NEWS ANALYSIS : New Entities Now Must Find Their Identities

When the leaders of the Soviet Union’s republics proclaimed the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Saturday, they were really announcing the simultaneous--and troubled--births of a dozen new countries.

Stretching across the Eurasian landmass, they remain bound together by an integrated economy, by a shared history, by their need for mutual security.

But politically they differ, and increasingly so, in their struggle to emerge from the collapse of Soviet socialism. Each of those nations, some going back thousands of years in history, has come to feel that its best hope lies in breaking from the others and returning to its own roots.

Powerful forces, ranging from Russian nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism to atavistic tribal hatreds, are now surging into the void left by communism in each of these reborn nations.

In Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia (the latter not yet a member of the commonwealth), political parties that were killed and buried by the Communists three generations ago have come back to life--with greater appeal but limited experience.

“We are trying to solve the problems of 1991 with the same solutions we had in 1921,” an Armenian politician remarked last week, “but it seems we have to settle the problems of 1921 first in order to resolve the ones we have now.”

Through Central Asia, former Communists are battling nationalists for power--and the Communists, though discredited elsewhere, are holding their own. New movements are meanwhile seeking to unite the region’s 60 million Muslims in a sprawling Turkic state that would reshape the world’s geopolitics.

And in Russia, as big and brawny as Boris N. Yeltsin, its president, a thrusting “Russia-first” nationalism is the new political ethic. Europe’s largest nation is reasserting an identity that had been submerged during seven decades of Soviet rule and promising to change the Continent’s course once again.

The passage of the Soviet republics to independence will not be easy.

The Soviet economy, once the world’s second largest, is crumbling faster than officials have been able to devise rescue plans. With prices soaring and widespread unemployment certain, civil unrest is likely. And none of the states are politically stable.

Even as he hailed the creation of the new commonwealth and the freedom it represents for its member states from the Soviet Union, Yeltsin spoke on Saturday of another “time of troubles,” a reference to the 17th-Century turmoil when social discontent and political maneuverings plunged the nation into civil war.

Armenia and Azerbaijan, two members of the commonwealth, are virtually at war with each other now; Georgia is being run with an iron hand by its president amid mounting unrest, and ethnic conflicts are spreading through the rest of the Caucasus Mountains into Russia.

Yet Yeltsin was determined to force the breakup of the Soviet Union.

As the collapse of the Soviet system accelerated over the past four years, Yeltsin concluded, first, that socialism had failed and could not be reformed--and on this he broke with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who until last summer championed socialism.

Yeltsin then came to believe that the Soviet Union, founded on socialism, had also failed as a state and that nothing could be put right within that framework. Until a month ago, he worked with Gorbachev to reconstitute the country on a new political basis, but again broke with him over the fundamental issue of central power, which Yeltsin saw perpetuating socialism.

To the end, Gorbachev had contended that, like socialism, the Soviet Union could be reformed: That a solution to its problems lay in a common, not a divided, approach and that a state built with such sacrifice over so many years was worth preserving.

Whatever merits Gorbachev’s argument had were increasingly ignored as Ukrainians, Armenians and Georgians scented independence, nationalists in Central Asia recalled their grandfathers’ ambitions for a Greater Turkestan and Russians themselves began to ask precisely how did they benefit from so vast, diverse and costly an empire.

The new commonwealth is thus largely a Yeltsin creation--an attempt to preserve a common market for an integrated economy that Russia dominates, a way to calm Western fears about the uncontrolled division of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and an assertion of each nation’s right, first of all Russia’s, to solve its own problems and not be burdened by those of others.

In securing Russia’s liberation from Soviet rule, however, Yeltsin also freed all the other nations that had constituted the ethnic “union republics” of the Soviet Union.

Choosing independence, the other republics backed Yeltsin’s loosely structured commonwealth over Gorbachev’s “confederative state,” and the Soviet era ended, for not only was socialism now dead but so were both the party and the state that had promoted it.

With the exception of Georgia and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the other republics saw sufficient benefits to accept Yeltsin’s terms: Access to the huge Russian market but at the price of accepting Russian economic decisions, an end to Russian subsidies for poorer republics, Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union in international forums such as the United Nations, Russian control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

“It may not have been a great deal for them, but at the end of the day it was the only deal,” a Russian government official commented in Moscow last week.

“Some republics wanted this freedom as badly as we did and saw it as the only way forward, but others were trapped in their own declarations of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ and could not retreat.”

Suddenly free of Moscow, the former Soviet republics are like the British and French colonies of Asia and Africa as they gained independence--beset with economic problems, riven by internal political disputes and far from settled about what course to take.

The Baltic states broke away in September. They had been independent between the two World Wars, but still they are struggling to restructure themselves politically and economically as well as to establish international identities.

Ukrainians voted, 9-1, this month for independence, motivated by an old dream of their own nation-state and convinced of their ability to manage their own affairs better. But serious differences remain with Russia over economic reforms, and the economies of the two republics-turned-states are so integrated that Ukraine may still find itself accepting a diktat from Moscow on price increases, credit policy and internal trade.

And Armenians and Georgians have discovered nation-building to be hard, slow work after declaring their independence earlier this year and then finding themselves beset with even more problems and no easier solutions.