The Hidden Nations/Soviet Disunion
Nahaylo, Bohdan & Karatnycky, Adrian & Diuk, Nadia & Swoboda, Victor
ikhail Gorbachev was eating lrl lunch in the Kremlin the day Lithuania's president, Vytautas Landsbergis, phoned to denounce the massacre of civilians in Vilnius by Soviet troops. The Soviet...
...The Soviet premier, according to news reports from Lithuania, either declined or was not allowed to take the call...
...The notion overlooks that such conjurings of a global catastrophe merely exploit a fundamental confusion regarding nationalism in today's Soviet Union...
...29.95 Peter Keresztes 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 denouncing the Vilnius crackdown and paying a personal visit to Latvia...
...In The Hidden Nations, Karatnycky and his wife Nadia Diuk suggest three possible outcomes: the replacement of glasnost and perestroika with Brezhnevstyle neo-Stalinism...
...But Russians now constitute only about half of the Soviet population of 285 million, and are losing ground to the other, more fecund peoples, especially in Central Asia...
...The "nationalist genie" supposedly unflasked by Gorbachev's glasnost has always been on the loose...
...22.95 SOVIET DISUNION: A HISTORY OF THE NATIONALITIES PROBLEM IN THE USSR Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda The Free Press/432 pp...
...Diuk and Karatnycky concede, on the other hand, that Boris Yeltsin's narrow victory as president of the Russian Federation may be a "sign of the beginnings of a Russian retreat from the empire...
...In January, Yeltsin wasted no time in THE HIDDEN NATIONS: THE PEOPLE CHALLENGE THE SOVIET UNION Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky/William Morrow/284 pp...
...The last the authors see as a possible "transitional phase" toward full sovereignty for the republics...
...The Russian psyche is not prepared to accept minority status...
...Similarly trapped are Gorbachev's liberal admirers, who fret that his failure would reverse the human rights progress the country had been making until recently...
...In the Caucasus, where ferment in 1987 awakened some in the West to the fact that the USSR was far from a harmonious family of nations, the authors met the likes of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a Georgian Helsinki monitor who is convinced that many interethnic conflicts are orchestrated from Moscow as a way of exercising its "imperial policy," an assessment corroborated by Soviet defense minister Dmitri Yazov, who admitted that the military crackdown in the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute in Baku in January 1990 took place to preempt Azerbaijani nationalists from taking over the republic's government...
...His use of force to keep the evil empire intact amounts to a direct attack against its constituent nations...
...It's like being an immigrant in your own country," one Uzbek says...
...The Hidden Nations puts to rest another myth—that a "superior" proconsul is necessary to keep the chernozhopy ("black-asses," the Russian pejorative for Armenians and Azerbaijanis) from butchering one another...
...or the establishment of a confederation or commonwealth— "a low-budget Eurasian version of the European Community...
...On May 16, 1944, for instance, a quarter of a million Crimean Tatars were packed into railway oil tankers and wagons for transport to Central Asia...
...Although Gorbachev later claimed the decision to open fire was made without his knowledge, he nonetheless endorsed the crackdown...
...T he Hidden Nations starts off with a brief, comprehensive survey of the historical, cultural, and economic coercion by the "master" Russians of the fourteen "imprisoned" nations and eighty-seven other large and small ethnic groups...
...Armenian masses demonstrated in 1965...
...The result is top-flight journalism enriched with anecdotes, interviews, and firsthand observations...
...Lenin himself, aware that force would never suffice in holding the empire together, engineered concessions for non-Russians, though he didn't shrink from using the Red Army to capture Baku in 1920 for its oil deposits...
...While such a federalization is behind the Union treaty now bePeter Keresztes is an American journalist based in Brussels...
...The book chronicles from the days of Lenin the fierce fight for survival by the Soviet Union's non-Russian nations in face of a relentless consolidation effort...
...Bukovsky declared his solidarity with the non-Russian majority among Soviet political prisoners, concluding, as Nahaylo and Swoboda recount, "that if those who were imprisoned for defending the rights of their nations were `nationalists,' then he too was one, 'for democracy means freedom both for individuals and for separate nations.' " No less pernicious is the theory that the Soviet system's disintegration, in Gorbachev's words, "is fraught with the destabilization of the political situation in Europe and the world...
...For the Central Asians it adds up to a socialist apartheid...
...ne can assume, then, that the future will bear some resemblance to the turbulent past...
...Stalin and each of his successors underestimated the survival instincts of the "hidden" nations...
...There is a growing sense among Russians of being "under siege...
...As the book observes, "genuine democratization and the preservation of empire, however disguised, are incompatible...
...television networks to task for ignoring "the national dimension of the catastrophe...
...By 1968, their survivors and descendants had collected over 3 million signatures in support of their right to return to Crimea...
...and Crimean Tatars resorted to self-immolation to dramatize their grievances in 1978...
