A popular Government,
without popular information or the means of acquiring it,
is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance;
And a people who mean to be their own Governors,
must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
JAMES MADISON to W. T. BARRY
August 4, 1822
WILLIAM C. BODIE
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.
--HOBBES, Leviathan I:13
The end of the cold war, phenomenal strategic victory though it was for the West, has disoriented NATO capitals. Scenarios that eluded Western planners even five years ago have become fact. The USSR has dissolved, 15 autonomous states have emerged, and inter-republican conflict has ignited. The once monolithic military has devolved into assorted, self-directed armed forces, and secure unitary control over thirty-thousand nuclear warheads has diminished. Any post-Warsaw Pact concert of Europe will be buffeted by the ongoing revolutions in the former Soviet empire. "Russia is no longer threatening, but it is frightening," one NATO official summed up.Note 1
Such an environment is hazardous for daily political forecasts, let alone long-range strategic visions. The West has no experience analyzing countries "that are attempting nation-building, political democratization, and economic reform in a context of economic austerity, imperial disintegration, and the collapse of state structures." Note 2Yet Western governments must appreciate the forces driving defense and diplomacy in the former USSR in order to foresee--and forestall--general conflagration in post-Soviet Eurasia.
Several unappreciated realities demand a review of the states on Russia's European periphery.Note 3 The Republic of Ukraine, by virtue of its geopolitical position, resources, and nuclear weapons, is already a major actor on the European security scene. Quiescent Belarus, capital of the moribund Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), has nevertheless created its own army and could be drawn into a regional conflict. A shooting war erupted in Moldova in mid-1992 which, though currently ignored by the West, evinces eerie parallels to the Balkans.Note 4 The Baltic republics, centrifugal pioneers of the Soviet break-up, continue to "host" unwelcome Russian military units and an unsettled Slavic population whose cause has energized Moscow's conservatives. Russian policy toward the "near abroad" or "nearby foreign parts" (blizhniye zarubezhiya)Note 5 will indicate the kind of Russia--nation, empire, or anarchic battleground--the West will know in the 21st century.
The territorial arc from Tallin to Yalta contains six independent countries with 70 million inhabitants, over 250 strategic nuclear missiles,Note6 and a third of the economic output of the Soviet Union. Ukraine alone has a population of 52 million (including some 11 million Russians) and Europe's second largest standing army. Unlike the Central European Warsaw Pact states, these republics did not entertain any notion of statehoodNote7 and were thrust abruptly into independence in 1991. Like Russia, all six share unfathomable socioeconomic nightmares, not least that each has banished its Communist party without casting off its Communists. All the historical "risk factors for intense outbursts of aggressive nationalism" are present in these countries: "democratization, state building, marketization, mass communications."Note8
Josef Stalin designed these states' borders to heighten ethnic identities and justify repressive Soviet rule. The area once known as "the Soviet West" maintains strong cultural links with Western neighbors despite russification and sovietization.Note9 Democratic and market forces are fragile, but each republic intends to follow the Central European republics into Western economic and security structures.Note10 In addition, economic, military, and sociological crises raging in the republics impinge directly on Russia's future and Western security. Uncertainty surrounds the outcome of defense conversion and arms sales, the nuclear tug-of-war between Moscow and Kiev, incipient "warlordism" in Moldova, and Russian restiveness in the Baltic states.
The two keys to security relations in this region are the republics' obsession with Russian power and the Russian military's enhanced policy role toward the republics. Ukraine's leadership in particular has justified its authoritarian state-building efforts by appealing to fear of Muscovite imperialism. As Russian civil authorities are blamed for the "loss" of territory under Moscow's sway since Peter the Great, the CIS and Russian General Staffs have usurped some Foreign Ministry prerogatives, militarizing policy toward the "near abroad."Note11 Hence, the current interplay between Russia and these states on such issues as division of property, rights of russophones in the republics, and security pacts with other states--will be a bellwether for the strategic orientation of the world's first former superpower.
