Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 4 – Organizers have
collected some 1500 signatures on an Internet petition calling for a referendum
on the transfer of part of Russia’s Smolensk Oblast to Belarus, a step they say
would correct an “historic injustice” because that area belonged to Belarus
before World War II and one that echoes what Vladimir Putin did in Crimea.
The effort has attracted some media
attention in the area and in Europe, but it is unlikely to go very far. (For a
survey of this coverage, see newsru.com/russia/04apr2014/smolensk.html.)
Nonetheless, it is important because it highlights three underlying realities
of the current situation that bear watching.
First, Russia is not the only
country on the territory of the former Soviet Union with co-ethnics living
abroad or which has people who remember when the borders were different and
territories now included in one country were part of another republic. Between1921 and 1981, republic borders were
changed some 200 times.
Belarus, which Stalin moved westward
at the end of World War II, is only the clearest case, but all the borders
among the former Soviet republics are problematic in terms of ethnicity and
history. Until Putin’s Crimean Anschluss, all sides had more or less agreed
that calling for the transfer of territory from one to another would open a
Pandora’s box and therefore restrained themselves.
(Even the events in Georgia in
August 2008 reflect that fact. Moscow helped Abkhazia and South Osetia to move
out of Georgia, but the Russian government did not take the next step of
annexing them, even though that is what the South Osetins wanted, although most
Abkhazians did not.)
Second, in the Internet age, these
issues can be enflamed quickly. People
who have never thought much about co-ethnics abroad or about territories that
used to be part of their republics can be prompted to think about them
amazingly quickly, and their new sensibilities about these groups and lands can
become a political force.
Three months ago, few Russians in
the Russian Federation talked much about Crimea or about their co-ethnics
there. But an intense propaganda barrage
caused many to come to believe that ethnic Russians in Crimea were being
oppressed and that the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR
in 1954 was a crime requiring correction.
No other country in the region has
the capacity to mobilize its population in this way as quickly, and none at
present appears interested in doing so. But individuals and groups using the
resources of the Internet can exacerbate the feelings of many and create
challenges both for the country of which they are residents and for the one
they wish to join.
Related to this, some governments
may be only too happy to see such independent efforts take off. On the one
hand, campaigns of this type are a reminder to other governments of the dangers
of moving borders about. And on the
other, governments can shut such things down and perhaps even get a certain
amount of credit from those who oppose a change.
And third, any questioning of the
borders of the former Soviet republics can quite possibly be used by those who
argue as do many in the Putin regime that some of the post-Soviet countries are
not effective states, that their borders can and quite possibly should be
changed, but that this will only be possible if all these states are part of a
single country centered on Moscow.
That is an argument which few would
seem likely to accept, but it is one that the Putin regime quite possibly will
exploit because it would distract attention from Moscow’s openly imperialistic
policies by redirecting attention to what Vladimir Putin has called “the
greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century,” the
disintegration of the USSR.
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