...The Russian nationalists' complaint, according to Diuk and Karatnycky, is that it was their nation which suffered the most from the policies of "a Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian, but fundamentally totalitarian antinational ruling elite" The price of empire, they feel, was a loss of the Russians' "own spiritual roots and national identity...
...Stalin, determined to consolidate the empire once and for all, shot, starved, and deported potential "independentists...
...46 percent died en route...
...In Latvia they encountered Eduard Berklays, a disillusioned former Communist, more accurately a "national Communist," who wound up in Siberia for his efforts to slow the influx of Russians into his country...
...Western conservatives, for instance, cherish the notion that if only the USSR adopted an efficient market economy, prosperity would make happy capitalists of disgruntled separatists...
...He thought the Kremlin cared more for ideology than for empire...
...Anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku had already subsided by the time martial law was introduced, according to leaders of the Azerbaijani Popular Front...
...Diuk, a historian who works as an East European specialist at the National Endowment for Democracy, and Karatnycky, research director for the AFL-CIO Department of International Affairs, based much of their book on travels throughout the Soviet Union...
...Their logic ignores Gorbachev's arbitrary power to roll back the rights of individuals in the interest of the empire...
...The "Elder Brother" —the Russians, whom the authors describe as "the most relentlessly and consistently successful expansionist ethnic group in history" —is indeed primus inter pares...
...As Adrian Karatnycky wrote in these pages last month, "Something has to give," and so it has: there can no longer be any doubt as to which way Gorbachev is leaning on the nationality question...
...More significantly, the Armenians, disillusioned with Moscow's maneuverings, negotiated directly with the Azerbaijanis and achieved a temporary truce and agreements in principle on other issues...
...Non-Russians have resisted Russification and political encroachments on their cultures...
...In Central Asia, where the rapidly growing Muslim and Turkish populations are beginning to realize that they can provide a powerful counterbalance to pan-Slavism, the authors are struck by a 'Pashkent statue of Karl Marx, bearing "more resemblance to Genghis Khan than to a German of Jewish extraction...
...The authors then take a detailed look at each major region of the Soviet empire: the Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Russia itself...
...Andrei Fadin, a leader in the Club for Democratic Perestroika, says that, because dissolution of the empire would affect 25 million Russians who live in the non-Russian republics, he can't see the Russians allowing secessions...
...From the outset, his Bolshevik followers mixed guile with fire to deny the aspirations to autonomy of peoples in Central Asia and the Caucasus...
...All previous attempts to entrap it have failed...
...The call of the people is for something far more profound than, simply, the necessary amelioration of economic injustices...
...Exploited by the cotton monoculture forced on the region, the indigenous population is allowed to work only in the countryside, while Russian factory workers and bureaucrats occupy the dismal cities...
...the collapse of the USSR into independent nation-states...
...ing drafted, it is hardly a long-term solution...
...In the Ukraine the authors found that four years after Chernobyl more than half the children in an area stretching as far as fifty-six miles from the reactor suffer from thyroid disorders...
...Georgian independentists rioted in 1956...
...This quest for identity explains the rise of the Russian ultranationalist group Pamyat, with its simple solutions, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, anti-democratism, and anti-Semitism...
...They branded me a 'bourgeois nationalist' —me...
...a son of poor workers who had never owned anything in his life" Poor Berklays...
...The tanks and troops in the Baltics will be no more successful, except in crushing the ultimate myth that Mikhail Gorbachev was somehow different from his predecessors...
...Diuk and Karatnycky take the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three major U.S...
...He shipped off peoples most Westerners have never heard of—Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Chechens, Ingushi, and Meshkhetians—like bulk commodities from a warehouse...
...Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda add a fourth alternative: the "genuine federalization or 'Yugoslavization' of the USSR...
...Such thinking is merely that of Americans projecting "their own domestic arrangements onto a Soviet setting," as Diuk and Karatnycky put it...
...As of 1970, for instance, half of non-Russians and three out of four Central Asians couldn't communicate in Russian...
...National movements in non-Russian republics, Diuk and Karatnycky write, "have much in common with the liberal nationalism that swept Europe in 1848 and little in common with the revanchism, imperialism, and fascism that provided the coloration of European nationalisms of the 1920s and 1930s...
...In the long run, determination, time, and demographics will favor the parts over the whole...
...Both works debunk numerous myths about Soviet nationality policy...
...He has plenty of Russian supporters in Moscow and Leningrad, who have taken to the streets in solidarity with the Balts...
...Soviet Disunion is a lucid account of that history by Bohdan Nahaylo, a British-born writer and broadcaster on Soviet Affairs who is a senior research analyst for Radio Liberty in Munich, and Victor Swoboda, honorary research fellow at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in the University of London...
...As dissident Vladimir Bukovsky said in a statement from prison in 1975, human rights are inseparable from national rights...
...Ukrainian and Baltic guerrillas remained active until 1952-53...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
