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The most immediate purpose of this book is to tell a story. Its heroes are the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Its plot is based on their eventually successful struggle to gain independence from a Soviet Union they never wished to be part of in the first place, and its moral concerns how, in that process, they actually helped to destroy both the Soviet state itself and the Communist Party that had been its leader and architect.
Rather like a folk tale, our story begins with Lenin granting the three Baltic peoples independence ‘for ever’, from a Russia torn asunder by revolution and civil war. Then the big bad wolf Stalin quashes this freedom, by way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and finally, in the triumph of right over might, the three Baltic presidents of the transition period, Vytautas Landsbergis of Lithuania, Anatolijs Gorbunovs of Latvia and Arnold Riiiitel of Estonia, stand up to the infamous Black Beret special forces of the Soviet Interior Ministry.
At first glance, the story of Baltic secession has all the trimmings of a world in simple black and white. The bad guys wear black and are armed to the teeth. The good guys are little and armed with nothing but courage and the righteousness of a just cause. The bad guys are Communists. The good guys are democrats. In Hollywood it would all go down very well, but in real life, as we shall see, the picture is less clear-cut.
A complication of particular importance arises with respect to the reversal of roles that took place in the early post-independence period, when the previous Soviet majority nationality – the Russians – suddenly became a national minority in the three Baltic successor states. This rather dramatic turning of the tables not only brought unaccustomed insecurity to the Baltic Russians. It also placed the democratically elected governments of the three newly-independent Baltic states in a position of equally unaccustomed responsibility for the future course of events.
Most importantly, however, the change of scene in the Baltics brought home to outside observers that the world as a whole had changed, that old patterns of analysis would no longer suffice. In order to understand what may now become of the various parts that until very recently combined to make up the Soviet Union, it is imperative also to understand the processes that led to its disintegration. In this sense, our story has an immediate bearing on the empirical study of post-Soviet development. At the same time, however, it also seeks to establish some analytical points of great relevance.
In presenting the story of Baltic secession, we create a framework which will be used to study the mode of conflict resolution within a disintegrating Soviet Union. The topic as such has a considerably greater analytic appeal than might be apparent at first. Neither conflict resolution nor imperial decline represent problems which are new in their own right, but in their present application both pose vital new questions.
In world history, the death of empires is something akin to the order of nature. The Chinese, the Roman, even the British – all the great empires have gone the same way, albeit in a different fashion, and it was hardly realistic to expect the Soviet version to last for ever. The intriguing point lies in all previous experience telling us that empires go through a long period of decline, before being finished off by some external shock, normally a war.
Neither is applicable to the present case. In a few short years, the Soviet Union went from being a superpower with great influence in world affairs, to becoming an economic basket case intensively engaged in begging for aid. It did so, moreover, pretty much on its own. Even if civil war should break out amongst the ruins of the former Soviet Union, the Soviet collapse will still be remembered more as an implosion than an explosion. The way in which the Soviet empire collapsed, in a few years and without being attacked by outside enemies, must be unique in world history. All previous great empires have either needed centuries to dissolve, been violently overrun, or vanished by way of an orderly political process (the British).
The very speed of these internal events leads us on to the question of post-imperial adjustment, and to the challenges being faced by the new political leaders. Can they be expected to have the skills necessary in order to guarantee a peaceful post-transition period? Or, phrased somewhat differently, can the old Soviet leaders be relied upon to handle in a constructive manner open political challenges, from actors that would normally have been taken care of by the KGB?
We are rather ill-equipped to answer these questions. From a theoretical point of view, Soviet bargaining behaviour represents a well-known and well-researched topic. Bargaining processes within the planning apparatus have been extensively studied, and the same holds for patterns of international negotiations. The present case, however, is one where different nationalities haggle over the way in which the Soviet Union should be first reformed and then dismantled. The very structure of the process is thus of a kind that makes it fall well outside all previous applications.
