and again over the last year on unity as a defense against political and economic collapse. But they argued that the unity must come from among the republics and not be imposed from Moscow.

As envisioned, the commonwealth will be pulled together not so much by the broad declarations issued from its summit meetings but by a series of bilateral and multilateral treaties among the member states.

Agreements have already been reached, Yeltsin says, on joint control over government spending, fiscal policy, coordination of foreign trade and a uniform currency. Russia slowed its plans for radical economic reform, including major price increases, to allow the other republics to catch up; in turn, it received commitments that they would match those changes.

Although some republics, notably Ukraine, want their own armies, the commonwealth’s founding members committed themselves to a single strategic force, controlling their nuclear weapons under a joint command with the declared goal of nuclear disarmament.

Finally, this new commonwealth is not a product of the old Soviet Union, its Bolshevism and its failures. It was not conceived in the unrepresentative councils of that system. It, thus, is not tainted with the political illegitimacy that now attaches to everything that the Communists created.

It resulted from a coming together of republics that had broken with the Soviet Union, either declaring their independence from Moscow or through dismantling the old Soviet political and economic structures. First proposed a year ago at a meeting of the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the commonwealth was championed by men who won convincing mandates from their electorates.

Gorbachev’s proposals, first for a federal state, then for a “confederative state,” failed this crucial test. However rational they were on paper and whatever initial acceptance they won, his political blueprints were products of a system now widely rejected as unjust; he had sought only the broadest of mandates from voters last spring to “preserve” the union.

In what seems to have been a valedictory press conference with Soviet journalists this week, Gorbachev complained, “We are now making the biggest mistake since the beginning of perestroika . . . . We are destroying a state when it needs to be reformed.”

But Yeltsin and the others who founded the commonwealth contended with equal conviction that only by destroying the Soviet state can the fundamental political and economic reforms that they envision, even more than Gorbachev, finally be undertaken.