But they ignore the reality that centrifugal forces were already so great, the leader of the Other Russia Party says, that even “if Yeltsin and Gorbachev had agreed on the restoration of the monarchy” let alone agreed to a confederation, “the Union already had in fact collapsed.” Even drowning the country in blood might not have been enough.
Read also: Vitaly Portnikov: “The ghost of the Soviet Union was definitively buried in Ukraine in 2014”
The non-Russian republics, he says, would have viewed a confederation as a half-way house to independence, and in the absence of a Moscow elite prepared to use the kind of violence across the entire Soviet Union that Yeltsin and then Putin applied to Chechnya, the country would have disintegrated.
Yevgeny Valyaev of the Foundation for the Development of Civil Society agrees and argues that “a confederation could not become a salvation format for the preservation of the USSR, by itself, this form of state organization is unstable and often is encountered as a traditional phase, either toward future unification or toward final collapse.
The sad fate of the Commonwealth of Independent States and of Moscow’s efforts to promote a union state with Belarus only underscore this reality. Only if Russia were very strong and had a political class willing to use violence to hold things together would there have been any chance for saving the USSR.
Further reading:
- Chornobyl destroyed the Soviet Union
- ‘Homo putinus’ – the successor to ‘homo sovieticus,’ Yakovenko says
- Ukraine’s open colonial wounds
- Many Ukrainians remain “Soviet people” decades after collapse of the USSR. How to eliminate “Bolshevism of the mind”?
- Who wants the USSR back in Ukraine?
- Weak desovietization complicates WWII commemorations in Ukraine — analyst
- ‘Creative de-Sovietization’ will immunize people against communism
- The Russian Federation will disintegrate but not ‘just like the Soviet Union did’
- The decolonization of Ukraine is irreversible — Viatrovych
- The West’s failure in 1991 must not be repeated now
- Vitaly Portnikov: “The ghost of the Soviet Union was definitively buried in Ukraine in 2014”
