In 1989, with the start of this series—so many momentous events ago—there existed a Soviet Union and, within it, there had been Soviet republics (all socialist!). The entirety was imperially presided over by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Chairman of the Communist Party and President of the USSR.

The world changed on August 19, 1991. On that date, a self-styled “Emergency Committee” of conservative Politburo members attempted to derail and reverse the process of structural reform that had started some six years earlier under the sponsorship of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The coup backfired two days later because its leaders misunderstood a central political fact of life after perestroika—namely, that political events could no longer be scripted to suit the changing tastes of the party elitte. While the plotters probably suspected as much—indeed, that was one of the reasons why they initiated the coup in the first place—their mistake was in overestimating their capacity to put a stop to this “state of anarchy.” While the vast majority of Soviet citizens acted precisely as the Emergency Committee expected them to—with utter indifference to the ultimate outcome of this elite power struggle—a small minority did not. It was this opposition, not only in the streets, but within party, military, and security organs, that defeated the coup and ushered in the momentous changes that we are experiencing today.

On the theatrical stage, the term “dénouement“ refers to the resolution of a dramatic complication. On the stage of world events, few historical periods can rival the present situation in the Soviet successor states for satisfying this definition more exactly. On December 21, 1991, eleven men—all, ironically, former communist party officials—signed an agreement in Alma-Ata, Kazakhastan, resolving that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “henceforth will cease to exist.” With this announcement, the “Soviet experiment” came to an end and a new world, inchoate and uncertain, began to emerge.

Alexander Motyl (Chair): Introductory Remarks

This is the fourth and final Conference sponsored by the Program on Nationality and Siberian Studies. While you are witnessing the final act of this particular institution, the traditions of this program—that is, the study of the former Soviet republics and their nationalities—will be carried on by the Harriman Institute.

The Bends, otherwise known as Caisson Disease, is according to my dictionary, “a condition marked by paralysis, pain, etc., developed in coming from an atmosphere of high pressure, as in a caisson, to air of ordinary pressure, and caused by the formation in the blood of bubbles…” The malady of Bends, provides a metaphor, if not too closely scrutinized, for the condition of the successor states of the former USSR.

While some groups are discovering new opportunities in the shifting political and economic structures of the former Soviet Union, others are finding that their paths towards upward social mobility have become less clear or blocked. There are also growing regional differences in benefits and losses. Although privileges in the old system often translate into advantages in the new, a contracting economy and the redrawing of political boundaries are altering the social order.

The migration and settlement of Russians throughout the former Soviet Union in combination with rising nationalism have resulted in a set of conditions that will probably result in considerable national conflict. From an operational perspective, the subjective definition of a nation is the most useful. A nation is a self-defining community whose members claim a common ancestry and a common destiny. They also claim a common geographic origin, the national homeland, over which they claim an exclusive, proprietary right. In fact, nations seek to ensure their destiny by controlling the national homeland for the benefit of their nation, and by promoting the indigeneous nation to a dominant, preferential position. A primordial connection between nation and homeland—blood and soil—is claimed, which results in a geographic or spatial identity, imbued with great emotion as the sacred ancestral land. The national homeland is delimited and justified by either history, demography, or both. Although demographic dominance can generally be claimed by only one nation, the historical claim can be made by more than one, and frequently the demographic claim is reinforced by the historical argument. Most national and ethnic conflict is provoked by conflicting claims to the homeland or aliens residing in the national homeland. Thus, as a rule, the more ethnically homogeneous the homeland, the less the conflict among nations. Of course, this is not always the case. A major national goal is ethnic homogeneity in the national homeland, as various restrictive language, citizenship, and immigration laws demonstrate. Yet this aim will not be sought at the expense of control over ancestral territory.

This is a presentation that will be more concerned with impressions than with numbers. I suppose we could count the number of theaters or schools that have gone out of business. Yet I am not sure that would be an advantage in a presentation about culture. Two years ago, I was having lunch at a Theater Institute in Alma-Ata. It was a very special occasion because that morning they had just slaughtered a horse for us. And as my host told me this, he loooked me right in the eye and said, “You know, this is freshly-killed horse meat. We did it just for you.” As I responded, I returned his gaze, and said: “I love it.” And actually, it was very good, but remember that the Kazakhs, like all people of the East, are very sensitive to how people from the West regard them. That is but one small demonstration of this tendency. Another was that in the course of the meal someone suddenly came in and whispered something to someone else—remember the date, late May 1990—and everyone stood up and cheered. And I asked, “What's happened?” Somebody else said, “Yeltsin has been elected.” Two people at the table subsequently made mention of Yeltsin's popularity in the non-Russian areas and said that that this was an exciting development. Kazakhs really thought that this was a change for the better. And they were right.

