Why the Empire Should Crumble

By YURI AFANASYEV Yuri Afanasyev, 55, is a Soviet historian who, along with Andrei Sakharov, helped found the Interregional Group of Deputies, a radical group of parliamentarians that has increasingly criticized Gorbachev for moving too slowly on reforms.

People are losing their confidence in perestroika, considering it for the most part to be rhetoric. Many have lost their faith in Mikhail Gorbachev. But the biggest trouble in our house has come from the least expected place: our rich family of nationalities.

Our misfortune is being played out on two fronts: the flare-ups of ethnic $ hatred within the republics and the growing opposition of the republics themselves to Moscow. These calamities have been as unexpected to us as the disintegration of the world colonial system was to many Marxists. We had rejoiced at the crumbling of that system. At the same time, we believed our empire was protected from such troubles; after all, didn't we enjoy an immunity of sorts in our "eternal brotherhood of peoples"?

Such slogans have not helped. An enormous fire of national strife burns in the U.S.S.R.

The embarrassed initiators of perestroika are still unable to define this problem and rely instead on such terms as nationalism, conflict and separatism. They still don't have enough courage to use the appropriate words, for we are witnessing the crash of the last world empire, coupled with the downfall of what was most Stalinist in the Stalinist system.

To understand today's events, we must go back to the beginning. It is December 1922, and Lenin has just retired into his final illness. But his mind is still pulsing. On Dec. 30 the First Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R. is scheduled to devise a structure for the union. Joseph Stalin is pushing for national groups to join the Russian Federation as autonomous republics. But Lenin wants all the regions, including Russia, to sign a treaty of equality and form a union. His view will ultimately prevail.

But Lenin immediately begins to have second thoughts. Perhaps the union will still have too much power over the republics. He dictates a letter -- one can only call it apocalyptic -- in which he laments that he has "failed the Russian workers for not interfering strongly enough in the so-called issue of autonomy." Lenin concludes that the next Congress of Soviets should amend the plan once more so that the union would retain only its diplomatic and military functions.

All the participants in the birth of the U.S.S.R. believed they were choosing the best method of solving the nationalities question. Instead, they were setting a huge time bomb. No matter what the reasons were behind the formulation of the union -- according to Lenin, to stimulate the world revolution; according to Stalin, to build socialism in one country -- it would even out the various levels of development of many peoples and bring different nations, cultures and civilizations into a common framework. But only one method could be used to achieve this Utopian goal: mass violence. The union was doomed from the very beginning.

! Thus, at the very moment the U.S.S.R. was being formed, Lenin was aware of its explosive nature. He realized that if his original proposal was formally implemented without guaranteeing the rights of republics, the union would eventually be transformed into a notorious ruler of the center over the republics, overseen by what he called the "Great-Russian chauvinist, villain and tyrant, which is what a typical Russian bureaucrat is." After Lenin died in 1924, his worst fears became a reality under Stalin.

Today we are confronted with a Stalinist map of the country, and have used it as the basis for carrying out perestroika, accepting this unified landmass as a historic entity. Our tensions spring from an inadequate understanding of a most crucial fact: the U.S.S.R. is not a country, nor is it a state. The Eurasian territory that is marked as such on the maps is a world of worlds made of different cultures and civilizations. It is a neighborhood of states and nations that are tired of their colonial and colonizing past, that have been tortured and humiliated by Stalinist efforts at unification.

We cannot reconcile ourselves to the idea that the U.S.S.R. as a country has no future. Each of the existing worlds within the empire longs for nothing less than sovereignty. But the Soviet leadership is unable to shake its belief that a fundamental revision of our national system would result in anarchy and disintegration. In reality, the Kremlin is actually pushing the republics toward secession. The Baltic states have found themselves forced to move in that direction. This tendency could affect the other republics as well unless we come up with the only possible alternative to secession: sovereign and politically independent national states.

Many of us still hope to overcome the multitude of difficulties that besiege us by our usual method -- by means of force, this time ordered by a President empowered to do so. Such is the dramatic and even tragic nature of the present situation: instead of moving ahead toward doing away with the empire, we have become like rabbits transfixed before a boa constrictor. All we are doing is returning to an age of centralization and dictatorship -- this time in the form of the presidency, since the President of a disintegrating Soviet Union can only emerge as its dictator.