The State of Nations: The Ex-Soviet Union and Its Peoples

...They have discovered that only a small proportion of the non-Russians (between 5 and 10 percent) want to secede from Russia, but 40 percent to 60 percent desire more autonomy and equal treatment by the center...

...Would Russia become a true federation, with power shared between the center and the regions and republics, or would it become a unitary state...

...In his struggle against Gorbachev and the Soviet central power, Yeltsin supported the ambitions of non-Russian republics...

...Reintegration" of the old Soviet Union gained broad support...

...But when Lukashenko spoke publicly about a tight union between Russia and Belarus, Yeltsin characterized the effort as "deep integration leading to confederation...

...what powers the center will allow the regions and republics and what powers they in turn can keep from the center remains the great unknown...

...U.S...

...This tragedy disproportionately affected local Russians, who actually made up 94 • DISSENT The Ex-Soviet Union the majority of the population of Groznyi and had less chance to flee to mountain villages...

...As conditions worsen, some Russians have been leaving many of the national republics, in the same way that they have migrated from Central Asia and Transcaucasia back into Russia...

...In most of the Russian Federation ethnic Russians are demographically dominant...

...In Moscow there would be a bicameral national legislature with the lower house, the Duma, representing the population in general and the upper house, the Council of the Federation, representing the eighty-nine regions and republics...

...He was immediately elected leader of the council and, with a small band of armed men, he marched to the Communist party headquarters and seized power...

...The native peoples tend to live in the countryside, are more traditional in their lifestyles, and tend to have higher birth rates, while Russians live in cities, work in industry, the professions, or government, and have fewer children...

...Economic progress required the end of state controls in the economy and real privatization, which meant eliminating the Com92 • DISSENT The Ex-Soviet Union munist nomenklatura, the main obstacle to democracy...

...A New Russia Boris Yeltsin's Russia was a new state...

...Along with their neighbors, the Ingushi, they speak a North-Central Caucasian language unrelated to any other and said by linguists to have been native to this area since prehistoric times...

...As the economy spiraled downward through 1992 and 1993, regions and republics were burdened with providing social services locally without funding from the center...

...never before had an independent state existed within these borders...

...The fallout from the war in Chechnya, the depressed economy, and the general lawlessness and insecurity in Russian society turned many people, among them non-Russians, away from Yeltsin and the self-styled democrats to seek alternatives to the current chaos...

...But there was no consensus among the Russian political elite, let alone the broader population, about the internal and external contours of the new Russia or the reach of its military and political power...

...Protector of the Russian diaspora...

...The Council of the Federation called on the Duma to reconsider...

...Now, as the head of independent Russia, Yeltsin's task was to stop the fragmentation process he himself had encouraged earlier...

...With war raging in Chechnya and hostility toward "peoples of Caucasian complexion" simmering in Moscow, the threat of ethnic conflict in post-Soviet Russia remains real...

...Still, Chechnya was less the result of a visceral Russian expansionism, as feared in the West, than it was a spasmodic imperial response by a leadership afraid that the country faced a Soviet-style disintegration...

...Yeltsin was prepared to move against Dudaev but was restrained by the Russian parliament...

...Yeltsin's team decided quite early to treat all fifteen of the former Soviet republics as sovereign and independent states and to forgo imperial claims over their freedom of action...

...and between Chechens and Russians over the Chechens' desire to secede from the new Russia...

...Not surprisingly, mistrust of Moscow also grew...

...These findings come from a team of Russian researchers that has investigated attitudes in four republics and uncovered a broad range of responses to the post-Soviet condition...

...Ominously the turnout in Tatarstan was extremely low, and Chechnya did not participate in the election at all...

...While the Lithuanians simply accepted all permanent inhabitants as citizens, Estonia and Latvia instituted restrictive language and settlement requirements that for a time disenfranchised the large Russian and Russo-speaking minorities...

...Russian journalists and political entrepreneurs speak of the danger of the "Muslim crescent," the band of Muslim peoples that extends from the North Caucasus through the center of Russia up the Volga...

...They were active in Imam Shamil's wars against czarist Russia in the midnineteenth century and resisted Soviet power during the revolution and civil war...

...Heaving but not yet sinking, Russia and a number of other republics have navigated the shoals of ethnicity and kept their weak and leaking states afloat...

...The fate of Yugoslavia still hovers over the former Soviet Union but it remains a possibility, not an inevitability, in Russia...

...In conditions of economic distress, this "renationalization" of local power gives nonRussians a great advantage in contests over the redistribution of influence, social advantage, and even wealth...

...The Chechnya Crisis The only republic that refused to sign on to Yeltsin's federation was Chechnya, which had declared itself an independent state in late 1991...

...The Chechnya fighting also demonstrated the extent to which the Russian army had disintegrated...

...Finally, in frustration and desperation, Yeltsin overthrew the legislature in September 1993, bloodily repressed its resistance to his unconstitutional move, removed regional leaderships—even those democratically elected, and pushed through a new Constitution that was barely (if at all) approved by voters...

...Even as they distanced themselves from Gorbachev's hesitant reform style and dove headlong into radical restructuring of the state and economy, the Yeltsinites accepted the former government's notion that economic, political, and nationality reform had to be carried out simultaneously...

...However, the dominant nationalities in each of the republics embarked on nationalizing programs—enforcing language laws, changing street signs to the official lanSUMMER • 1996 • 91 The Ex-Soviet Union guage of the republic—that forced the Russians, whom they considered "occupiers," to make the choice between emigration and conformity to the rules of the newly dominant nations...

...Islamic fundamentalism, some claimed, would infect the traditionally Muslim peoples of the south and the Volga region...

...Some selfdeclared republics, like the Urals, reverted quietly to regions again, and even recalcitrant Tatarstan became less confrontational and began to compromise with Moscow...

...In 1944 Stalin exiled the Chechens and Ingushi to Central Asia as alleged collaborators with the Nazi invaders...

...Local Russians had long lived in peace with the Chechens, and even in the heat of the fighting they weren't the victims of any atrocities...

...Moscow was so weak and divided that it was unable either to discipline the resistant regions or republics or to reward the more loyal ones...

...Tens of thousands perished during the journey and the resettlement process...

...Attempts to subvert the Dudaev government failed, as did mercenary military operations in November 1994...

...As a consequence of all these factors, Russians are usually overrepresented in the local intelligentsias...

...Most of the Soviet republics were not ethnically homogeneous...

...He quickly backed down since it was obvious that trying to shift borders would have launched a ruinous war of all against all...

...At the same time non-Russian peoples within the federation were given a brutal lesson about the consequences of secessionism...

...Their response was to withhold locally gathered taxes due to the federal authorities...

...The Russian state, like those in other former Soviet republics, is still gelatinous...

...Russians left "abroad"— in Central Asia, Crimea, and the Baltic Republics —would become tinder for conflagrations...

...His image as a democrat, already sullied by his action against the Parliament a year earlier, was tarnished...

...Secretary of State Warren Christopher strongly criticized the resolution and turned up the heat by supporting emphatically an expansion of NATO...

...At the same time, politicians tried to trump one another as champions of "reintegration...

...The right to secede remained unclear...

...Then, by an even more overwhelming majority, it affirmed the March 1991 referendum in which voters had supported the formation of a Union of Sovereign Republics, which was then being developed by Gorbachev...

...A chorus of leaders from other former Soviet republics denounced the Duma too...

...Relations between Russians and non-Russians have not been particularly hostile and tend to be more harmonious in republics like Tatarstan where the ratio of the two communities is in rough parity...

...The Soviet Union presented itself as a mosaic of ethnic cultures protected by the state, though ethnicity was always seen as something quaint and particular, eventually to be transcended through universal economic progress toward modern, socialist society...

...Elaborate affirmative action programs, beginning with the policy of korenizatsiia (nativization) in the 1920s, promoted people from the local nationality in the ethnic regions and republics...

...The potential for conflict remains, but somehow it has been contained and channeled in other directions...

...Even where lines on maps were not contested, disputes arose over membership in the nation, although usually (at least so far) without violence...

...Should Moscow be the mediator of ethnic conflicts...

...between Georgians, Abkhazians, and Ossetians over the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within a Georgian state...

...Under pressure from BorisYeltsin's Russia and with the mediation of international commissions, the Baltic leadership eventually moderated its policies, avoiding the potential violence that plagued the Caucasus and Moldova...

...thus distinctions between regions and republics remained A series of bloody conflicts erupted precisely over the definition and boundaries of the new nation-states--between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over whether the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh would remain in Azerbaijan, be joined to neighboring Armenia, or become an independent republic...

...Ruler in its traditional sphere of interest...

...Take as much power as you can swallow," he told an eager audience in Tatarstan in August 1990...

...The democratic and seemingly peaceful Baltic republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—sought to define the contours of the nation through new citizenship laws...

