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Strategies & Market Trends : Russian Crisis - Is it a buying opportunity? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffrey L. Henken who wrote (151)	9/3/1998 5:36:00 PM
From: Ray Tarke	Respond to of 175

How the Soviet Union Fell Apart by Richard Pipes August 27, 1998 What should we make of Boris Yeltsin's latest bizarre action? Dmitry Trenin analyzes in Crossing the Swamp. In his 7/16 article, Russia Rescued from Financial Crash, Richard Pipes assesses the IMF bailout of Russia. When in December 1991 the heads of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine, meeting privately in a Belorussian forest, announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the news seemed so incredible that they immediately gave rise to a host of legends. One myth, popular in Russia, held that the event was a conspiracy hatched by the CIA. Another, spread both in Russian and abroad, claimed that Yeltsin along with his Ukrainian and Belorussian colleagues were in a drunken stupor when they signed the declaration: Yeltsin was said to have fallen off his chair during the negotiations and lain prostrate on the floor. Setting the record straight- Shushkevich: Putting the rumors to rest These stories have now been put to rest by then-chairman of the Belorussian Supreme Soviet, S. Shushkevich, in a May 1998 interview with the Polish Daily, Rzeczpospolita (The Republic). Shushkevich, who represented his country on this occasion, says that the action of the three heads of state was the result neither of a foreign plot nor of alcohol. It was rather a deliberate move to confront the inevitable and to make the transition to a new political regime as painless as possible. The Soviet Union was in the 1920s by the forceful annexation to Soviet Russia of a number of independent republics located along Russia's borders. Although a highly centralized state directed by the Communist apparatus from Moscow, it was given the appearance of a voluntary federation that any member state could leave at will. The union held as long as the Communist Party remained united. But the reforms of Gorbachev, carried out after 1985, quickly threw it into confusion. The instant the politicians of the non-Russian republics felt the center wobbling, they began to clamor for their national rights. Thus, Georgia declared its independence in April 1991; Azerbaijan and the three Baltic republics followed suit that August. In the Ukraine, the largest and most important of the non-Russian republics, with over 90% of the population -- including the 12 million Russians residing there -- voted for separation and sovereignty. These declarations and referenda could have been dismissed as meaningless gestures. Apparently this was the opinion of American diplomats who had advised President Bush, on his visit to Kiev in August 1991, to urge the Ukrainian to remain in the Union. But under communism, where symbols meant more than reality, they signified that the Soviet Union was falling apart, that it existed only on paper. The conclusion, according to Shushkevich, was drawn by the heads of state of the three Slavic republics. The question they faced was how to clothe the new reality in a form that would make possible a peaceful transition and avoid the kind of civil war that tore apart the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after its dissolution in the summer of 1991. In October, Gorbachev proposed a confederate plan. In theory, a confederate is a looser arrangement than a federation, but on closer inspection his proposed state turned out to differ from the old Soviet Union only in name. Taken to a logical conclusion At this point, Yeltsin accepted the invitation of Shuskevich to meet in the privacy of a national park in Belorussia to settle the issue. They invited the president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, but deliberately kept out Gorbachev. The trio proceeded on the assumption that the Soviet Union was dead. After intense discussions among themselves and with their legal experts, they agreed to declare the Soviet Union formally dissolved and to grant each of its constituent republics full sovereignty. The alternative, in their view, was to maintain the fiction of unity by resorting to force that would inevitably lead to massive bloodshed. These revelations are significant not only because they set straight the historic record. They indicate that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had become unavoidable and that when the Russian parliament, the Duma, votes to annul the December 1991 decision, it is acting in a totally irresponsible manner. The same holds true of the Russian military and other imperialists who dream of re-imposing Moscow's rule on the separated borderlands. Russia has lost its empire not from foreign conspiracy or drunkenness of its leader, but from the force of political reality. Hence, there is no way this process can be reversed. Richard Pipes is a professor of history and has previously served as director of Russian studies at Harvard University. He is a contributing editor of IntellectualCapital.com.