21.03.1996

Parliament rejects destruction of USSR

On March 15, the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, passed a resolution which revoked the agreements reached in 1991 on setting up the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The CIS was set up as a means of replacing the Soviet Union, though not all the former Soviet republics belong to it. The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have stayed out. Many Russians and indeed many citizens of the other former Soviet republics do not accept the legal validity of the Soviet Union’s destruction. Some of them are hostile to the CIS for that reason, although others see the CIS structures as raw material for recreating the Soviet Union.

The deputies who voted for the resolution were mainly drawn from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Their motive was to reject the CIS in a symbolic manner, and by implication to declare the Soviet Union’s destruction null and void.

Predictably, the Duma resolution has stirred up a storm of indignation from politicians associated with the CIS or profiting from it. On March 16, Russian president Boris Yeltsin accused the Duma of trying to “do away with our [Russian] statehood”, according to the Itar-Tass news agency. He said the Duma resolution could not revive the Soviet Union, but would merely give rise to confusion about the constitutional position of Russia.

While many politicians have echoed Yeltsin, other reactions have been different. The chairman of the Duma, CPRF member Gennady Seleznev, said that the Duma deputies had voted the way they had to state that “the great Soviet Union was destroyed against the will of the peoples and with gross violations of the constitution of the USSR”.

On the day the Duma passed the resolution, Russian TV gave coverage to the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. True to his track record as a far-right buffoon, Zhirinovsky produced handcuffs from his pocket and called for the arrest of all the Russian and former Soviet leaders who had formed the CIS and broken up the USSR. Zhirinovsky said they had all worked as “a team under CIA leadership”.

Zhirinovsky’s behaviour should serve to warn that the pro-USSR impulse in Russian politics need not be considered leftwing. In the words of the old Soviet national anthem, the USSR was “an unbreakable union of free republics created forever by great Russia (velikaya Rus)”.

Communists outside the former Soviet Union are entitled to ask whether a revived Soviet Union, even if that was achieved, would be a union of workers’ republics or simply “great Russia”. I am inclined to think it would be the latter. At the same time, the destruction of the Soviet Union was an undemocratic carve-up by the political elites of Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

John Craig