Edmonton Journal (Alberta)
September 12, 2005 Monday
Final Edition

Loose association of former Soviet states hasn’t replaced USSR: They
can’t even unite for a common cause

by David Marples, Freelance

Is the CIS dead? The recent summit, held in Kazan, Tatarstan, despite
official publicity making much of an occasion that coincided with
the 1,000th anniversary of the city, provided clear signs that the
association has become practically defunct, and little more than
ceremonial.

The Commonwealth of Independent States was founded in December 1991
by the leaders of three former Soviet republics — Russia, Ukraine
and Belarus — as a means to accelerate the collapse of the Soviet
Union and to ensure that the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev,
was deprived of any meaningful function. At that time Gorbachev had
tried to persuade several republics to sign a document that would have
prolonged the Soviet Union through decentralization while allowing
Moscow to control defence and foreign policy.

The founders of the CIS anticipated that it would be of benefit to the
various republics (the Baltic States never participated) to continue
to maintain close economic and security links.

Initially the informal capital of the CIS was to be Minsk, Belarus.
Yet, from the outset, there were some serious problems. For one thing,
the legal basis of the new organization was never clarified. The three
leaders who had signed the deal had no consent from their parliaments,
and its secretive nature carried all the hallmarks of a well-laid plot.

Ukraine never accepted formal membership, though it attended meetings
as an observer. The first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, never
took the organization very seriously, other than during elections,
when he would use the CIS as a symbol of a Russian-led entity in what
he termed the Near Abroad.

As the Russian 14th Army established a breakaway republic at Tiraspol
in Moldova, several states feared that Russia intended to use the
CIS to control its former partners and to establish a new power base.

Other organizations developed outside and parallel to the CIS from
1996, the most serious being the GUUAM, a partnership that received
support from the United States and consisted of countries around
the Black Sea region (Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and
Moldova); the Russia-Belarus Union (Russia and Belarus); and the Common
Economic Space Group (CES — Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan).

Other states have maintained a preference for bilateral relations
outside these entities.

According to U.S.-based Russian analyst Sergei Blagov, Russian
president Vladimir Putin has veered from supporting the idea of a
“divorce” among CIS states, to promoting greater unity after the 60th
anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow last May.

However, the Kazan summit appeared to make it plain that the CIS will
soon be dissolved. There are several reasons why.

First, Turkmenistan declined to attend the occasion, and its president,
Saparmurat Niyazov, declared that his state would become no more than
an observer in the future. Second, Georgia, one of the more activist
republics under President Mikhail Saakashvili, has initiated the
formation of what is termed a group of “democratic states” on the
border of Russia that would be oriented toward the United States
and the EU in particular. Third, Ukraine under Viktor Yushchenko has
stalled on the signing of 29 documents on the Common Economic Space,
agreeing to only about half of them.

The presence of Ukraine in Kazan at all was something of a surprise.
A meeting between Yushchenko and Belarusian president Alyaksander
Lukashenka produced few results and a proposed exchange of visits to
each other’s capitals failed to materialize.

Other states that might have resolved longstanding issues also failed
to do so, most notably Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh; and the Republic of Moldova and its
separatist enclave, the Transdniester Republic.

Though the separation of the CIS states into authoritarian and
democratic regimes is somewhat facile, there is little doubt that
the states that have undergone political changes in recent times
–Ukraine, Kyrgyszstan and Georgia — are perceived by several others
as dangerously subversive, particularly by the virtual dictatorships of
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and the genuine dictatorship
in Belarus.

But such states have not found a natural home under Moscow’s influence
either.

Russia indeed remains the most enigmatic of the CIS states, as
Putin appears to have accepted a smaller role on the world stage and
focused more on consolidating his own authority and removing internal
enemies. To date, he has tried to maintain cordial relations with the
United States while increasing his control over parliament and the
media through his security forces. He may thus decline to take steps
to dissuade Turkmenistan from its departure, and other republics are
thus likely to follow.

That still leaves scope for Russia to tighten its links with its
closest allies, Kazakhstan and Belarus, while exerting pressure
on its former closest partner, Ukraine, through economic pressure,
particularly the threat to raise oil and gas prices to world levels.

The CIS served the essential function of legitimizing the rise of
Russia over the Soviet Union, and what was essentially an internal
coup d’etat by former president Yeltsin. But as a loose association
of willing partners, it has failed manifestly to replace the USSR,
or even to unite the former republics in a common cause.

David Marples is a professor of history at the University of Alberta