Who lost the Russian empire? History will keep seat warm for Putin
by Christopher Boian

Agence France Presse — English
March 27, 2005 Sunday 1:09 AM GMT

MOSCOW March 27 — When history looks back coldly to determine “Who
lost the Russian empire?” it will surely reserve a seat for Vladimir
Putin, a leader propelled into the Kremlin on vows to revive a great
power but who by his own admission faces unforeseen challenges in
doing so.

Mikhail Gorbachev is still blamed by many Russians for the demise
of the Soviet Union, the 20th century’s incarnation of the Russian
empire. Boris Yeltsin is still reviled by many Russians who believe
he carelessly sold his country down the river in the decade that
followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet though still widely popular, it is Putin who during his five
years in power has presided over a precipitous decline in Russia’s
ability to influence the course of events in the part of the world
it has long dominated and continued to overshadow for more than a
decade even after the Soviet collapse.

And few seem more acutely aware of this irony of destiny than the
Russian president himself who has in recent months all but spelled
out that his country faces a paradox in which the only way to restore
its own power for the future is to consign the power long lorded over
neighbors to the past.

On Friday, the 52-year-old Putin, commenting on the regime change
in the ex-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan following a revolt there,
went further than perhaps any Russian leader has in the past three
centuries in admitting that Moscow’s capacity to impose its will in
the vast portion of the planet once occupied by the Soviet Union was
more limited today than thought even a decade ago.

He said the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the body set up
in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union
and regarded to some degree by Moscow and its allies as a loose
replacement for the bloc, was really only a “useful club” designed
to facilitate the “civilized divorce” of ex-Soviet republics.

“If someone expected particular achievements in all areas of the
CIS, they have not occurred and could not have occurred,” Putin said
Friday at a news conference in Yerevan, the capital of the former
Soviet republic of Armenia.

“The processes following the breakup of the Soviet Union were different
than the goals that were initially declared” for the CIS, which groups
12 of the 15 former Soviet republics (the three Baltic states did not
join) and which until recent years held regular policy-coordinating
summits.

Through much of the 1990s and the early years of the present decade,
Russia in particular sought to use the CIS as a forum for promotion of
Moscow-directed plans for retaining close policy coordination among
members on everything from defense and economic issues to social and
political reforms.

“The CIS did not cope” with that objective, Putin admitted bluntly.

Other leading political voices in Russia and elsewhere in the former
Soviet Union are mindful of the rapidly-loosening bonds between Russia
and its once tightly-controlled republics stretching from the borders
of the European Union to the borders of China, though their views
vary widely.

Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian communist party, warned
Saturday that if something were not done quickly then the currents
today eroding the vestiges of Russia’s empire will soon go to work
on dissolving the coherence of Russia itself.

“If we don’t do something, this process will spread throughout
the post-Soviet space and will eventually break up Russia itself,”
Zyuganov was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying at the start
of a congress of communists from Russia and the ex-Soviet republic
of Belarus.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the new prime minister of Ukraine and a key leader
of the “orange revolution” there that ousted a pro-Moscow regime late
last year, saw things differently, asserting that more revolutions in
the former Russian empire lay ahead and would only enhance people’s
ability to “live free”.

“When and in what country it will occur next is difficult to predict,”
Tymoshenko told reporters in Kiev. “But it will definitely happen
again.”

The Soviet Union, a political-social experiment unprecedented in scale
that survived for 74 years, was however only the latest incarnation
of a Russian empire whose foundations date back to the 16th century
and that comprised much of the Caucasus and Central Asia, strategic
regions where great powers have for centuries competed — and continue
to compete — for control.

Perhaps the most telling public comments from Putin on the monumental
challenge his country faces as it cedes influence outside its borders
in order to retain control within came last September 4, the day
after the horrific Beslan school massacre.

“There have been many tragic pages and painful events in the history of
Russia,” Putin said in a nationally-televised address then. “We have to
admit that we have failed to understand the complexity and the danger
of the processes emerging in our country and in the entire world.”