Nationalism in the Soviet Union
Lourie, Richard
Te specter of civil war is often raised in prognostications about the future of the Soviet Union, the great guessing game of the late twentieth century. When asked about the possibility,...
...The Baltic states, acting in concert with the Ukraine, could present Moscow with a joint ultimatum for independence...
...The current adhesive is the fear that moving too suddenly might cause the whole gigantic, dilapidated edifice to collapse...
...Sometime after the grand collapse, Russia and the Ukraine might well decide to unite for economic and security reasons...
...Lenin's rallying cry was "All power to the Soviets...
...They put the "union" in the Soviet Union...
...Spontaneous councils of workers would spring up in the coal fields of Siberia and the Ukraine just as they did in 1917 and again in the summer of 1989 when the miners decided that the state had violated the social contract by failing to supply them with soap...
...Who knows, this new entity might even be called . . . the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR for short...
...When asked about the possibility, Andrei Sakharov could only gasp and quote Pushkin: "God save us from a Russian revolt, merciless and blind...
...It was known as the Cheka, an acronym for "Emergency Committee to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage...
...But there were means for that...
...Civil war, which has smoldered throughout Soviet history, would flare up (Continued on page 288) 262 • DISSENT Does the Soviet Onion Exist?, continued from page 262...
...considerable convincing was required...
...only six men died...
...The Armenians and Azerbaijanis have given ample proof that they do not identify as Soviet citizens, by going for each other's throats the moment they felt Kremlin control weaken...
...But no sooner had they vanquished the Whites than the Bolsheviks discovered their true enemy was the people itself...
...No party received a majority, but, fascinatingly, 80 percent of the electorate voted far left...
...And where a political Chernobyl may yet occur...
...Officially, the Russian Civil War lasted from 1917 to 1920...
...The emergency never ended...
...And counterrevolution was hardly over when the White Army sailed across the Black Sea to Constantinople in 1920...
...They had won the coup d'etat chess game, taking the enemy's king, the Winter Palace...
...Perhaps the Russians would vote in extreme left socialists just as they did in 1917...
...But the Bolsheviks could not have taken power without the spontaneously created councils, known as soviets of revolutionary workers and soldiers...
...As soon as the outbreak of the Second World War liberated the Ukraine from Communist dominance, large numbers of Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis...
...The Bolsheviks' only claim to legitimacy was that they had kept their heads when all around them others were losing theirs, some quite literally...
...The role of terror as social glue is clear in the case of all the original republics...
...This union was not entered into freely...
...Overnight, the Soviet Union could cease to exist, no great trick since there was never any such thing in the first place...
...What he meant was all power to his party, the Bolsheviks...
...What would happen then...
...The Bolsheviks had been an embattled minority from November 1917, when, in the USSR's only free election until 1989, the Bolsheviks received 20 percent of the votes, less than half of what the Socialist Revolutionaries got...
...The Bolsheviks stole the election, the revolution, and even the name "soviet," which they used when forming the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in 1922...
...And other of the original republics might also join in, if only to protect themselves against ethnic gang war...
...But the question is posed in the wrong tense because the Soviet Union has been in a state of civil war ever since the October revolution...
...It was a relatively bloodless affair...
...The key to the whole business is, of course, the Ukraine—fifty million people, a great source of food, coal, steel, electrical power—where Chernobyl occurred...
...The first secret police was founded a mere six weeks after the revolution...
...At that time the USSR consisted of Russia, the Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan...
...And even that is being tested...
...The peasants were revolting, the workers were striking, even the radical sailors of Kronstadt took up arms against the Bolsheviks in 1921...
...But if it has been the threat and use of force that have held the Soviet Union together, what will keep it in one piece if people become convinced that the threat has become empty...
...The Baltic states know the situation is not ripe yet for complete independence and may be waiting until other parts of the USSR catch up with them in seeing that there is no freedom without sovereignty...
...Ten million people died in battle or from disease and executions...
...Local nuclei of power, the soviets controlled regiments, factories, neighborhoods, towns...
...again—or Moscow would simply have to face facts...
...q 288 • DISSENT...
...Proportionally, Georgia suffered more than any other republic under Stalin, who always found his native land's allegiance suspect...
...Perhaps those councils would retain their historical name as soviets...
...The Bolsheviks, who, soon after the Civil War, changed their name to the Communist party, could never have held on to their monopoly of power if it had not been for the secret police...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