Ukraine, the largest and most anti-Russian, non-Russian republic in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), arouses Western attention mainly due to Kiev's contradictory statements about nuclear weapons on its territory. The singlemindedness with which Western politicians emphasized the nuclear issue (besides bruising Ukrainian sensitivities) convinced Kiev that the weapons were of considerable diplomatic and economic utility. Future Western policy initiatives will be more successful if our awareness of Ukrainian politics extends beyond our interest in the implementation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The opportunity to establish a sovereign Ukrainian republic surprised most Ukrainian politicians, including Leonid Kravchuk, whose utterances as the parliamentary chairman during August 1991 were artfully ambiguous.Note12 Unlike tumultuous Moscow during that month's events, Kiev saw neither a coup nor an anti-Communist revolution. As the dissident leader Vyacheslav Chornovil noted some six months after the coup, "If you look at a map of Ukraine to see how democratic it is, then three-quarters of the territory should be painted red or pink because, even today, it is under control of our sovereign Ukrainian Communists."Note13
Ukraine had known only two previous periods of independence since the Mongol invasions (in the mid-17th century and during the 1917-21 period).Note14 Nonetheless, Kravchuk moved swiftly and skillfully to establish the rudiments of statehood. He nationalized Soviet property, decreed the establishment of independent Ukrainian governing entities, and made forceful public statements that convinced many anti-Communist opposition leaders that he was indispensable to the consolidation of Ukrainian independence.Note15
For Kravchuk, the main factor in the successful realization of independence was the swift creation of a Ukrainian armed force out of the remnants of the Red Army based on Ukrainian territory. The leader of the 1917 Ukrainian republic, according to Kravchuk, "made two cardinal mistakes. He entered into a political alliance with Russia and he did not create a Ukrainian army."Note16 In the fall 1991 interregnum between the coup and the establishment of the CIS, Kravchuk had no doubts that Ukraine would "activate" Soviet military forces on Ukrainian territory. On 27 December 1991, CIS Commander in Chief Yevgenny Shaposhnikov announced the rejection of a unified CIS force. This admission meant that "less than two weeks after the creation of the CIS the integrated military structure maintained over seventy years of Soviet rule had begun to unravel in earnest."Note17
Having been hailed as the man who stood up to Moscow, however, the former ideology chief of the Ukrainian Communist party and his KGB cohorts are paying for this particular path to independence. First, Kravchuk's determination to place "state-building" before democracy has damaged Ukraine's international reputation and eroded public confidence in the regime.Note18 Second, the aggressive identification of Yeltsin's Russia with the Soviet empire has exacerbated a bitter psychological schism with Moscow transcending any single political or economic issue. As Aleksandr Kluban of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense puts it:
Russia simply can't put up with the idea that we're an independent state. They do it formally. We recognize them as a great power, but they still don't treat us as an independent, sovereign state.Note19Ukraine's economic performance, which makes the Russian economy seem stable by comparison, is intensifying social conflict in the eastern, heavily russophone mining and industrial oblasts.Note20
Internal military challenges include absorbing a large Soviet officer corps, revamping command structures, recruitingpersonnel, and converting Ukraine's massive military industry to peaceful uses. Externally, the numerous conflicts with Russia include ownership and control of military assets, especially nuclear weapons and the Black Sea Fleet; the status of Russian-dominated areas such as the Crimean peninsula; and a tangle of economic issues, notably energy supplies. Kiev's progress on all scores is mixed, and the nuclear issue haunts diplomatic discussions throughout Europe.
Officially, Ukraine inherited an army of 1,200,000 active service personnel, which Kiev plans to halve by the year 2000. The Ukrainian armed forces today employ roughly 650,000 men and women, including some 200,000, mostly Russian, officers.Note21 More than 100,000 Ukrainian service personnel in other republics have been offered billets in the Ukrainian armed forces. As part of its plan to "nationalize" the army, Kiev required all military personnel to swear a loyalty oath to the Ukrainian state, and 9 in 10 of them complied.Note22
Despite this apparent quantitative success, the institutional loyalty of the type Samuel Huntington describes in The Soldier and the State may be lacking in Ukraine. First, many officers took the loyalty oaths for material reasons--Ukraine's economic prospects looked brighter than Russia's in late 1991. But by summer 1992, growing numbers became dissatisfied with their material lot.Note23 Indeed, one public opinion poll showed that only 43 percent of the officers who swore loyalty took the oath seriously.Note24 As a result of such reports, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MOD) organized a "social-psychological division," with its own command chain reminiscent of the Red Army political indoctrination system. Farther down the command chain, desertion, draft evasion, and theft of military property are rampant.
