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.

American Jews often treat their religion and ethnicity as coterminous. In the Soviet Union religion and ethnicity are formally more distinct, through in most people's minds the two are closely related. American society generally considers Jews both an ethnic and religious group. There is a strong correlation between religion and ethnicity among other groups—for example between Irish and Polish ethnicity, on the one hand, and Catholicism, on the other. But since Catholicism is a universal religion—to say “Irish” or “Polish” is usually is to say “Catholic”—the converse is not true, since to say “Catholic” may also imply French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian or many other ethnicities.

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.

1985

April 3: Lutheran Minister Harri Motsnik, known for his outspoken criticism of human rights violations in the USSR, is arrested on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda.

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