This book was first written as the author's Ph.D dissertation and submitted
to the Graduate College of The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona,
USA, in 1995.
To my brother,
Farid Ahmed Bhuiyan
First published 1997 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright Anwara Begum 1997
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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-31567-9 (hbk)
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Introduction
The Chechen crisis which began in early December 1994 prompted such reformers as Egor Gaider and Grigori Yavlinsky to distance themselves from the Yeltsin government. The Russian media portrayed Yeltsin as closeted with his Soviet era advisors and associates. Such isolation of Yeltsin from the reformist democratic forces was perceived by many as somehow a more recent development and his government's aggressive posturing towards the near abroad as an ominous new phenomenon. Some Russian observers even called Russia's behaviour towards the newly independent countries 'frivolous.' The image of Yeltsin as the 'new authoritarian' or Yeltsin the 'helpless, isolated Tsar' manipulated by officials from the Communist elite of the Soviet Union was the result of our relative ignorance of the Russian state and its burgeoning elite's behaviour in the period when Russia was trying to define itself as a separate state.
Russia's politics in the late Soviet period when it was separating itself from the central authority of the Soviet Union has been somewhat neglected. That is why its behaviour in many instances appears to be new development and the character of its government surprises us. One of the many aspects of Russian politics that has not received adequate attention is a process of inter-republican cooperation that the new Russian government conducted in the period 1990-1991.
The year 1990 saw two rival political processes unfold in the Soviet Union both of which aimed at the reconfiguration of an aspect of the Soviet State structure. One of them, the Union Treaty process, was initiated by the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, and had the goal to renew the Soviet state as a federation. The other, inter-republican cooperation of the Russian Federation government under Boris Yeltsin's leadership was to culminate in the recognition of the republics of the Soviet Union as independent states. It is probably due to our lingering bias for formal institutions and their interactions that we devoted more attention to the unsuccessful attempt of the USSR President than the ultimately successful strategy of Russia ~ a republic that was emerging as a separate state.
Inter-republican cooperation can be defined as, but was not limited to, signing treaties promoting economic and technical cooperation, bestowing symbolic importance through head of the state level visits, and verbally supporting another republic's struggle for independence. Russia became engaged in such activities immediately after the formation of the Russian government in June 1990. Even before the government was formed, Yeltsin, after his election to the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, expressed the desire to develop relations with the rest of the republics on the basis of treaties. Although it was the other republics, specifically the Baltic ones, which initiated inter-republican cooperation, Russia came to dominate the process.
Nothing has been written on the inter-republican cooperation of the Russian Republic, As a matter of fact, the politics of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) when it was trying to separate itself from the centre has been somewhat neglected. Very little has been written on cooperation among all the republics in general in the late Gorbachev period. The few studies that have considered such cooperation in some form brief remarks, short discussion or exclusive focus incorporate Russian cooperation in the broad concept of inter-republican cooperation.
In the chapters that follow I study the RSFSR's cooperation with the rest of the Soviet republics combining a number of research methods and situating the whole study in the theories developed in comparative politics. It is true that other republics were establishing cooperative relations with one another, but Russia's cooperation presents some important and interesting research questions.
Russia was not just another republic trying to gain independence from the centre but itself was the centre. A Russian dominated Communist Party was governing the Soviet Union. It was not an instance of manoeuvring in a nationalist struggle like any other republic. Russia's cooperative posture looked very much like the effort of a sub-national elite hostile to the Communist elite to reorganize Russia's relations with the republics. Also, it resembled the effort by a more flexible elite to manage the break-up of an empire so the ruling ethnic group, in this case the Russians, would not lose much. The questions this phenomenon generates are: 1. Was the cooperation an effort to undermine the governing elite of a state by a rival elite governing a sub-national administrative unit which had earlier broke away from the governing elite? 2. Was the cooperation also an attempt by the more liberal rival elite to salvage as much as possible out of an empire that could not be retained in the old form? 3. If the answers to both 1 and 2 are yes, then how can elite conflict a concern in elite theory influence the way the break-up of an empire is managed a concern in theories of empires? These are the overarching issues addressed in this study.
In an attempt to analyse Russia's cooperative strategy, I ask why the Russian Republic engaged in cooperative actions, actions that were supportive of other republics (more detailed definition of cooperation given later). Was it economic necessity as one author suggests (Seliverstov, 1991) and another seems to think (Bahry, 1991) or were there other reasons? The book is an attempt to find out whether two propositions can be supported with evidence. The propositions are: 1. The Russian Republic cooperated with the other republics to render the central government irrelevant. 2. It cooperated to manage the breakdown of the Soviet state occurring at the time. The first proposition addresses the first question stated in the paragraph above; the second one relates to the second issue. The findings of the research will address the third question.
