Alexander Solzhenitsyn said about the collapse of the Soviet Union: “And we must not, instead of leaving it liberated, perish crushed under its rubble”. It was in 1990, between the fall of the Wall (1989) and the dissolution of the USSR (1991).
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
The summer of 1990 was indeed that of all dangers: Mikhail Gorbachev, although breaking with his predecessors, nevertheless sent his tanks to Vilnius; in the winter, civilians fell to Soviet bullets, as had happened under Khrushchev in Budapest (1956) and under Brezhnev in Prague (1968).
The West had not intervened in these conflicts: in addition to the atomic threat, the possible fall of the USSR had been an operational variable in Washington since George Kennan’s “long telegram” (1946) at the origin of the policy called “containment”.
Kennan postulated that the structural deficiencies of the Soviet economy would lead to the collapse of its political framework – a Marxist analysis! – and that it was enough, therefore, to stem and be patient. The West will reap the rewards of its restraint through post-Cold War expansions: Hungary, the Czech Republic, and even Lithuania have long been members of the European Union and NATO.
The post-Soviet era
If the feeling in the West at the end of the cold war gave in the exaltation, the specter of separatist or irredentist conflicts on an immense nuclearized territory did not frighten only Solzhenitsyn. These fears came true: the Caucasus was set ablaze before Russia and Georgia engaged in an interstate war (2008). Civil wars shook Transnistria and Donbass. And that was without taking into account the potential for implosion of the Russian Federation itself: the two wars in Chechnya caused, out of sight, undoubtedly more than 100,000 deaths.
However, the surprisingly consensual reading so far of the post-Soviet era was that the dissolution of the USSR… had gone off without a hitch! While the outlook certainly varies between Beslan and Berkeley, the fact remains that it could indeed have been much worse.
The 1990s denominator of this “much worse” was the implosion of another predominantly Slavic ethnolinguistic communist federation, Yugoslavia. If it was in the strict sense of a civil war, it does not prevent that secessionist republics had been recognized, since 1992, as sovereign States by the United States and the European community.
The story repeats itself
Just like today, we were bombarded with “1940s” images, but in color, of an intolerable war in Europe, with the added horror of new extermination camps. Each era believes itself to be rid forever, thanks to what it believes to be a moral superiority inherent in its time (but a posteriori puerile), of the implacable brutality of armed conflicts; it is to forget that in 1914, that in 1939, the world was just as sophisticated, intellectually, culturally, spiritually (if not more!), but that it nevertheless sank into the abyss.
However, the frontal interstate conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine (even if it has been independent for 30 years) is the copy, in many respects, of the war between what remained of the Yugoslav federation (in fact, Serbia, refusing a divorce) and Bosnia, to which the Serbian political power reproached the persecution of its minorities and even its Nazi acquaintances.
It’s as if the worst-case scenario of the summer of 1990 were unfolding, but delayed. Once again, innocent people perish under the rubble of the Empire. The scale, this time, makes you dizzy.
After the failure of the UN, the failure of the draconian sanctions (oil embargo, freezing of registered assets, etc.) and the balance of power being what it is, NATO, during the war in Kosovo (1999) , bombarded Belgrade (causing numerous civilian victims), thus putting a definitive end to these horrors of ethnic cleansing and stopping any other inclination for conflict.
This was done in contravention of applicable international law, but all the same participating, in the long term, in enforcing it: war criminals are still languishing in prison, and the Balkans have been pacified.
This time it will be more complicated.