The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In 1939-1940, in accordance with a pact Stalin signed with Hitler, the Soviet Union annexed some of the territories of the former Russian Empire, including a part of Poland (which was integrated into Ukraine and Belorussia), a chunk of Romania (which became Moldavia), a part of Finland (which eventually became a part of the Russian Republic), and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which became republics within the Soviet Union—with the theoretical right to secession. The constitution adopted in 1977, which Alexander Nikolaevich helped draft, added that the USSR was "multinational" and a federation. At the same time, the constitution gave the central government complete control over policy, including the command economy, and provided no guarantees of representation of the republics in the central government.¹⁴ Each of the constituent republics had its own cookie-cutter constitution, which gave it virtually no control over law, policy, or budget, even on paper. Yet every republic was, on paper, a "sovereign state." The Russian Republic itself was a federation that contained sixteen different "autonomous republics" that were also "states," plus dozens of other territorial units. None of these, however, had the right to secede from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.¹⁵ In the daily experience of the Soviet citizen, living in one or another constituent republic meant little. Quality of life was determined by individual privilege and, to a lesser extent, by proximity to the center. For visitors from other republics, life in the

Baltics appeared strikingly different—in large part because these republics were annexed later and retained some of their pre-Soviet infrastructure and culture; fewer people there spoke Russian, while other republics had been subjected to decades of learning the greatest of all languages. All Soviet citizens, however, were aware of their ethnicity, which was never neutral information—it could confer advantages where vestiges of affirmative action remained, or open one up to official discrimination or persecution if one's ethnic group was currently suspect. Policies and practices regarding different Soviet ethnicities shifted shapes frequently, and one had to be alert to successfully navigate the terrain of the "friendship of the peoples."

In other words, the Soviet system of managing both the republics and the various ethnic groups who populated them was inherently contradictory. Soviet Russia had once declared itself to be the world's first multiethnic anti-imperial state, yet its practices were imperial. It was another of the games the Soviet state played, much like the "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" game.

PERSONAL

Mikhail Sergeevich,

Some mathematical problems have no solution. They cannot be solved. Mathematics has methods for proving that a problem is unsolvable.

Karabakh is such a problem. It cannot be solved. There is no optimal solution. Any conceivable solution will be

unacceptable to one of the two sides.¹⁶

Alexander Nikolaevich wrote this note to Gorbachev in January 1988. For months, tension had been building between the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus concerning Nagorny Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that was part of Azerbaijan. This was the first region in the Soviet Union to cry foul in the nationalism/internationalism game. The impossibility of a solution was obvious: Azerbaijan was never going to cede the territory to

Armenia, and Armenia was never again going to be satisfied with Armenians living in Azerbaijan on what it thought of as historic Armenian land. One could, of course, have argued that it did not matter where a Soviet citizen lived, since republics had no real authority. But the fragile balance between symbolism and lived experience, identity and perception, had been shattered.

The Armenians appealed to Moscow for help. Alexander Nikolaevich was shocked by the depth of the conflict. He had always thought of nationalism as a retrograde ideology whose adherents were a priori in the wrong, making their opponents, invariably, right. Now he saw the face of ethnic conflicts the world over: no one was in the right. "It's time to stop wasting time and effort looking for a solution and, instead, look for a way out of the predicament in which we find ourselves," he wrote to Gorbachev. Alexander Nikolaevich proposed imposing direct Moscow rule in the region and, in the interests of lowering tensions, reintroducing full censorship in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. He proposed to "abstain completely from using any visual information (televised images, photographs, documentary film footage etc.) other than precleared materials of a positive nature."¹⁷