...The USSR was an unevenly modernized society where one could encounter in major cities the modern and traditional side-byside, the diesel truck and the horse-drawn cart, Muslims in business suits and robes and turbans, women in miniskirts and peasant scarves...

...The president was empowered to reject regional decisions that he considered unconstitutional, and the Duma had the right to overrule the Council's veto of ordinary legislation...

...A highly rural society organized in clans related to dialect groups, Chechens are remarkably cohesive as a nationality, especially when confronted with threats from the outside...

...What was to be its role in the "Near Abroad...

...Also in the Russian republic there was a violent dispute over borders and territory between the tiny North Caucasian republics of Alania (North Ossetia) and Ingushetia...

...Identity Crisis Almost five years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has not consolidated its own identity, has not settled on what kind of state it will become or what form the nation within it will take...

...When analysts consider minorities in the new Russian state, they usually mean the non-Russians, but in eleven of the twenty-one national republics Russians actually constitute the minority, though hardly an endangered one...

...Russian foreign minister Evgenii Primakov warned that the decision weakened Russia's credibility abroad and strengthened advocates of NATO expansion into eastern Europe...

...And ten republics claimed that their laws were higher than those of the federation...

...The war went badly from the beginning...

...Violence and Boundaries The experience of the former Soviet Union suggests that violence is most likely when the boundaries of a nation or state are in dispute...

...Was Russia to become a nation-state of the ethnic Russian people, or a state of all peoples of Russia, or the core of a reconstituted imperial state...

...The belief that ethnic difference must lead to ethnic conflict and even to ethnic cleansing has not been borne out by the postSoviet experience...

...The Russian and non-Russian populations are interwoven in complex ways...

...Chechen resistance led to the destruction of Groznyi, a city of four hundred thousand, by the Russian military and to a massive flow of refugees into the neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan...

...Real power lay in the hands of Yeltsin and the Duma...

...Several Russian regions declared themselves to be sovereign "republics" even without the usual ethnic requirements...

...But Estonia (61.5 percent Estonian), Latvia (52 percent Latvian), and Kyrgyzstan (52.4 percent Kyrgyz) could be considered binational states, with very large Russian or Slavic minorities, and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan were actually a minority of the republic's population (39 percent...

...Never fully sovereign and often subjected to campaigns of Russification, the non-Russians of the Soviet Union nevertheless managed not only to preserve aspects of their traditional culture but in many ways to gain the levers of cultural power...

...Nationalists at times attempt to realize their dream of every nation having its own state, and every state having one nation, but such congruence can be achieved only through violence, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide...

...Second, non-Russians have institutions through which they can exercise their power, at least locally, and work within the system to shape their own future...

...Everything depended, in turn, on maintaining the state, no longer in its hypercentralized deformity but as a federation with power sharing among center, regions, and republics...

...By a vote of 250 to 98, it renounced the decision of the Russian Supreme Soviet of December 1991 to abrogate the 1922 treaty that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...

...The result was a highly asymmetrical federalism in which ethnic republics ended up with more rights over their "land, minerals, water, flora and fauna" than did Russian regions...

...Yeltsin's team set out to create a democratic polity, a free-market capitalist economy, and a federal state structure to accommodate the ethnically and regionally diverse population...

...In the Volga region, however, there are concentrated populations of Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashi, Udmurts, Mordva, Mari, and Komi...

...Ironically, the only elected figure who could claim a legitimate connection with the old USSR was Yeltsin himself, who had been elected president of the Russian Soviet republic in June 1991...

...At the same time, internal borders within those republics were preserved, and 90 • DISSENT The Ex-Soviet Union The Transcaucasian States Reprinted by permission of Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Washington, D.C...

...At the time of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, a council of Chechen elders invited Jokhar Dudaev, then a high-ranking Chechen air force officer vacationing at home though scheduled to return to his unit in the Baltics, to speak to the gathering...

...Yet even in Russia, a look at an ethnographic map shows that the greatest concentration of Russians is in European Russia and along the southern border, extending out to the Pacific Ocean...

...It clearly reflected Yeltsin's willingness to impose his own vision, vague as it was...

...Asymmetry There was also no agreement about Russia's internal structure and its self-conception as a nation...

...The wreckage of those who failed lies all around, and no one can know what lies ahead...

...Since the Gorbachev years, however, nonRussians have increased their hold on official state positions and cultural institutions in the republics...

...between the Slavic people of Transdneistria, who feared integration into a Romanianizing Moldovan republic...

...In the last years of Soviet power non-Russians in the union republics, as well as the national enclaves of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Sakha-Yakutia, and Chechnya within Russia itself intensified their claims against the center and accumulated political power in their designated national homelands...