The divided loyalties in the Ukrainian military are exemplified by the experience of former Major General Valeriy Kuznetsov. A Crimean corps commander, the Russian Kuznetsov, pledged loyalty to Ukraine and was slated for higher office. When a Ukrainian MOD official, who was also a member of the ultra-nationalist Union of Ukrainian Officers, asked whether Kuznetsov would fight against Russia, he replied in the negative. Kuznetsov was fired in May, after appealing to the local (largely Russian) Crimean parliament.Note25 While Kuznetsov's case was heightened due to the ongoing dispute over the status of the Crimea,Note26 it signaled Kiev's sensitivity about the attitudes of Russians in the Ukrainian military in an era of Russian-Ukrainian tensions.
The most unnerving dispute between Russia and Ukraine in 1992 arose over the status of strategic forces located in Ukrainian territory. Since its sovereignty declaration in 1990, Ukraine had made many declarations about its intentions of becoming a "nuclear free state," but its actions during 1992 signaled otherwise. On 10 March, Ukraine suspended transfers of tactical nuclear weapons to Russia. At the same time the CIS command disputed Ukraine's right to assume control of the strategic air bases in Ukraine and their 42 long-range bombers.Note27 During the summer Ukraine kept trying to assume "administrative control" of the former Strategic Rocket Force sites in Ukraine, placing officers who had sworn loyalty to Ukraine in charge of launch sites. Although Kiev signed the Lisbon START protocols calling for removal of Ukraine's strategic weapons within seven years, the agreement was criticized in the Ukrainian parliament on the eve of the spring 1993 ratification debate.Note28 While Ukraine may be using the nuclear "card" to obtain more Western aid, recent statements by Ukrainian leaders stressing the need for US or NATO "security guarantees" may indicate a hardening of Kiev's position.
After a "hot" spring and an early summer in 1992, two Russian-Ukrainian summits were held. One summit produced an agreement to place the Black Sea Fleet under joint Russian-Ukrainian command for three years, when the fleet will be divided. While the summits were applauded in the West (and in the state-controlled Ukrainian media), parliamentary leaders in both Kiev and Moscow promptly attacked the arrangement on the fleet. A Ukrainian cabinet minister said the accord was merely an effort to calm Western worries.Note29 Still, by early July both Russia and Ukraine ratified the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, meaning that Moscow at least recognized Ukraine's seizure of conventional military forces.
Neither president sees a positive outcome of further Russian-Ukrainian tension, but hostility between important sectors of their political elites still runs high. The ex-Communist Ukrainian elite sees a Russia disintegrating into chaos and expects a successor regime far less congenial to Yeltsin than to Ukrainian independence. Hence, they might prove unwilling to downsize the Ukrainian military, or convert the unproductive military industrial complex, or relinquish nuclear weapons. At the same time, as Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma points out,
There isn't a single sector of the economy that isn't disastrous--agriculture, industry, the credit finance system, health, ecology.Note30
This economic plight has destabilized the eastern regions and could prompt disintegrative pressures or violent social unrest. If violence occurs in the eastern regions, where Kiev is redeploying military units, the potential for Russian military intervention in Ukraine would be frighteningly clear.
Beyond these immensely difficult issues, many Russian politicians silently share the view of Russian People's Deputy Sergei Baburin that, "either Ukraine unites with Russia, or [there will be] war."Note31 Given the historical ties, trade relations (80 percent of Ukraine's commerce is with the Russian Federation), and the existence of 11 million Russians in Ukraine, many Russians, even the most liberal and democratic, demonstrate a psychological difficulty in recognizing a permanently independent Ukraine.Note32 At the same time, a Russian bogeyman has become all the more important for Ukrainian leaders whose democratic shortcomings and economic failures may threaten their grip on power. And, as veterans of the Soviet Communist power structure, the maintenance of power transcends all other considerations for Kravchuk and his circle.
Belarus, with a population of 10.3 million (13.2 percent Russian), has had positively romantic relations with Russia compared with Ukraine. Internally, the post-Communist nomenklatura in Minsk has elevated stabilnost (stability) over democracy. It has decided not to hold free elections, to limit entrepreneurial activities, and to prevent an independent judiciary from emerging.Note33
The ruling parliament, dominated as in Ukraine by veterans of the Soviet-era communist nomenklatura, has proven far more amenable to Russian perspectives and sensitivities, particularly on nuclear weapons dismantlement. As Minsk is the titular CIS capital, Belarusian leaders have been forceful in their public defenses of the Commonwealth and its structures.Note34 Asked about Belarusian foreign policy, one Minsk official said that soon "virtually every step in this direction will be taken in full accordance with the interests of Russia."Note35
Similarly, Russian attitudes and statements toward Belarus have been benign. Andrei Kortunov writes that the lack of Belarusian nationalism and russophobia permit a high degree of cooperation, even in the military sphere. "Russia could probably achieve more than just a Finnish model of security cooperation with Belarus."Note36 Culturally, Russians in Moscow have more in common with residents of independent Belarus than with their countrymen in far off Irkutsk or Vladivostok.
