Window on Eurasia

Gorbachev’s Policies Threatened to Dismember Russian Federation

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 28, 2006 -- Mikhail Gorbachev pursued policies that, save for
the August 1991 putsch and the actions of Boris Yeltsin, could have led
to a smaller Muslim-dominated USSR, the rise of Nursultan Nazarbayev as
its leader, and the disintegration of the Russian Federation, according
to a leading specialist on separatism there.

In an essay posted on the APN Kazakhstan website on Friday, Aleksandr
Yeliseyev, who writes regularly on Russian and non-Russian challenges
to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federationt, describes what he
calls this “Turkestan alternative” to the old Soviet Union
[http://www.apn.kz/publications/print5483.htm].

It was widely discussed in 1991, Yeliseyev says, that Gorbachev planned
to appoint the Kazakhstan leader president of a new Union state, one in
which the status of autonomous republics across the Soviet Union would
be “sharply increased” relative to the power of the unioin
republics.

Indeed, he writes, Gorbachev’s plans in this regard may even have had
the effect of prompting the leaders of some Union republics who might
otherwise have been inclined to find some way to work together with
Moscow by means of a New Union Treaty to think about independence.

Such an increase in the power of the autonomous areas, Yeliseyev notes,
would have hit the RSFSR hardest, something that Yeltsin was very much
aware of and, the author of this essay says he is forced to acknowledge
although he is no friend of the first Russian president, to do what he
could to oppose.

Yeliseyev quotes with approval the research of S.A. Filatov, another
analyst who has reexamined the events of 1991 that led to the end of
the USSR. According to Filatov, Gorbachev planned to create a state
consisting of 35 “subjects,” each with the right of secession, in
place of the 15 union republics.

Such an approach, Filatov continues, would have undermined Yeltsin as
head of the RSFSR by carving out a variety of new entities within that
republic and in fact have led to a situation in which “Russia itself
would have been converted into an autonomous republic, losing more than
half of its territory, 20 million of its people, and almost the entire
extent of its strategic resources and natural resources.”

Yeliseyev extends this argument by noting that already in 1990, “many
of the autonomous republics of the RSFSR had already become de facto
union republics. All that was missing for them was a declaration of the
demise of the RSFSR, after which the process of disintegration would
have acquired an irreversible character.”

That in turn meant that Gorbachev’s much ballyhooed “renewed
Union” would have had “several” additional Muslim Union republics
and that these new republics, including Tatarstan and Bashkortostan
would have been very strong political formations which would have
succeeded in achieving equal status” with the others.

Tatar activists at that time, he continues, argued that Leonid Brezhnev
in 1977 was “very close to making the Tatar ASSR a Union republic.
[And] apparently the local leadership [in the Middle Volga] was even
prepared to agree to replace the word ‘Tatar’ with the name
‘Bulgar’” in order to achieve its ends.

Given that in Gorbachev’s “new Union,” it is “100 percent
certain” that the three Baltic countries would not have been members
and that Moldova, Georgia and “even Armenia” would refuse to join
as well, Yeliseyev argues, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus “would have had
very little room for maneuver.”

They would have found themselves in what would have been “a
Turkic-Slavic confederation” in which, especially if the Russian
Federation were to have been dissolved and new Turkic Union republics
created there, Musim republics would have occupied the dominant
position.

In such a case, having Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev as leader
would have been entirely natural, and because Yeliseyev says “it is
obvious that as a politician, the Kazakhstan leader was must stronger
than his Kremlin ally,” he would have shifted the direction of that
entity in unpredictable and for Yeliseyev unwelcome ways.

All these dangers were prevented as a result of the failed August 1991
coup that eliminated Gorbachev as a factor in Soviet and Russian
politics and of the work of Boris Yeltsin as well as the leaders of
Belarus and Ukraine not only in destroying the USSR but in preserving
the existing republics.

Like almost all exercises in counterfactual history, Yeliseyev’s discussion of what might have been in 1991 is not so much about the
past but rather a discussion of what could happen in the future. And he
clearly has at least three target audiences in mind in making this
argument.

First, he is directing his wordst at those who would like to see the
Russian Federation take the lead in restoring a new and broader empire.
For them, they are a warning that such efforts could entail not only
the domination of Russia by currently independent Muslim countries but also
the disintegration of the Russian Federation itself.

Second, he is obviously targetting those who would like to see ethnic
Russians carve out an ethnically defined nation state within the
borders of their current country, efforts that would not only reduce its size
and power but ensure the rise of still more powerful Muslim competitors
in Eurasia.

And third, Yeliseyev’s argument is directed at those Russians who
blame Yeltsin for everything. As Yeliseyev notes, he is no friend of
the first Russian president, but “it is necessary to be just – not the
Russian but the Soviet leadership bears responsibility for the
extraordinary strengthening of the national republics in the Russian
Federation.”

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |