Both geography and history, as noted in the article on Eurasia in this issue of the Carnegie Reporter, have long been both complicating and defining factors in the region. After all, Eurasia, as currently defined, is the product of the Russian Empire that emerged between the 17th and 19th centuries. At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire occupied almost 1/6 of the Earth’s landmass and had forged a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national and multi-racial empire that stretched from Europe to the Bering Sea on the doorstep of Alaska. But in the chaotic aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolutions and World War I, this giant among empires faced civil war and disintegration, often along regional and ethnic lines. What prevented these fissures from becoming permanent was the emergence of the Soviet Union in 1922, which, under Communist rule, eventually reconquered practically all the territories that were lost during the Great War. But this triumph also posed a dilemma: since Communism opposed colonialism and advocated a transnational workers’ state free from the divisive ravages of nationalism, the Communist Party formulated a new concept of a sovereign state that was designed to preserve both unity and diversity.

This goal was best exemplified in the “Stalin” constitution of 1936, under which, eventually, 100 different national cultures living in 16 soviet federated socialist republics,¹ including 6 territories, 123 regions, 20 autonomous republics, 8 autonomous regions and 10 autonomous districts were ostensibly granted the right to secede from the union but at the same time, pressed to recognize their obligation, in the name of proletarian solidarity, to denounce even the possibility of such a move. After all, Marxist theory, as formulated by Joseph Stalin, held that “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture,” and that those countries and peoples comprising the Soviet Union had joined it voluntarily. Sustaining this proposition was easier said than done. In reality, the same ethnic and nationalist tensions that beset the Russian Empire fermented beneath the Soviet structure even though the Communist Party hierarchy asserted that it had been able to solve the nationality question and hence, had successfully confronted the issue of nationalism. Therefore, the Soviet Union, while serving as a bridge between Europe and Asia, remained at the vanguard of the working-class revolution that soon, in the view of its leaders, would spread throughout the world.

During the eighty years of Soviet rule, at least five distinct policy trends helped to shore up the balancing act that Soviet leaders attempted in order to keep the “voluntary” amalgam of nations and peoples they had placed within the framework of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics functioning:

1. What united the Slavic peoples—such as religion, history, language, racial makeup, ethnicity and shared suffering under the yoke of tyranny—was natural; what divided them, particularly imposed borders, was artificial.

2. Just the opposite could be said of Muslims living in the region. What united them—religion—was artificial in the view of atheistic Soviet doctrine; what divided them (many of the same factors as were seen to unite the Slavs) was natural. This view rationalized the creation of republics with unique characteristics such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, with arbitrarily drawn borders crossing ethnic and tribal lines in an attempt to prevent the development of a Muslim bloc.

3. The Jews presented a particular challenge to Soviet leadership, both in practice and in theory. Stalin’s “final solution,” enacted in 1934, was to create for them an autonomous region called Birobidzhan in the southern part of the now-former Soviet Far East (bordering on China); the goal was to isolate Judaism, which ran counter to official state policy of atheism; and the burgeoning notion of Zionism, which countered Soviet views
of nationalism.

4. The effects of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact saw three Baltic states—Estonia (part of the Russian Empire until 1918 and then independent for 22 years), Latvia and Lithuania—transferred to Soviet control; these “newcomers” required the development of new Soviet policies to deal with their more European roots and outlook and their ethnic mix of peoples.

5. The issue of Armenia and Georgia, both of which had adopted Christianity in the 4th century and which, at one time or another, were independent kingdoms (the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartl-Kakheti remained an independent entity until 1783), was addressed by grudging recognition on the part of Soviet leaders that these intransigently separate regions could not be wholly subsumed. Though part of the Russian Empire, they retained their own alphabets and languages, as well as their own national churches.

But the concept of Russia as a benign elder brother acting as a leader, and often, an umpire over a collection of common interests, proved difficult to maintain. During World War II, for example, the Soviet leaders promoted nationalistic fervor to combat the Nazis, but they could not bury the concept of nationalism with the war dead: issues of ethnic pride, historical memory and the nationalist goals of various republics and autonomous zones were never put to rest. While the Communist Party may have decided that internal borders were not important within the Soviet Union—because Soviet nationals were, to their thinking, citizens of one country rather than citizens of many distinct republics or other subnational entities; they all served in one army, participated in one planned economy, belonged to one trade union and were governed by one party and one constitution—there were millions of people living under the Soviet system who thought otherwise.

While the Soviet Union may have stifled open internal debate about these divisive issues, it could not prevent the West, during more than forty years of the Cold War, from appealing to nationalism and making religious and ethnic freedoms, along with the defense of national cultures, into effective anti-Soviet propaganda tools. Thus positioned as defender of the rights of Christians, Jews, Muslims and other groups, the United States and its allies stoked the fires of national identity and ethnic and religious rights that burned in the memory of those who mourned a lost nation or dreamed that a motherland, gone for decades or even centuries, could rise again.

In the 1970s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath rekindled the late 19th century Great Game that pitted the Russian Empire against Great Britain, though now the protaganists were the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia, vying with the United States for the future of the region. Afghanistan was the tipping point: throughout the war, which was fought, on the Afghan side, largely with Western arms and financing, the thousands of guerilla fighters who poured in from other Muslim nations and their political backers used Islam as a motivating factor and argued that the presence of “atheistic” Soviet troops in Afghanistan was an offense to Muslims all over the world. In an ironic twist, for the West—particularly the United States—Islam was, for a time, a useful buffer against “the red menace” of Communism, a weapon to be wielded as necessary, and sheathed when it was no longer needed. But that decision turned out not to be one that could be made without long-term consequences: once the Soviet Union collapsed, other nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan saw that money and influence could be used to promote the rebirth of Islam as a potent political weapon to be used in the name of Muslim solidarity in the region but also to support their own national and regional ambitions.

Now, as competing international interests—the United States, China, and any number of Muslim states—continue jockeying for power, the newly minted Russian Federation is forced to face its own future. It may chose to be autochthonous, echoing with the Slavophile aspirations of those 19th century advocates of the supremacy of Slavic culture and historical institutions as a better model of development for Russia than the Western European one. Or it can continue the process of Westernizing begun under Peter the Great, and carried on by both the Czarist and Soviet governments, and thus continue bridging the divide between Europe and Asia. Which path Russia will follow is critical for the future of democracy in the region. Perhaps, defying hegemonies of all sorts, the new Eurasia will seek to find a way to embark upon new forms of regional cooperation suited to its common economic needs, including outreach to global markets, while at the same time leaving breathing room for discordant national, ethnic and religious interests to coexist. But even if this type of collaborative effort is a possibility, one thing is clear: throughout the region, Russian culture, language and Soviet models of governance and development still remain influential. (Let us remember, for example, that many of the newly independent states were or are still run by former KGB leaders or other strongmen.) For all these non-Russian republics—some of them multi-ethnic, including a major Russian population—the challenge is to transition from authoritarian rule to a rule of law and begin to build a future based on democratic principles that include not only free elections, free speech and freedom of assembly, but the creation of the institutions that make democracy possible. In capitals around the world, the impact of the choices made in post-Soviet Eurasia are waiting to be measured.

¹ The Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was dissolved in 1956, leaving a total of 15.

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