The struggle between Moscow and the Baltic republics offers an excellent background for a first attempt at sorting these questions out. We have threats, intimidation and violence. We have the underdog reaction of stubborn peaceful resistance, coupled with hints of civil disobedience. We have superpower implications, and we have new challenges to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process of a new order for European security. Most of all, however, we quite simply have a good story.
Since it was the breakdown of Soviet power that made room not only for the ‘refolutions’1 of Eastern Europe in 1989, but also for the policy of secession that eventually led to the establishment of fifteen post-Soviet successor states, it might be a good idea to start by looking briefly at the process of disintegration.
END OF EMPIRE
By the end of 1990, all of the fifteen fully-fledged Soviet republics had issued various forms of sovereignty declarations, and the same went for a host of minor autonomous formations within these republics. The constitutional chaos that resulted from the accompanying practice of issuing conflicting sets of legislation became known in Soviet parlance as the ‘war of laws’. The picture as a whole was rather baffling, and one was hard put to predict where it all would end, with a bang or with a whimper.
During 1990, Soviet politics had come to resemble the game of ‘musical chairs’. In the first round there were sixteen Soviet presidents, but only fifteen Soviet republics. Judging from moods amongst the Soviet population at the time, moreover, there was hardly any doubt as to who would be left out when the music stopped. Even more importantly, the chances were that in a second round the same procedure would be repeated within at least some of the successor republics.
The most compelling example was, and at the time of writing still is, that of the former Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which is presently engaged in searching for a new name and a new identity. In April 1992, the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies decided on a compromise, calling their state ‘Russian Federation. Russia’. (The full stop left room for individual choice of what name to use.) As the Soviet Union crumbled, it became increasingly obvious that the RSFSR was about to run into much the same kind of trouble. Within its borders could be found around a hundred different nationalities, some of whom were settled in no less than sixteen autonomous republics, ten autonomous okrugs and eight autonomous krais. In 1990 they all began to seek various forms of sovereignty.
In terms of population, the autonomous provinces of the Russian Federation are not overly important, holding merely 20 million out of a total of close to 150 million inhabitants in the federation as a whole, but economically their importance is far greater than implied by mere population figures. Geographically, they account for about half of the republic’s total area, and it is on their territories that the bulk of Russia’s once vast supplies of natural resources is to be found.
Given the heavy dependence of the Russian economy on above all its energy exports, the issue of regional autonomy took on some considerable importance. When the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, declared that Russia should have the right to her own resources, it was only natural for the autonomous regions of the RSFSR to claim that such rights should be passed on to those who actually resided in these areas.
To mention but one example of the gravity of this problem, a new giant gas field has recently been discovered in the Yamal peninsula, which is located in the the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrug, which is part of the former RSFSR, which was part of the Soviet Union. One would certainly expect President Yeltsin to claim that the Russian Federation should be the master of this plentiful source of hard currency earnings, but if the indigenous populations of the area were to claim that such rights should be passed on to them, where would it all end?
Supposing that the 17,400 Nentsy, the 6,500 Khanty and the 5,600 Komi who live in this area were to acquire full rights to the gas deposits, they would soon not only become rich as the Kuwaities, but would also be able to oppress the almost 100,000 Russians living in ‘their’ autonomous okrug.2 This will certainly not come about, but what will? How will these conflicts be resolved?
Similar stories can be told for many other strategically important resources. Much of the oil, for example, can be found in Tatarstan, in Bashkiria and in Chechen-Ingushetia, the latter being an autonomous Caucasian republic where the struggle for independence took a violent turn in late 1991. Much of the ‘Russian’ gold, moreover, is to be found in Yakutia, a vast area with very few indigenous people. Somehow, these conflicting interests will have to be aligned, as will a host of other problems of a similar kind.
