Michael Rywkin - Moscows Lost Empire

Also by Michael Rywkin

Moscows Muslim Challenge Soviet Central Asia

Soviet Society Today

A few years ago I published a book titled Soviet Society Today, which was intended for readers who wanted solid information about the Soviet Union presented in an easily digestible form. This was done by keeping the chapters short, the language clear, and the notes minimal. Since then the Soviet Union has disintegrated and Soviet society, in the apt words of one observer, has become the society of yesterday. But the national and ethnic problems described in Soviet Society Today survived the collapse of the Union, just as they survived seventy years of Soviet power, and have become a key issue in the post-Soviet period.

This development propelled me to start on a new book devoted solely to ethnic and national problems, a book covering the background and the current fate of the principal nationalities assembled under the Romanov crown and later under the Soviet hammer and sickle. The intention is to give the reader a full picture of national and ethnic issues affecting the former Soviet Union and its component republics, or rather their heirs, the post-Soviet states, at the outset of their independent existence. This book does not pretend to compete with either scholarly monographs covering specific aspects of the subject or journalistic essays based on personal observations of current events.

Given the sheer speed of change in the post-Soviet states, the temptation to be fully up-to-date had to be resisted: todays news may be forgotten within a few months. What is important is to distinguish developments with potential long-term impact from passing events. It is the authors hope that Moscows Lost Empire will not only satisfy the readers curiosity, but will provide solid background for the interpretation of subsequent events and more advanced study.

The enormous cultural variation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union, as well as the long historical period to be covered, made it impossible to give this book the cohesiveness of Soviet Society Today. The parts of the book could have been arranged in a different way and indeed can be read in any order. Each reader or instructor will decide how best to suit the book to individual needs.

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This volume could not have been completed without several contributing factors:

(1) My academic trips to the (ex-) Soviet Union in 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992, and 1993, as well as my personal experience of having lived there during World War II;

(2) A richness of personal and academic contacts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Tashkent, Baku, Tbilisi, Erevan, Tallinn, and Vilnius;

(3) My long activity in the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ex-USSR and East Europe) and its journal, Nationalities Papers, as well as my association with the Nationalities Seminar of the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York, the Center for Ethno-Political Studies of the Foreign Policy Association and the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York, and the University of Warsaws Program on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I also greatly benefited from professional contacts with individual scholars: Henry Huttenbach, Alexander Motyl, and John Hazard in New York; Roman Szporluk at Harvard; Emil Payin, Viktor Perevedentsev, and Victor Kozlov in Moscow; Marie Bennigsen-Broxup in London; professors Hlne Carrre dEncausse in Paris, Andrus Park in Tallinn, Marco Buttino in Torino, Jan Malicki in Warsaw, and many others.

I am grateful to Professor Seymour Becker for reading the draft manuscript and to my daughter Monique for taking care of the initial editing.

Patricia Kolb, executive editor at M.E. Sharpe, Inc., merits special mention since without her benevolent labor this book could never have been completed. She not only took on herself the thankless task of editing and reediting the text, but subjected all its parts to thorough criticism, forcing me to clarify, expand, and revise several chapters.

The Soviet empire, heir to that of the tsars, was the last great European empire to succumb to the inevitable. The Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires had fallen after World War I, and the remaining West European empires after World War II. But the Romanov empire in a new form would manage a second lifetime of seventy-two years.

It was the attraction of the communist ideology that allowed the Russian empire to outlive its peers. True, the recovery of territories lost in the initial disintegration was achieved by military force, but that alone would not have been sufficient. The new Soviet regime offered powerful enticements as well: recognition of the separateness of its many nationalities, formal institutions of national self-government, and the principle of equality of nations within the Union. No longer were the component nations to be treated as simple provinces of Great Russia. The larger nations were granted republic status (as union or autonomous republics) along with other attributes of statehood: governments, parliaments, ministries (initially called peoples commissariats), constitutions, codes of law, national anthems, and so forth. The principle that all nations are equal was enforced and ethnic discrimination was outlawed. And what is even more important, all the nations of the Soviet Union were to participate in the building of a new society devoid of class exploitation and national antagonisms. Class struggle within a given nation was to replace the struggle between nations, while hostility between the communist and capitalist camps would over-shadow all other kinds of confrontation.