Nevertheless, Minsk has made clear its desires for bilateral relations with Russia in the security sphere, not CIS collective security pacts. Belarus also balked at some Russian-sponsored CIS initiatives on financial burden sharing. And Belarusian authorities have voiced their concerns about political instability in Russia.
Belarus's defense minister identified his major concerns as draft evasion, corruption in the military, and low esteem for the army in Belarus.Note37 Moreover, few officers in the Belarusian army wish to leave, and thousands of Belarusians stationed in Russia plan on returning home, which will strain Belarus's already sparse fiscal and housing resources. By 1994 Minsk is forming its own armed forces, 90,000 to 100,000 strong (a defense law was passed in March 1992). Belarusian will be the military's official language by 1998. According to its defense doctrine, Belarus will be a neutral, nonnuclear state, with a strategy based on defense of its borders.
Whether Minsk, located between Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Latvia, could remain neutral in a regional conflict is doubtful. And, like every nation in the "Soviet West," Belarus has had territorial disputes with Lithuania and Poland ever since Stalin redrew borders after World War II. Given Ukraine's problems with Russia, border conflicts with Lithuania, and Russia's cold war with the Baltic states, Belarus may soon be forced to reassess its hopes about "stability."
In mid-1992, as the West anxiously focused on the prospect of widened conflict in the Balkans, the first war in the European heartland of the former Soviet Union erupted six hundred miles northeast of Sarajevo. Although a tenuous "ceasefire" has been in effect since summer 1992, the Trans-Dneister has all the attributes of likely future conflicts in and around Russia--border disputes, Russian nationalism, Communist revanchism, and a highly politicized, self-controlled ex-Soviet army. As one observer puts it,
Moldova in 1992 represented a far more immediate threat to stability in the region. . . . the Dniester region [after Kaliningrad] could become a second longer-term security problem for European leaders."Note38
Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, and granted territory from both by Stalin, Soviet Moldava was an ethnic mélange of Romanians, Gagauz, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians. During the last years of the Gorbachev regime, as the "Moldovan Popular Front" agitated for closer ties with Romania, the Russian Communists on the Slavic east bank of the Dniester River organized themselves in opposition to both reform and Moldovan independence. After the coup in 1991, the dominant Romanians established what some Slavic residents viewed as an ethnically based state. Some Russians pointed to statements from Bucharest about eventual incorporation of Moldova into a "Greater Romania," which the political leadership in Chisinau (formerly Kishinev) did not initially contradict. As a result, existing ethnic tensions burst into the political, and eventually military, spheres.Note39
On the surface the contest between the former Soviet republic of Moldava and the Russian separatists on a sliver of land east of the Dniester River resembles other blood feuds that have erupted across Eurasia. The Moldovan republic, with a population of 4.3 million nestled between Romania and Ukraine, is dominated by 2.8 million ethnic Romanians whose leaders seek closer ties--some say federation--with Romania. The official language of the republic is Romanian, and Moldova has even adopted the Romanian flag. As much of modern Moldova was annexed by the Red Army in 1940 after the Hitler-Stalin pact, many Moldovans feel their aspirations are as worthy of Western support as those of the Baltic states.
East of the Dniester, where one quarter of the population is Russian, a separatist cabal of old-line Russian Communists holds sway with the help of the remnants of the 14th Russian Army.Note40 Also in this mix are roughly 600,000 Ukrainians--yet another of Stalin's numerous cartographic bequests--and 800,000 ethnic Romanians who fear the tender mercies of a Russian force that sports slogans such as "Death to Romanians" on its armored vehicles.