Seeing these processes unfold, some Russian intellectuals began to speculate that the future Russia would be something akin to South Africa, with independent states landlocked within its borders. The Kingdom of Lesotho would in this analysis correspond to the free Republic of Tatarstan, which flatly refused to participate in the Russian presidential election that was won by Boris Yeltsin in 1991. In the spring of 1992, Literaturnaya Gazeta published a rather striking map of a future Respublika Rus, a country that meandered its way – from the Baltic to the Pacific – amongst all the non-Russian territories.3
To the outside world, the process of Soviet breakdown seems to have come as a total surprise. Attitudes marked by a high degree of confusion produced policies which in equal measure rested on wishful thinking. Up until the very last moment, hopes remained high that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev would somehow manage to square the circle, to preserve the union intact without resorting to force.
The fallacies of such a policy should have been obvious already at the time of the parade of republican sovereignty declarations, which shook the Soviet Union during 1990, but in a somewhat broader perspective we must conclude that it was far from being an isolated aberration. A rather ominous parallel could be seen in the initially naïve Western approach to the Yugoslav crisis.
By the time of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, on 25–6 June 1991, it was obvious to all serious observers that the level of ethnic tension within Yugoslavia had risen beyond the point of no return for the federal state. Serbs and Croats in particular could no longer be expected to live together in the same state. These facts notwithstanding, both the United States and the European Community underscored the imperative need to preserve the unity of the Yugoslav state. Nobody wanted to deal with a break-up. No ideas for a peaceful dismantling of the federation were put forth.
This is not to say that a more resolute policy would have succeeded in averting the tragic events that were to unfold during the fall and winter of 1991. Maybe things had already gone too far. The important point to note, however, is that no attempt was made. Shielded behind the principles of inviolable borders and of the integrity of states, the outside world stood passively by, watching as tensions rose to the point where a savage civil war was unleashed. It would be hard to find a more powerful indication of the absence amongst Western nations of a preconceived international policy, taking into account realities rather than wishful thinking.
Returning to the case of the Soviet collapse, we find a similar pattern of attitudes and policies. Although both political and ethnic processes were pointed firmly in the direction of a dissolution of the Soviet state, it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s central power that was the focus of outside policy-making. During his visit to Kiev, only days before the August coup, President George Bush could still issue warnings about separatism and come out strongly in favour of a central power.4 Compared to Yugoslavia, however, the composition of the Soviet crisis derived from an even more complicated reality. The case of the United Nations will serve to illustrate.
In the United Nations, the Soviet Union had one seat, the Ukraine one and Byelorussia one. This rather strange composition of the Soviet representation was the outcome of negotiations where Stalin had initially argued that each of the then sixteen Soviet republics should have its own seat. The compromise said that the Soviet side should be granted a representation equal to that of the three Western allies, that is the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
The fact that Russia did not get a seat of its own reflects the very deep-seated Russian habit of viewing Russia and the Soviet Union as one and the same. Republican institutions inside the Soviet Union were never intended as anything more than window dressing, and the same went for the Ukrainian and Byelorussian delegations at the United Nations.
During 1991, however, all this changed profoundly. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia had to put up a hard fight in order to carve out its own post-Soviet existence. With respect to internal affairs, that process had begun already in 1990, when the RSFSR had successfully established its own Communist Party, its own Supreme Soviet, its own president, even its own KGB, but when it came to international relations, progress was made at a much slower pace. The struggle for recognition cannot really be said to have got off the ground until well after the misguided August 1991 coup.
Already on the following Monday, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering, said that Russia ought now to take the place of the Soviet Union and that all other former Soviet republics were welcome to apply for membership.5 Treading gently, Boris Yeltsin did hint that he too would like representation in the United Nations, but up until the very last minute Western policy remained in favour of the integrity of the Soviet state. The first real breakthrough towards international recognition came with President Yeltsin’s visit to Germany, in late November 1991, and the signing of a Russo-German friendship agreement.
In sharp contrast to the Russian caution, the Ukraine had been actively engaged in exploiting what it considered to be its rights to an independent foreign policy. Agreements on the exchange of diplomats had been signed with Poland and Hungary already in the late spring of 1991, and at about the same time the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, had visited Germany, where he met with both President Richard von Weizsäcker and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Most remarkably, after the Soviet crackdown in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, in January 1991, the Ukrainian delegate to the UN Commission on Huma...
