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Gorbachev's Nationalities Predicament
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15454 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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Date : |
12 / 1989 |
4,673 Words |
| Author
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Hugh Ragsdale
Hugh Ragsdale is professor of history at the University of
Alabama. He has studied at Moscow University and the Soviet
Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His recent books are Détente in
the Napoleonic Era (Kansas Press, 1980), and Tsar Paul and the
Question of Madness: An Essay in History and Psychology
(Greenwood, 1988). |
About a decade ago, an eminent French scholar made a considerable splash in the press with a book virtually predicting the early ethnic dissolution of the Soviet Union. Helene Carrere d'Encausse's work was titled, in English translation, Decline of an Empire (1979), but its original French title, L'empire eclate (1978), was more faithful to the book's contents. Eclater means to explode, to shatter, rupture, or fragment. In a pre-perestroika age, the book was met by veterans of the Cold War with a good deal of satisfaction, a kind of gleeful rubbing of the hands and self-congratulation. The consensus among other specialists, by contrast, was skeptical: They found the prognostication premature. As some observed, the surprising thing about the Soviet ethnic problem was not that it was serious, but that it was not a lot more serious than it then appeared.
A decade later, what Carrere d'Encausse foresaw seems improbable. Certainly the nationalities question, as revised, has affected glasnost, which in turn seems to have catalyzed national consciousness and conflict. Every day's headlines seem to bring us news--promising or threatening, depending on personal taste--of the Soviet empire in ethnic turmoil.
The Contemporary Situation
The ethnic problems of the Soviet state can be briefly explained by three factors.
The first is the distribution of nationalities throughout the empire. At present, Russians make up about half the population and more than one hundred other nationalities make up the remainder. The figures on the population of the USSR and
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