. . . (The Soviet Union) is shrinking at a fantastic pace and each day finds new defections. The loss of the Baltic states has been foregone for months. But the Ukraine and Byelorussia? These republics, along with the massive Russian Federation, have been regarded as the East Slav heartland.
The retreat from Eastern Europe was dictated by economic collapse. But that conquest never has been permanent. Over the centuries Germany and Russia have swept back and forth across the region with various countries, notably Poland, disappearing entirely from time to time. The Russians` theory of survival was defense in depth and the uses of the buffer state. . . .
But always the defensive posture cloaked an aggressive expansion that had its roots in the deep belief in a messianic Russia. . . .
Just as the Communist Party in other countries was an efficient instrument of Russian foreign policy, so was the Soviet system a means of subjugation at home. ”Russification” was a sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle process of forcing Russian language and culture on the collected nationalities. . . . The goal was to change first linguistic, then cultural identity. . . .
But now . . . nationalism is the most enduring of all collective emotions, and it is dismantling the Soviet Union. The republics . . . have been dominated by Russians, but they also have been getting oil and coal at cheap rates; the economy, however ragged, is interwoven into a complicated fabric of dependency.
Before it is over, the various republics may indeed be sovereign. But it may be a sovereignty limited by the necessity of economic cooperation. The communists used to call that a disguised form of imperialism. They were experts.