We should not be surprised if we find each of the former republics of the Soviet Union placing foremost in their foreign policy the desire to achieve a truly recognized statehood. Obviously, developing their constitutions, and internal political and economic structures, is an internal matter, but it is closely related, of course, with the foreign policy that they can pursue. The principal aim of a foreign policy—just as perhaps the principal aim of an individual—is self-preservation. And once the entity has been created, either because of a long struggle of important forces within the society or, in a few cases, because independence is handed to them due to events elsewhere, the fact is that once you are independent you must act in a way that defends your independence. You defend the ability of whatever political system you have to make its own autonomous decisions. And I believe that what we are seeing today reflects this imperative. We see it most spectacularly, of course, in the jockeying of Russia and Ukraine within the Commonwealth of Independent States.

I'll start with culture. Today we have been speaking principally about culture in the republics. I would like to address the common problems facing the post-Soviet republics. I agree with Edward Allworth that there is a crisis or trauma not only for the national intellectuals, but for intellectuals as a whole. This is especially a trauma for intellectuals who were supported by the state. They had very comfortable lives inside the institutes and the cultural unions. Now these privileges are disappearing. Previously intellectuals’ lives were characterized by a kind of self-adoration of their positions, of their purity, of their disengagement from political life, and this stance is now also in crisis. Recently, I read a very interesting article which said that today nobody wants to engage in the escapist literature that was once so popular. Nobody wants to hear about themes of history, of Egypt, the Silver Age, and so on because politics is now the hot topic in cultural life. A similar situation occurred in the Prague Spring, and we know that the results in this case were very fruitful. Havel, who was a very sophisticated journal writer, became a very contemporary, very active, and essential writer. And I consider this crisis, this struggle of intellectuals, a good sign. The people who will survive will be those whom other people read. Conversely, Chengiz Aitmatov, who was long a friend of the national struggle, who made a name for himself as a writer concerned with conditions in Kirgizia, and who was a defender of the national traditions, now prefers to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. While I was very surprised by this, this is also typical of the struggle to which I refer. Secondly, as Professor Allworth noted, it is true that Kazakh leaders

I am very pleased and very honored to be a participant in this discussion. In order to understand the situation in the former Soviet Union, we must first realize that there were many backward areas that never fulfilled their Five Year Plans, yet which coexisted with areas that developed much more rapidly. To understand this fact is to look into the future of the successor states. It points to factors that will influence why some states will have constitutions and why these constitutions will often be quite similar if we speak about the future of their political systems.

Alexander Motyl

In this discussion, let us exclude economic issues altogether. While I would not presume to fill an economist's shoes, I would like to rephrase one or two issues from a political scientist's perspective that might then be worthy of discussion. This rephrasing is essential because the discussion of economic reform in the Soviet Union has been noticeably lacking in any kind of context or any appreciation of the genuine political situation in the Soviet Union. What strikes me in the economists’ discussions of what should be done in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland is that, by and large, there is very little consideration paid to precisely the issues that have been raised by today's presentations. There is almost no consideration of the constitutional and political confusion referred to by John Hazard; very little talk about the social decompression and the societal problems described by Peter Juviler; complete ignorance of the gender, equality, and age conflicts addressed by Michael Paul Sacks; virtually no appreciation of the ethnic conflicts discussed by Robert Lewis; no understanding whatsoever of the cultural problems pointed out by Edward All worth; and very little appreciation of the security dilemmas referred to by Jack Matlock. In other words, the economic discussion, even if theoretically correct, and reflective of the best textbook version of what should be done in such circumstances, seems to be totally disembodied from any of these other contextual realities, and thus, almost foreordained to fail.

Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Negotiating a New Life: Burdens of Empire and Independence—the Case of the Baltics

The Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 but, dying, gave birth to many new shoots of life, each struggling to survive and flourish despite great difficulties. Devolution of empire rarely proceeds without pain; it often causes, or results from, great violence. The first year of independent life for the successor states of the USSR witnessed much less violence than attended the demise of other great empires in this century. None had to fight for liberation as did Algeria and Angola. The fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia does not approach the violence seen in the breakup of India, the attempted secessions of Katanga and Biafra, or the Croatian-Serbian war.

In the aftermath of the coup of August 19,1992, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet or Verkhovna Rada passed a Declaration of Independence whose approval was to be put to a referendum three months later. Shortly thereafter, as happened in many other republics, the local Communist Party was banned. Even though its organizational existence may have been snuffed out, its representatives continued to live on in posts both in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet and within the state and economic structures. Throughout the fall of 1991, Ukraine attempted to steer clear of participation in the decaying structures of central power, seeking to remain aloof from the Nova Ogoreva process that sought to fashion a new Union Treaty. Ukrainian elites pursued such a course even though the newly envisioned Union would provide the republics with powers beyond those that were ceded to the republics under the previous Union Treaty of Sovereign States. The ostensible reason for their political demurral was the unwillingness of Ukrainian elites to compromise the forthcoming referendum on independence by getting involved in any organization or structures that would unduly constrain the exercise of independence. On December 1, 1991, the referendum on Ukrainian national independence was finally held. As far as Ukrainian nationalists were concerned, the referendum was a great success: with strong support not only where one would expect it, i.e., in the Western and Central Ukraine, but also in regions considered most likely to fear, and thus least likely to support, Ukrainian independence—Russians in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. Russians in Crimea, and Ruthenians, Hungarians, and Romanians in Western Ukraine. The strong support of these minorities notwithstanding, it is not a forgone conclusion that secessionist politics within Ukraine (rather than of Ukraine) has been finally been put to rest. In fact, this trend bears watching in coming years in Ukraine.

If the eight months since the August coup have shown us nothing else, it is that the “nationalities problem” not only will survive the death of the Soviet Union but may well intensify. For Russia in particular the past year has witnessed what might be called the “The Nationality Problem—Round II” whereby many of the same pressures that brought down the Soviet Union are now mounting within the Russian Federation (or simply, “Russia”—the delegates at the recent Congress of Peoples’ Deputies were unable to settle on a single name). There are many ironies about all this, but let me just cite a few.

A year ago it was still possible to review events within the regional confines of Transcaucasia. The three republics constituted a logical sub-unit of the Soviet Union. Subsequent events, however, no longer permit such a tidy delineation. A revolution is taking place: the Raspad, or Great Collapse, of which the dissolution of the USSR was but the beginning of a major political reshufflement throughout Eurasia, a continuing process that is still playing itself out in the entire Caucasian region. The demise of the trans-continental Soviet empire has left the three Transcaucasian successor states separated by international borders from the Russian Federation, Iran, and Turkey as well as from one another. Nevertheless, the dynamics of ethnic-fueled fragmentation, which initially helped bring down the power of Moscow, continues to gnaw away in defiance of any artificial frontiers, most of which cut through ethnic communities. Revisionist ethnic activities thrive on either sides of frontiers, especially those shared by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and the Russian Federation, thereby forcing one to consider the whole of Caucasia as the proper area of evaluation for the crucial year 1991-2. North and south of the mountainous divide, ethnic-driven politics proves all too clearly that the energies of the Raspad are anything but spent.

The current situation in former Soviet Central Asia has been formed by two sets of factors: long-term developments which are the direct results of decades of Soviet rule; and specific trends that are more characteristic of the pre-independence decade.

I am not sure how to respond to these presentations since they were all very different in form and content. Maybe that says something about the monster with which we are trying to grapple.

Motyl

I would like to pursue some of the ideas raised by Mark von Hagen and the other speakers, synthesizing some of the many themes and topics that have been raised. What has been implicit in much of the discussion in the morning and in the afternoon is the most obvious development of the last year—that is that the Soviet Union actually collapsed. This is a phenomenal event, not simply because it happened without the intercession of a major world war, but because the place was so big and powerful. Further, it raises a critical question because, inasmuch as external violence was not involved in the collapse, inasmuch as it is logically unsound to implicate the Estonians, or the Armenians, or the Ukrainians, we are drawn inevitably to conclude that the internal dynamics of this particular kind of political system had something to do with the collapse.

Panelists

Professor John Hazard, School of Law, Columbia University