About a decade ago, an eminent French scholar made a considerable splash in the press with a book virtually predicting the early ethnic dissolution of the Soviet Union. Helene Carrere d'Encausse's work was titled, in English translation, Decline of an Empire (1979), but its original French title, L'empire eclate (1978), was more faithful to the book's contents. Eclater means to explode, to shatter, rupture, or fragment. In a pre-perestroika age, the book was met by veterans of the Cold War with a good deal of satisfaction, a kind of gleeful rubbing of the hands and self-congratulation. The consensus among other specialists, by contrast, was skeptical: They found the prognostication premature. As some observed, the surprising thing about the Soviet ethnic problem was not that it was serious, but that it was not a lot more serious than it then appeared.
A decade later, what Carrere d'Encausse foresaw seems improbable. Certainly the nationalities question, as revised, has affected glasnost, which in turn seems to have catalyzed national consciousness and conflict. Every day's headlines seem to bring us news--promising or threatening, depending on personal taste--of the Soviet empire in ethnic turmoil.
The Contemporary Situation
The ethnic problems of the Soviet state can be briefly explained by three factors.
The first is the distribution of nationalities throughout the empire. At present, Russians make up about half the population and more than one hundred other nationalities make up the remainder. The figures on the population of the USSR and its fifteen constituent republics are broadly indicative.
The second important factor in the Soviet ethnic problem has to do with trends in population growth. At present, the proportion of Russians, other Slavs, and Europeans is diminishing relatively rapidly, and the proportion of non-European peoples is growing correspondingly rapidly. The European and urban parts of the Soviet population have relatively low birthrates; the Asian and rural parts, relatively high birth rates. For example, from 1979 to 1989, the total Soviet population increased by about 9.3 percent; the population of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) by only 7.2 percent. During the same period, the population of the Tadzhik Republic grew by nearly 34.5 percent, and the population of the Uzbek and Turkmen republics grew only a little less rapidly. The growth rates in the Ukraine and the Baltic republics were like that in the RSFSR.
In the meantime, we have learned that the life expectancy of Russian males diminished in the quarter century after 1959 by nearly six years--the most common explanation is alcoholism. To make maters worse, a high birthrate among Soviet Asians and low birthrate among Soviet Europeans make the proportion of Asian males of draft age significantly higher than that of Asians in the population as a whole. A Soviet army dominated by Asian ethnic groups whose knowledge or Russian is questionable can hardly be comforting to the Soviet rulers.
The third major factor in the Soviet Union's ethnic politics is the recent and suddenly massive expression of discontent among the nationalities. This is surely the most dynamic and dangerous feature of the present ethnic problem, but
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