What distinguishes this conflict is the remarkable degree of political involvement by the Russian military commander, General Aleksandr Lebed, and the proximity of Russia and Ukraine.Note41 Lebed, who has called Moldova a "fascist" state and continued to make political speeches ignoring a ban on such statements by Russian officers, fancies himself the guarantor of the self-styled Dniester Republic, itself a kind of redoubt for paleo-Communists in the former USSR. Former KGB officers and ex-Soviet special forces (OMON) officers have been identified as serving in the "Dniester Republic" security services. However, even putative Russian liberals such as Yeltsin adviser Sergei Stankevich support the actions of the 14th Army as protecting legitimate Russian interests.
After several months of sporadic, but often intense, fighting, the region was somewhat becalmed by the summer ceasefire. Neighboring Ukraine has shifted its position on the Dniester region by suggesting it gain autonomy from Moldova.Note42 Yeltsin reportedly said, "Don't worry, there won't be a war. We will pull back the 14th Army to Russian territory and will not permit Russia to be dragged into war."Note43
But the army has not been withdrawn. In fact, on 2 December a transfer of equipment in progress was reported, from Russia's 14th Army to the "Dniester Forces." The remnants of the 14th Army were to be turned over to "local authorities" in the "Dniester republic" or "sold" locally and the units themselves "disbanded" locally instead of being withdrawn.Note44 At any rate, no effective diplomatic initiatives have come from the Russian Foreign Ministry, and individuals in the Russian parliament and MOD are fueling tensions between Moldova and Russia. Also, despite the Moldovan authorities' declared opposition to unification with Romania, they have indicated their growing reluctance to sign the CIS Charter.Note45
Finally, the Ukrainians have a great interest in the Dniester conflict. Any movement of Russian forces would have to take place through Ukrainian territory or airspace, as Moldava has no contiguous border with Russia. Kiev is also concerned about a flood of refugees from the region to a Ukraine with scarce support resources. There is also the geopolitical problem of an aggressive, autocratic Dniester republic on Ukraine's Western frontier.Note46 Given the many other Russian-Ukrainian strategic disputes, the Trans-Dniester situation could prove to be far more than an inconvenient legacy of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
The intensification of the drive for Baltic independence in 1986 struck many Westerners as quixotic. Some even criticized Baltic activists, many of whom were local Communist party officials, as injurious to the cause of Soviet reform.Note47 In fact, the independence movement in the Baltics and the violent intervention in Lithuania and Latvia in January 1991 helped precipitate the ultimate break between Yeltsin and Gorbachev that paved the way for the August revolution.
The Baltic republics today confront the same daunting litany of social, economic, and political ills as other post-Communist nations: economic and ecological catastrophe, the absence of legitimate political institutions, and the challenge of creating responsive state structures and civil societies. The Baltics, however, bear some unique burdens. As late recipients (1940) of the gifts of Soviet socialism, many Balts have memories of interwar independence. These images, romanticized through five decades of occupation, form a powerful--and not always democratic--element of Baltic political culture. Second, the Balts confront the armed detritus of their former colonists, most of whom feel no responsibility for past crimes. Finally, due to fifty years of forced population transfers, industrialization, and relentless russification, the republics' social and demographic composition scarcely resembles the pre-1940 picture.
It is important to distinguish among the Baltic republics. They are diverse nations with distinctive problems regarding political development and relations with Moscow.Note48 Still, the most pressing security problems for each state in the near term are the severe political and economic dislocations caused by independence. The conflict between preservation of national culture and the creation of vibrant, contemporary democracies is more acute in the Baltic states than in Eastern Europe due to the corrosive legacy of Soviet annexation. This legacy colors all attempts to create tolerant republican political virtues such as respect for majority will and minority rights.Note49
The internal challenges complicate the withdrawal process, the primary Western concern. For the Balts, the issue is not merely troop withdrawals, but financial restitution for property and equipment seized by the Soviet government since 1940 and support for the massive ecological cleanup. In Moscow's view, withdrawals will occur, but at a pace that fits Russia's ability to absorb forces into the federation. Moscow's negotiating terms also include the "protection" of Russian speakers living in the Baltic states. Some Russian military officers even discuss retaining access to certain strategic facilities built by the Soviet authorities on Baltic territory.Note50
LITHUANIA. Lithuania has had the greatest success of the three Baltic states in organizing its own, centralized armed force and in negotiating Russian troop withdrawals. Of course, Lithuania has many fewer Russian-speaking residents (10 percent of its population) than do the other two states (almost 50 percent in Latvia and 40 percent in Estonia). Lithuania's location on the east-west rail link between the Russian Federation and the Kaliningrad oblast also gave Vilnius some added leverage.