...To create a new state from the core of the one that had just been abolished was a formidable task...

...Nationality was preserved on the internal passports carried by every adult Soviet citizen, and politics and social life were colored by the everpresent consciousness of who was what ethnically...

...Yeltsin invited Belorussian president Aleksandr Lukashenko to Moscow where they agreed to create a new "unity" between the two Slavic republics...

...Patriarchal yet roughly egalitarian otherwise, renowned for their hospitality, and influenced by revivalist Islamic movements like the Sufi brotherhoods, Chechens had repeatedly resisted Russian overlordship...

...The situation remains unstable, and the structural arrangements inconsistent...

...In mid-March 1996 Yeltsin signed a decree institutionalizing powersharing with the republics and the regions...

...In effect the Duma had declared that the Soviet Union still existed and that Russia was an illegitimate state...

...Yet in the last five years, ethnic conflict, though explosive and bloody in several places, has not spread across the ex-USSR...

...In today's world, states have heterogeneous populations, made up of different ethnicities, religious groups, social classes, regional allegiances, urban-rural distinctions— all shifting in the modern and post-modern environment of rapid mobility, transnational migration, international economics, and overlapping and changing identities...

...In the rubble left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the other new states struggle over the shape of their new nations...

...Much of Siberia is sparsely populated by Russians...

...On March 15, the newly elected Russian State Duma, led by the Communists, sent a shock through the former Soviet Union...

...q 96 • DISSENT 98 • DISSENT...

...Chechens, the most numerous of the North Caucasian people, numbered just under a million in 1989...

...Russian national identity was complexly interwoven with ethnic affiliations, religious and cultural allegiances, as well as a sense of greatness and imperial destiny...

...Siberians met in Krasnoyarsk to discuss their local interests, and in Yeltsin's home territory people spoke of a "Urals' Republic...

...In the meantime, Russia's future is being determined by deals made among powerful actors, sometimes with quite short-range and mercenary goals in mind...

...the varied native peoples of Siberia, although not numerous, have their own national regions and republics...

...Several non-Russian republics voted heavily in December for the Communist party, which emerged as the largest political party in the new Duma...

...After Russia declared itself sovereign within the Soviet Union in June 1990, almost all the autonomous republics within Russia made similar declarations...

...People are more interested in economic matters, the local intelligentsias are more concerned with cultural issues like the use of the native language and the teaching of history from the point of view of the native people...

...In Azerbaijan, Lithuania and Belarus more than 77 percent of the population consisted of the titular nationality...

...Twelve years later Khrushchev restored their republic and returned the survivors...

...Discussion about Russia's future shape dwells on basic doubts about its legitimacy and survivability, speculation about its contraction or expansion, and disagreements about its internal cohesion...

...It is difficult to assert, as the Soviet government did with ill-considered hubris, that the "national question," the problem of relations between Russians and non-Russian ethnic peoples, has been solved...

...No republics would be called "sovereign" any longer...

...after all, they left twenty-five million Russians living outside the Russian Federation...

...Reaction was swift...

...Ethnic republics rich in resources, like Tatarstan and Sakha-Yakutia, asserted claims to their natural wealth...

...The first months after the Soviet collapse was a period of Russian retreat from its imperial role, a turning inward to deal with precipitous economic decline and to lay the foundations for a democratic political system...

...Fallout By the last months of 1995 the most fundamental questions of state and nation had become entangled in electoral politics, first for the Duma in December and then looking ahead to the June 1996 presidential elections...

...Many of the limits on national self-expression of Soviet times have fallen away...

...In the meantime, nightly television images of wanton destruction rapidly turned public opinion against the war, and Yeltsin's standing in the polls dropped steeply...

...Even in the south there are concentrated pockets of non-Russians...

...Even as their influence weakened on the national level, they increased their hold locally...

...Russians make up the majorities of all the capital cities of the republics, except for the North Caucasian republics and Chuvashia...

...Democratization, marketization, and anti-imperialism were to go hand-in-hand, but without the disastrous consequences that had befallen Gorbachev's attempt at a similar triple revolution...

...Russia was fairly homogeneous, with 81.5 percent of the population ethnically Russian...

...Russians in the republics are socially as well as ethnically differentiated from non-Russians...

...At the same time regionalism continued to grow...

...Add to this the volatility of contemporary Russian politics and it is easy to understand the anxiety felt in the rest of the former USSR...

...Dudaev had been inspired by the recent Baltic independence movements and spoke in favor of Chechen separation from Russia...

