NEWS ANALYSIS: The emergence of a post-Soviet principle for Russian expansionism (01/24/93)

NEWS ANALYSIS

The emergence of a post-Soviet principle for Russian expansionism

by Prof. Henry R. Huttenbach

"Russian foreign policy must be based on a doctrine that proclaims the entire geopolitical space of the former union, a sphere of vital interest...Russia must secure...the role of political and military guarantor of stability on all the territory of the former USSR."

This statement embraces the guiding principle of expansionism as expressed by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Increasingly, it also seems to embody the views of its rival governmental authority, that of the administration of President Boris Yeltsin.

A three-day conference in St. Petersburg convened on November 27-29, 1992, by the Committee of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet (to which the author was invited) was designed expressly to lay the theoretical groundwork for the formulation of basic principles for a specific foreign policy goal, namely, the justification for intervention on behalf of ethnic Russian minorities outside the borders of the Russian Federation.

This meeting must be seen in the light of two events in the context of the political struggle for primacy and legitimacy between Parliament (the Congress of People's Deputies) and the presidency. The first is the recent forced resignation of Galina Starovoitova, President Yeltsin's liberal advisor on nationality questions, who called for general moderation and cautioned against automatic intervention in matters of ethnic strife. The second is the formation of the St. Petersburg conference; significantly, it directly preceded the assembly of the Congress of People's Deputies in early December, a gathering Mr. Yeltsin had sought to prevent or, at least, to postpone, in order to scuttle, among other things, efforts to make the concern for Russian minorities a higher priority.

Systematic pressure by conservative opponents of President Yeltsin's reform politics have, over the past months, steadily forced him to retreat from a crash program of change (a la Poland) in order to protect his popular base among his electoral constituents, who have begun to fear the socio-economic consequences of his radical reform schemes. More and more pay heed to the inflammatory, anti-reform rhetoric of the xenophobic and unreconstructed Red-Brown coalition of die-hard Communists, large enterprise managers, and Russian chauvinists. This has forced President Yeltsin to appease his opponents by firing some liberal ministers (with the exception - until the Congress voted him out - of Yegor Gaidar, his chief reform architect), including the likes of Ms. Starovoitova who, for example, favored negotiation to intervention in matters concerning problems experienced by Russian minorities in the non-Russian successor republics.

On the agenda of his political foes is an open declaration of solidarity with the 25 million Russians who, overnight, found themselves outside the Russian Federation in various legal circumstances, ranging from citizens in a new country with an ethnic identity that left them culturally foreigners (e.g., Azerbaijan), to non-citizens in a new republic whose state policy defined them as aliens (e.g., Estonia). Worse, as in Tadjikistan, Russians have had to be evacuated with the help of military intervention.

This broad spectrum of circumstances has provided Russia's neo-unionists with a convenient device for legitimizing intervention, supposedly for the purpose of safeguarding the physical safety, political rights and ethnic autonomy of Russian populations outside the federation. They do so by oversimplifying the issue, reducing the multi-circumstantial conditions (in 14 republics) to a single one-dimensional crisis, reminiscent of Hitler's inflammatory propaganda vis-a-vis the 3 million ethnic Germans living in Czecho-Slovakia's Sudentenland. By means of careful distortion and willful prevarication, Nazi Germany was able to lay the foundation for military intervention and political annexation.

Similarly, the machinations by both the Russian Supreme Soviet and President Yeltsin's modified government have given birth to a "Sudeten Syndrome" with respect to all ethnic Russians living outside the federation. A combination of shrill calls for the defense of all "fellow" Russians, simplistically portrayed as victims of exclusionist non-Russian ethno-politics (real or suspected), paralleled by vociferous demands for annexation of the "historic Russian" territories in which these "victimized" Russians live (e.g., northeast Estonia, northern Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine), has brought about a dangerous expansionist foreign policy stance by the world's second largest nuclear power.

A Yeltsin or post-Yeltsin Russian Federation is potentially capable of embarking on an expansionist/adventurist post-Soviet direction that will have profound implications for the foreign policy strategy of the new Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton will have to be prepared to deal with an increasingly aggressive Russian Federation harboring a potential Sudeten-style mentality that may exploit the presence of millions of Russians "abroad" as a pretext for altering borders of the post-Soviet territorium. Such steps will have a continent-wide destabilizing impact, very likely unleashing dozens of other unresolved border disputes between the 15 successor states to the USSR. It could turn the heartland of Eurasia into one vast Nagorno-Karabakh (and, possibly, Bosnia).

The present heated and highly convoluted debate bears constant watching and analysis. As in all other post-Soviet states, the Russian Federation's ethnic majority - the Russians - are engaged in a debate about their identity, long neglected and subordinated to centuries of imperial and Soviet interests. At long last they have an opportunity to focus on Russian identity and Russian national interests.

The outcome of this debate will either be in favor of a democratic spirit less inclined to "save" all Russians, or will lean towards an irrational and dangerous desire for "union" with all Russians. At present the outcome is still unclear.

Dr. Henry R. Huttenbach is professor of history at the City College of New York and editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers, a semi-annual journal published by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe. This commentary is reprinted with permission from the association's newsletter called Analysis of Current Events.

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