On 8 September 1992, after months of arduous negotiations, the Russian and Lithuanian defense ministries established a framework for the withdrawal of all Russian military personnel from the territory of the Lithuanian republic by 31 August 1993.Note51 Boris Yeltsin and the Lithuanian leader at that time, Vytautus Landsbergis, failed to sign a general, "political" agreement on troop withdrawals, prompting many in Vilnius to view the timetable accord with some skepticism. Still, the timetable was judged in Vilnius to be a major accomplishment for Lithuanian diplomacy, and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly Churkin called it a "model" for the region.m016not1.htmlNote52 Withdrawals proceeded in the absence of the political accord, beginning (most conspicuously) with the airborne unit that had participated in the January 1991 assault on Vilnius.
Lithuanian officials are divided on how to interpret events in Moscow in the wake of the timetable agreement. Some believe that Yeltsin is making slow but steady progress in reforming Russia's political scene against the coalition of reactionary forces opposing Baltic sovereignty. Others, pointing to Russian decrees of October 1992 and March 1993 suspending Baltic troop withdrawals, argue that Russian democrats are being isolated by reactionary forces in the military. However, there is strong consensus in Lithuania that Yeltsin was the strongest supporter of Baltic independence among the Russian leadership and that his removal from office would jeopardize the independence of all the Baltic states and destabilize the entire continent. In the wake of Yeltsin's spring 1993 power struggle with the Russian legislature, Lithuanian leaders have expressed renewed doubts about Moscow's commitments.
The Lithuanian government elected in the fall of 1992 is led by members of the Lithuanian Democratic Labor party, the former Lithuanian Communist party.Note53 Although the respected Lithuanian Defense Minister Audrius Butkevicius retains his post, some Lithuanians feel that Russia may seek to stall on its commitments or demand renegotiation of certain elements.
LATVIA. In contrast with the cautious optimism in Vilnius, Latvia faces deeper problems with respect to Russian troop withdrawals, relations with the large Russian-speaking population, and Baltic security cooperation.
Internally, no full post-independence parliamentary elections have been held, and major decisions about citizenship and constitutional authority have been stalled as a result.Note54
Latvian officials interviewed emphasize repeatedly how fifty years of Soviet rule hampered the creation of a healthy democratic culture. "We are being asked to do too much," noted Janis Jurkans, who was foreign minister in September 1992. "Democratic ways of doing things are foreign to our genetic makeup," he added. "Russia succeeded in creating a Soviet man here."Note55 He concluded that Latvia's internal problems must be confronted before Russian relations can be stabilized. Ironically, Russian official Sergei Zotov made the same point:
Without real steps to change the legislation infringing on political, economic, and social rights of Russians, steps to create an atmosphere of good-neighborly relations between all nationalities, without a firm denunciation of territorial claims to the bordering Russian lands, further talks will be of no success.Note56
Negotiations between Riga and Moscow have been hampered by several political and social realities. First, as Riga is the Headquarters of the Russian Northwest Group of Forces, more Russian troops are stationed in Latvia than in the other two republics.Note57 Of these troops, however, almost half are officers. "An army with this many officers is no longer merely a military force--it becomes a political force," says one observer.Note58 Moreover, as a result of Stalin's forced transfer of populations in the Baltic states after 1940, almost half the residents of Latvia are ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The Russian-speaking population in Riga actually exceeds 50 percent. Although the Latvians have not yet passed a law on citizenship, Moscow has agressively denounced the drafts circulating in parliament and elsewhere as anti-Russian. Finally, Russia seeks continued access to several "strategic facilities" in Latvia, most notably a missile defense radar complex located at Skrunda.Note59
ESTONIA. Estonia is the northernmost Baltic republic with the smallest population (1.2 million) and the most difficult relations with Russia. As consumed as it is with the withdrawal of some 30,000 Russian troops based in Estonia, Tallin also has to cope with competing Estonian military institutions and an activist Russian minority.Note60 During Lennart Meri's first official visit to NATO Headquarters as Estonia's head of state, he named the need to counter the "growing pressure from Russian extremists" as one of Estonia's current problems.Note61
With or without an agreement, Moscow has already begun moving its forces out of Estonia. Of the 30,000 troops stationed in Estonia at the beginning of 1992, half had been removed by the time of Yeltsin's decree suspending withdrawals.Note62 That includes the closure of three Russian bases on an island off the Estonian coast that had served as a western outpost of the Soviet Air Force. The Russian Defense Ministry announced in October 1992 that conditions for Russian military forces were so horrendous that a pullout should be undertaken without delay. Meanwhile, the two sides have been negotiating in desultory fashion on an agreed timetable for withdrawal, officially suspended by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev in March 1993.
