The Moscow Times
Friday, August 29, 2008
Stalin’s Poison Pills
By Paul Goble
A lot of attention was focused on the symbolic importance when Russian
forces occupied Gori, the birthplace of Stalin. Few reflected, however, that
this conflict, like many others in the post-Soviet states, is the product of
what many in business call "poison pills," arrangements that make it
difficult, if not dangerous, for anyone to try to takeover or even change
the basic arrangements of another firm.
If the peoples of the region and the international community are to overcome
this crisis and the others that are clearly on the horizon in this part of
the world, they need to understand the nature and location of the poison
pills Stalin inserted in his system and the dangers of swallowing them.
When Stalin created the Soviet Union — and it was his project far more than
anyone else’s — he built it on the basis of politicized, territorialized
and hierarchically arranged ethnicity, a system that could function only if
Moscow used the kind of force that Stalin deployed with such consistent
viciousness.
Before the 1917 Revolution, many people in the Russian Empire did not
identify themselves in ethnic terms. The tsarist state did not encourage
them to do so, and many saw themselves in terms of class or faith. But
Stalin insisted that everyone have an official nationality because he
understood that you cannot play the divide-and-rule politics of building an
empire if people don’t identify themselves as members of one or another
nationality.
Moreover, Stalin linked nationality to territory, something the tsars had
tried in almost every case to avoid. No book was more important during
Soviet times than the periodic editions of the administrative-territorial
divisions of the country. That is because your rights as a member of an
ethnic group depended on whether Moscow gave you the status of an autonomous
formation or a union republic.
But there was one more aspect to this. Many people believe that Stalin drew
the lines so as to put all or most members of a given nationality together.
This is nonsense. He drew lines to create tensions between ethnic groups,
ensuring there was always a local minority that would do Moscow’s bidding in
return for being protected by the Soviet center. The Armenian-dominated
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan is the most famous of these
arrangements, but it is far from the only one.
And finally, Stalin instituted the Orwellian principle that "all animals are
equal but some animals are more equal than others," an arrangement that
guarantees interethnic hatred. Members of small nationalities without a
territory got few or no ethnic or linguistic rights and were slated for
absorption by others. Members of larger groups got such rights on their
territories but nowhere else. But members of the largest nationality — the
Russians — got such rights regardless of where they lived.
What were the consequences of this system? First, Stalin’s system not only
raised the importance of nationality and borders, but it ensured that anyone
who sought to dismantle his totalitarianism would have to cope with ethnic
anger and borders that guaranteed it would likely get worse.
Second, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did reduce the level of
coercion and introduced glasnost, he guaranteed that the Soviet Union would
fall into pieces, not along economic lines or regional ones but precisely
along the lines Stalin had drawn.
And third, when the Soviet Union collapsed, both the Russian leadership and
the international community, largely because they hoped to make the process
of imperial decay as easy and peaceful as possible, decided to accept
certain aspects of Stalin’s system — namely, the borders he drew and the
ethnic hierarchy he established — while expecting that other aspects of
Stalin’s system, his tyranny, be jettisoned.
Why did this happen? For many, it was simpler and more convenient than doing
anything else. Many in Western governments had no idea about the location,
let along the character, of the union republics, and even fewer knew about
the autonomous ones. It was easier to accept the union republics as the only
possible countries and their borders as the only acceptable ones, especially
since addressing the bigger problems would have taken a long time.
And further, any focus on autonomous republics and their rights would have
put at risk in the first instance the Russian Federation. After all, maps
showed that 53 percent of the territory of that republic was covered by
non-Russian autonomies. Addressing its imperial nature, many feared, could
trigger "a nuclear Yugoslavia."
But what has that decision meant? Most obviously, it has meant that few have
been prepared to focus on the legitimate rights of ethnic minorities who
feel they are trapped within a larger country or to consider that Stalin’s
borders were not designed to resolve conflicts but to intensify them. Anyone
who looks around Eurasia will see that in many countries, and in Russia
above all, the demands of minorities are only growing, and border tensions
are on the increase.
But that 1991 decision has had another consequence, which continues to
reverberate throughout the region. Stalin made his system work by means of
an authoritarian state. Just because so many people wished for an end to
authoritarianism has not guaranteed in Russia or elsewhere that this would
happen, and his commitment to ethnocratic arrangements in which one ethnic
group dominates others continues as a policy imperative, again regardless of
what anyone wants.
The events in Georgia are only the latest example of what happens because
governments and peoples in the region continue to be forced 17 years after
the end of the Soviet Union to swallow Stalin’s poison pill. These events
will not be the last. And the ones ahead, including more ethnic conflicts
and more authoritarianism, will not only be more serious but will affect the
Russian Federation first of all.
Paul Goble is director of research at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in
Baku.