...At its birth in 1991, this Russia's leaders saw it as both the juridical successor to the Soviet Union, taking over its assets within the republic and its embassies abroad, and the accelerator of the radical reforms begun by Gorbachev...

...The December 1993 Constitution established a new framework for federalism...

...He ruled that secession from the federation was prohibited, and that constitutions could not infringe SUMMER • 1996 • 95 The Ex-Soviet Union on the established powers of the federal center...

...Without careful consideration Yeltsin questioned the permanence of Russia's external borders...

...And anti-Semitism taints the more chauvinist expressions of Russian nationalists...

...Resistance to the new Constitution was greatest in the ethnic republics, where only a quarter of the population, and less than half of those who voted, cast their ballots for it...

...Yeltsin's interim solution was a set of federal treaties in March 1992 in which Russian regions signed on as "constituent units," while the ethnic republics were allowed to claim status as "sovereign states" within the federation...

...Over the next several years the lack of popular identification with a Russian nation, the frustrating difficulties of the new capitalist order, corruption and crime, and a growing nostalgia for stabler, more predictable Soviet times encouraged politicians on the Communist left and the nationalist right to resuscitate enthusiasm for the old Soviet Union...

...As Gorbachev's state withered away in 1991, the fifteen union republics declared themselves fully independent and were quickly recognized by the world powers...

...The civil war in Tajikistan, on the other hand, which led to armed Russian intervention, and the war of Georgians against Georgians that deposed the extreme nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia and brought Eduard Shevardnadze back to power, were not primarily ethnic but political conflicts between rival elites...

...Finally, Yeltsin and his security council decided to invade Chechnya...

...Even the Communist party leader, Gennadii Zyuganov, whose comrades initiated the resolution, began to back away, declaring that reintegration should not be achieved through force but by consent...

...In Russia itself two factors contributed to the relative lack of open violence...

...External borders had to be shored up and internal relations between the federal center and the "subjects" within the federation had to be regularized...

...Elsewhere, in remote villages and mountain settlements, traditional customs were precariously maintained outside the reach of Soviet authorities...

...Still, most Russians want to stay where they are and make a life for themselves, even when they are dismayed by recent changes...

...its decision undermined not only Russia's independent status, but the claims of all of the republics to sovereignty...

...Moscow buys peace with the regions and ethnic republics by offering this or that...

...Millions of Soviet people assimilated to the general Russianized Soviet culture at a time when political success and upward social mobility was predicated on becoming culturally competent in Russian language and behavior...

...With over 93 percent of its populationArmenian, tiny Armenia was the most ethnically consolidated, especially after it drove out nearly two hundred thousand Azerbaijanis in 1988-1989...

...Russia, many thought, was on the brink of disintegration...

...By the end of the year almost all the autonomous republics and autonomous regions had declared themselves sovereign republics whose laws took precedence over all-union laws...

...Yeltsin opted for a middle road, a federation of all of the peoples of Russia, but was faced with enormous liabilities...

...There was no public debate or consultation with Parliament...

...Despite weak state structures, disintegrating economies, and widespread anxiety about the future, ethnicity has not metastasized into open widespread violence...

...For three years there was a tense standoff, during which Yeltsin negotiated federal arrangements with all the other sectors within Russia...

...Such dissolution is, in fact, a remote possibility...

...Nearly 12 million Russians live in the designated national republics, autonomous districts, and the one national region, alongside 17.7 million non-Russians...

...Regional leaders were chastened and they accepted the new rules of the political game...

...Tatarstan and Chechnya, however, refused to sign, and others, like Bashkortostan and Kalmykia, added amendments that amounted to special deals with Moscow...

...For many people identification with the new state was far weaker than their nostalgia for the dissolved USSR...

...Late in March agreements were signed with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well, but the leaders of all four states shied away from speaking of a single state...

...One of the most lasting legacies of Soviet nationality policy was the formation of autonomous national regions in which the nationalities enjoyed to a certain degree their own schools, cultural institutions, and local ethnic elites...

...SUMMER • 1996 • 93 The Ex-Soviet Union While the president and his men in the Kremlin were trying to hammer together a federal state, Parliament, dominated by the opposition, undermined their efforts, at times encouraging devolution of power from the center, at other times favoring its own version of federation...

...Yeltsin appeared on television to ask what authority the Duma itself had if the Soviet Union still exists...

...Soviet policy towards non-Russians ranged from mass literacy campaigns to genocidal deportations to Siberia and Central Asia...