It would be cause for quiet optimism if withdrawal of Russian troops from the Baltic states were the only significant security problem in the region. The Russian leadership intends to withdraw its remaining forces from the republics, not out of a charitable concern for Baltic independence, but rather because of the deteriorating conditions on ex-Soviet installations in the region and the prospects for a breakdown of discipline within the Russian officer corps.Note63 The timetable accord with Lithuania, though not fully applicable to Latvia and Estonia, should nevertheless serve them as a rough model.
Of the remaining issues on Moscow's agenda--access to strategic facilities and "human rights" for Russian residents--only the first issue will be settled amicably. Many Baltic leaders express a private willingness to accommodate Russian demands for delaying withdrawals from cetain facilities. For Moscow, the human rights initiative has proved effective in the public relations contest. Many Russian political parties have clamored for liberalized citizenship rights for Russian residents in the Baltics, as well as the provision of pension and other benefits to retired servicemen. The economically strapped Baltic states will be hard pressed to provide such financial support. Still, citizenship rights looms above all other problems, especially in Latvia and Estonia. The problem for Moscow is the reliability of the officers in the Northwest Group of Forces, who may decide to be the arbiters of their own fates in the Baltic republics.
In one of Russian history's many ironies, sorting out post-Soviet Europe in 1992 must begin with 1917. The Bolsheviks sought to graft an internationalist, "scientific" ideology on a Russian nation-empire riven by a philosophical identity crisis.Note64 The putschists of 1991 dealt a terminal blow to Lenin's experiment but in so doing exhumed the dichotomy of Russia-as-nation versus Russia-as-empire. This centuries-old dilemma had been horribly aggravated by seventy-five years of Stalinist "nationalities" policies that brutally uprooted millions of people, changed boundaries repeatedly, and politicized all ethnic relations.Note65
Russia today finds itself in a peculiar position. It considers itself the successor state to the USSR,Note66 yet it was the Russian republic that posed the most direct threat to Gorbachev's USSR. The Yeltsin-Gaidar team seeks to create a democratic republic with a free market economy, yet it is accused of weakness by Russian conservatives and of imperialism by its neighbors. Yeltsin was the first Russian politician to recognize the legitimacy of Baltic independence, yet it was he who ordered the suspension of Russian troop withdrawals from the region in October 1992. And while the Russian leadership has established a Russian defense ministry and a Russian armed force, it still maintains the pretense of a CIS unified command and announces the viability of CIS collective security measures, viewed in the other republics as an attempt to resurrect the Warsaw Pact.
The "near abroad" problems bedeviling Russian politicians are often overlooked by Western analysts who focus on Russian politics or the economic reform debate. However, as Oleg Rumyantsev notes, concern over Russians in the republics "is not a cause just of the political right, but of all Russian parliamentarians. It is the most important cause we now have."Note67
If it is the most important cause for Russian parliamentarians, it has become a central part of the agenda of the conservative forces in Russian politics and their military allies. In July 1992 Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev condemned the "party of war," or those seeking to unify the Russian populace by being bellicose toward the near abroad, in an interview published in the Moscow newspaper Izvestiya.Note68 This was just after Russian President Boris Yeltsin reversed himself on an earlier idea about a civilian defense minister, appointing Afghan veteran General Pavel Grachev as defense minister.Note69 Yeltsin himself later criticized Kozyrev and in October, according to ITAR-TASS, "expressed his dissatisfaction with Russia's frequently spineless conduct in the international arena, her defensive tactics, and her imitation of others."Note70
About 25 million Russians and Russian speakers. . . , for the first time in 200 years, find themselves outside of Russia and subject to the laws of other independent nations. . . . It is keenly felt in a country which still retains the psychological detritus of a superpower.
