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Feud Across the Caucasus
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17054 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1990 |
3,154 Words |
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Jonathan Derrick
Jonathan Derrick is a journalist and historian who has written
extensively on the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Africa. |
The world is slowly getting used to the idea that the boundaries of the Soviet Union may be changing. While the crisis over Lithuania has not yet been fully resolved, it appears from the Soviet leader's own pronouncements that independence is merely a matter of time. And that raises all sorts of possibilities, unthinkable until recently.
Some argue that the three Baltic states are a special case, because of the internationally admitted illegality of their occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940; there must be people arguing thus in Moscow. But many others are sure to be thinking of a "domino theory.” If the Baltic states become independent again, who would leave the Soviet Union next? Moldavia, probably, as it was annexed at the same time as the Baltic states. It was seized from Romania, to which it might now be resorted. And after that? Very likely one or more of the three republics in Transcaucasia. Already events there have produced the worst crisis as far as Moscow is concerned, a crisis that came to a head two months before Lithuania's confrontation.
The three republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are dominated by three ethnic groups whose names they bear. Other groups live there also, and many more in the Caucasus mountains bordering the region to the north. That nationalism has revived in that region is not surprising. The histories, traditions, languages, literatures, and civilizations of the Georgians and Armenians are much older even than those of Lithuania, which has such a distinguished history. Armenia was a Christian kingdom in the fourth century. Georgia received Christianity about the same time, and these peoples are still to a great extent Christian: Armenians of the Gregorian Monophysite church, Eastern
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