Now fades the glimmering landscape
Philip Glazebrook
THE BALTIC REVOLUTION by Anatol Lieven Yale, £22.50, pp. 454 Everyone acknowledges publicly the awful importance to our world of the break-up of the Soviet empire; and most people must acknowledge also the opacity to themselves of these events, and their own private difficulties in separating out of the Soviet mass the identities and histories of so many unfamiliar races between Kare- lia and the Kyzil Kum. Here is an excellent book which lights a way through this unfamiliar territory and elucidates these complexities. It is instructive, and it is often made vivid by direct experience, for Mr Lieven is a Times journalist who has followed events on the ground.
Ingredients common to the past of many subject races are to be found in the Baits' history, and their progress towards nation- hood follows an exemplary pattern. In Lithuania's remote past glows an epoch of power, golden and legendary, a 14th- century empire which was crushed out of existence by the expansion of mighty neigh- bours. Since then the Baits have been serfs, their national identities submerged in the underclass of the Swedish or German or Russian empires. Deserted by their native nobles — who ignobly joined their con- querors — the lump was leavened by no trickle-down culture from an aristocracy of their own blood, so that they lived and worked in their damp forests in utter dark- ness for five centuries. With the 'nationalist awakening' of the 19th-century emerged the claim, here as in other oppressed provinces of empire, to form an indepen- dent state within recognised frontiers — a claim based on legend and fostered by folk-songs which, as in Wales, was all that survived from the Baits' golden age.
I was reminded again and again of the early days of modern Greece. She is the prototype for such states emerging from the shadow of a collapsing empire: a sub- ject race harking back to a mythic/heroic past, a province of the Ottoman empire for four centuries allowed in the 1830s to become an 'independent' state only by sanction of the Great Powers whose tactics and rivalries were suited by that arrange- ment. For Greece had none of the pre- requisites of true independence, neither sufficient wealth nor an army capable of defending her own borders. As with the ex- Soviet republics, her economy was funded, and her frontiers guaranteed, by the 'pro- tecting powers'. And Greece too had her squabbling, self-seeking politicians to abuse the parliamentary democracy they had con- vinced the world they wanted; she too was plagued by paramilitary brigands encour- aged by her politicians as an arm of their influence — and she too nearly foundered many times among the cross-currents now besetting the new nations of the Baltic, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Greece sur- vived because her existence continued to suit the world powers. Rivalries among today's world powers will support 'indepen- dence' in one place and snuff it out in another. That is the bottom line; not the Baits' idea of themselves as Europe's vital Eastern bulwark against the threat of the Bear, but Europe's idea of the Baltic states as a cordon sanitaire, for the time being, between herself and the diseased carcass of Russia.
Greece had the advantage over Russia's possessions that she was not part of her conqueror's landmass. Continental empires are bound to expunge the identities of their conquests with a thoroughness never achieved by an empire of overseas posses- sions. A traveller spoke of 'going to Russia' when his destination was Tashkent or Tbil- isi: no one going to Delhi or Durban ever said — or ever thought — that he was going to Great Britain. Thus the provinces now reclaiming their national identities from 'Russia' have little in the way of an ideological base, any more than they have a material infrastructure, to build upon. Folk-songs, invented traditions, a handful of dust. Consider Khiva, where the malig- nant work of Soviet restoration has expunged the city's native identity with a completeness which the Tsar's armies never achieved.
It is from this thoroughness of Sovietisa- tion which it is almost impossible for the ex-possessions of the Soviet Union to disin- fect themselves. So saturated in Leninism are all those educated within the USSR that they cannot think — even when trying to construct a democracy — except along Leninist lines. 'With the end of the big Soviet factories [writes Lieven] a whole social landscape is vanishing': it is the only familiar landscape, and no other certainty is ready to replace it. No wonder that pop- ular vote has kept on the Communist Party boss Karimov as democratic president of Uzbekistan, and has elected Brazauskas president of Lithuania, for they belong to that familiar landscape, and 'won't get lost in those Moscow corridors' which it is still essential for a Bait leader to tread. A clean break with all the humiliations of the past is the dream of the leaders of a subject race before and during its revolution; but the pragmatism of the electorate won't allow it.
Perhaps out of vexation at finding them- selves still dependent in many respects on Moscow, as well as out of antipathy for their ex-rulers, the Baits resent the power- ful Russian minorities within their states. Lieven sees it as the most immediate threat to their independence, that anti-Russian laws might give Russia good reason to reinvolve herself in their affairs. The Rus- sians who remain are well placed to benefit from 'privatisation', the term used through- out the ex-Soviet Union to describe the criminal process by which the ex-Commu- nist manager of a state factory sells the concern to himself for a pittance and either strips its assets or sets himself up as a capi- talist biznisman. Hard not to hate such a man, especially if he is a foreign ex-ruler; hard not to hate capitalism, if this is how it is interpreted by ex-Marxists; hard to trust democracy, if this is what comes of it in the hands of ex-Leninists. Poor Baits, they have many reasons for dissatisfaction with the outcome to date of those remarkable days in January 1991 when a peaceable crowd showed 'the power of the powerless' in face of Russian tanks. Lieven leaves it to 'the judgment of history', whether or not the disintegration of the Soviet Union is 'a good thing for the Soviet peoples or humanity'; I don't know how long we are to wait for that judgment — as far as I know, Clio's jury is still out in the case of the Roman empire — but for the moment, throughout the territories of the ex-Soviet empire, disintegration has been excellent news for the ex-Communist ruling class, and rather a shame for the workers.
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