--OLEG RUMYANTSEV, Chairman,
Constitutional Commission,
Russian Federation ParliamentNote71
These developments are cause for concern because they indicate Yeltsin's willingness to grant the Russian military a greater voice in foreign policy. Military leaders, including the CIS General Staff, have become increasingly politicized due to the collapse of the old control mechanisms. Some, such as General Igor Rodionov, chief of the General Staff academy, and Colonel General Mikhail Kolesnikov, deputy chief of the General Staff, have made pointed attacks on civilian political leaders for their insufficient attention to Russia's global interests.Note72
The military tends to be even more sensitive about the 25 million Russians outside Russia; the use of force to protect their rights was included in a draft of the Russian defense doctrine in May 1992. The draft "continued to place Moscow conceptually at the center of a unified defense system that seemingly included all or most of the old empire."Note73 The draft also implicitly rejected civilian control of the military. In fact, there is no legislative guidance on civil-military relations in Russia today or any understanding of constitutional checks and balances. In addition, some officers feel that disputes between military leaders on the issue of troop withdrawals will damage Moscow's military capabilities and undermine officer morale.
On 24 August 1991 right after the failed coup, Boris Yeltsin's spokesman noted that Russia reserved the right to renegotiate its borders with other post- Soviet states.Note74 Since then, Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, an Afghan veteran, has made several provocative visits to other republics. In the Crimea, he asserted, for example, "The historical consciousness of Russians does not permit anyone mechanically to bring the borders of Russia in line with the Russian Federation."Note76 An emerging line within Russia was expressed by Russia's Ambassador to the United States Vladimir P. Lukin. The ambassador described a "new encirclement" of hostile successor states where Russia would have to play a more traditional, activist role, given its geographical and historic interests.
In viewing Russia's relations with the near abroad, we should keep in mind Alexander Belkin's description of Russian statehood:
Russia still has no borders defined in accordance with international law; she has no concept of national interest; and she has yet to formulate a definitive long-term national development strategy.Note77
As long as Russia fails to know itself, its policies toward its former underlings can scarcely be expected to be based on enlightened self-interest. From a strategic perspective, that lack of self-awareness is perhaps the most sobering reality of all.
Perhaps the silver lining in this strategic cloud is that the internal challenges facing these republics are so daunting as to preclude major, deliberate inter-republican hostilities. A Russian military in such an advanced state of institutional decomposition has been described that there are no serious discussions of strategic doctrine, let alone coordinated planning for offensive operations.Note78 In Moldova, a "Dniester Republic" Defense Force might not have the same leverage to draw Russia into the fray as did Russian Lieutenant General Lebed's Russian 14th Army. In a study of post-Soviet nationalism, one authority argues:
If Ukraine seems unduly assertive in its national claims, this stems not from confident swagger, but rather from its own self-doubts about the solidity of newly won sovereignty. Claims on the Black Sea Fleet, foot-dragging on denuclearization, resistance to Crimean self-determination, and insistence upon a self-defeating degree of economic independence have been motivated largely by the symbolic politics of the assertion of national independence."Note79
Comfort might be found in the actual Russian withdrawals from the Baltic States, the Moldovan government's assurances that it would not merge with Romania, or the Belarusian commitment to denuclearization.
Anyone who isn't confused doesn't really understand the situation.
-- EDWARD R. MURROW
The pace of change in the region is so intense that almost any of the above frictions, from nuclear control to civil unrest to military insubordination, could catalyze major conflict between Russia and its Western neighbors. Inter-republican relations in the post-Soviet West are more likely to resemble a new type of cold war, characterized by internal preoccupations and unconsummated strategic ambitions. The six republics will view Russia as the principle threat to their survival or sovereignty over the next decade. And Russia will use all its resources to prevent these states from joining an anti-Russian coalition, be it NATO or a BlackSea-BalticConfedertion. There-fore we are likely to witness a situation in which therepublicsneitherrefeder-ate with Moscow nor are allowed to join Western security organizations.Note80
Given this framework, and the residual anti-Western, anti-American attitudes in Russian (and Ukrainian) political and military circles, there are clear limits on Western policy. But the West must actively support forces for consolidating democracy as well as independence; provide aid and expertise in the arts of republican government and civilian control of the military; and provide the economic assistance targeted on the creation of non-military enterprises.
The West should rid itself of the illusion that the CIS will ever serve as the functional equivalent of the USSR in military or strategic terms. The other republics, except Belarus, view CIS as an entity whose usefulness has passed. At the same time, the West should not seek to isolate Russia by building security relations with the other republics that resemble a new cordon sanitaire. In the future, the West will have to deal with more, rather than fewer, regional actors.
Specific initiatives that flow from this analysis include: