Loose association of former Soviet states hasn`t replaced USSR: They can`t even unite for a common cause :: Charter'97 :: News

Is the CIS dead? The recent summit, held in Kazan, Tatarstan, despite official publicity making much of an occasion that coincided with the 1,000th anniversary of the city, provided clear signs that the association has become practically defunct, and little more than ceremonial.

The Commonwealth of Independent States was founded in December 1991 by the leaders of three former Soviet republics -- Russia, Ukraine and Belarus -- as a means to accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union and to ensure that the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was deprived of any meaningful function. At that time Gorbachev had tried to persuade several republics to sign a document that would have prolonged the Soviet Union through decentralization while allowing Moscow to control defence and foreign policy.

The founders of the CIS anticipated that it would be of benefit to the various republics (the Baltic States never participated) to continue to maintain close economic and security links.

Initially the informal capital of the CIS was to be Minsk, Belarus. Yet, from the outset, there were some serious problems. For one thing, the legal basis of the new organization was never clarified. The three leaders who had signed the deal had no consent from their parliaments, and its secretive nature carried all the hallmarks of a well-laid plot.

Ukraine never accepted formal membership, though it attended meetings as an observer. The first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, never took the organization very seriously, other than during elections, when he would use the CIS as a symbol of a Russian-led entity in what he termed the Near Abroad.

As the Russian 14th Army established a breakaway republic at Tiraspol in Moldova, several states feared that Russia intended to use the CIS to control its former partners and to establish a new power base.

Other organizations developed outside and parallel to the CIS from 1996, the most serious being the GUUAM, a partnership that received support from the United States and consisted of countries around the Black Sea region (Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova); the Russia-Belarus Union (Russia and Belarus); and the Common Economic Space Group (CES -- Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan).

Other states have maintained a preference for bilateral relations outside these entities.
According to U.S.-based Russian analyst Sergei Blagov, Russian president Vladimir Putin has veered from supporting the idea of a "divorce" among CIS states, to promoting greater unity after the 60th anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow last May.

However, the Kazan summit appeared to make it plain that the CIS will soon be dissolved. There are several reasons why.

First, Turkmenistan declined to attend the occasion, and its president, Saparmurat Niyazov, declared that his state would become no more than an observer in the future. Second, Georgia, one of the more activist republics under President Mikhail Saakashvili, has initiated the formation of what is termed a group of "democratic states" on the border of Russia that would be oriented toward the United States and the EU in particular. Third, Ukraine under Viktor Yushchenko has stalled on the signing of 29 documents on the Common Economic Space, agreeing to only about half of them.

The presence of Ukraine in Kazan at all was something of a surprise. A meeting between Yushchenko and Belarusian president Alyaksander Lukashenka produced few results and a proposed exchange of visits to each other`s capitals failed to materialize.

Other states that might have resolved longstanding issues also failed to do so, most notably Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh; and the Republic of Moldova and its separatist enclave, the Transdniester Republic.
Though the separation of the CIS states into authoritarian and democratic regimes is somewhat facile, there is little doubt that the states that have undergone political changes in recent times --Ukraine, Kyrgyszstan and Georgia -- are perceived by several others as dangerously subversive, particularly by the virtual dictatorships of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and the genuine dictatorship in Belarus.
But such states have not found a natural home under Moscow`s influence either.
Russia indeed remains the most enigmatic of the CIS states, as Putin appears to have accepted a smaller role on the world stage and focused more on consolidating his own authority and removing internal enemies. To date, he has tried to maintain cordial relations with the United States while increasing his control over parliament and the media through his security forces. He may thus decline to take steps to dissuade Turkmenistan from its departure, and other republics are thus likely to follow.
That still leaves scope for Russia to tighten its links with its closest allies, Kazakhstan and Belarus, while exerting pressure on its former closest partner, Ukraine, through economic pressure, particularly the threat to raise oil and gas prices to world levels.
The CIS served the essential function of legitimizing the rise of Russia over the Soviet Union, and what was essentially an internal coup d`etat by former president Yeltsin. But as a loose association of willing partners, it has failed manifestly to replace the USSR, or even to unite the former republics in a common cause.