Birth of a nation
The Fall of the House of Gorbachev
THE fuse lit in 1985 has finally reached the powder barrel: the Soviet Union has exploded. The explosive potential was immense; the national question in this part of the world is of a formidable complexity. The ex-Russian empire, like the Ottoman empire, was marked by a geographical continuity between metropolis and colonies. The geographical dimensions of the Russian imperial domain were maintained as a result of the 1917 revolution which brought to power an internationalist regime proposing a definitive democratic solution to the national question. But behind the formal, legal equality of nations resulting from the revolution there remained a real inequality and oppression inherited from Tsarist times, albeit transformed in its social nature. The equality of nations, like that of individuals, can only be assured if compensation for the real inequalities produced by history is added to its formal expression. Thus Lenin argued for a transitional inequality weighted towards the formerly oppressed and absolute respect of their sovereignty. The Stalinist degeneration justified
Lenin's worst fears. Specific national oppression combined with national resentment against general bureaucratic oppres-
The absence of an autonomous political intervention by the working class of the ex-USSR gives the collapse of the Stalinist system a chaotic air. The working class is the only class capable of forging a renewed and remodelled union. The other unifying framework of the USSR was the bureaucracy, now collapsing under the weight of its phenomenal bankruptcy and decomposing into so many active factors of disintegration, with the exception of a minority grouped around Gorbachev. For Marxists, in particular those who share the class analysis of the USSR developed by Leon Trotsky, the political approach to the national question in the USSR is highly complicated by this overlapping between an oppression to be overthrown and social gains to be defended, extended and qualitatively improved: all the more complicated in that the collapse of the USSR is taking place on the basis of capitalist restoration.
Moreover, in the current historic context, the newly independent nations will tend to be drawn into the imperialist orbit, thus replacing one dependency by another, very much more pernicious; while a general "everybody for themselves"
approach is itself a generator of national injustice. Precisely because the ex-USSR was not a federation of genuinely equal republics, those who have devoured the best slices of the common cake over the decades can also, by suddenly declaring their total sovereignty, escape the task of reparation and compensation to the least favoured. And one can understand the resentment of the Asiatic republics towards the unilateral declarations of independence by the other richer republics
This great political complexity of the national question in the Soviet Union has for a long time led to divergent analyses in our own ranks. Programmatic divergences with political consequences, for, beyond the democratic assumptions common to all, there is the question of how to formulate national demands in the context of a non-capitalist state. Is it correct, for example, to reproduce the classical approach of the colonial question under capitalism, demanding unconditional independence for the oppressed nationalities? The debate remains open. It should be clarified by the evolution of the independent states in the ex-USSR and their socio-political dynamics. The article on the Ukraine that follows is the expression of one point of view in this debate. It can be compared to other analyses, of the Ukrainian and other national questions in eastern Europe, which are regularly published in our pages — Salah Jaber *
USSR / UKRAINE states, but in the Ukraine this is not an anachronism.
While being one of the largest European nations in population and territory, it has not had its own state and has been harshly oppressed for several centuries. An irregu-
FOR THE FIRST TIME in its history, on December 1, 1991, the