Vania Vanishlivi, 88, in May 2022, in Khurvaleti, Georgia.SOPA Images Limited / Alamy Stoc (Alamy Stock Photo)
In the summer of 2014, a grandmother in a camp in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, full of refugees from the separatist areas of Donbass, rocked her baby while speaking to this journalist: “Ukraine doesn’t let us speak our language,” he said in Russian . However, gradually the woman switched to Ukrainian and repeated the same message in that language: “They don’t allow us to use our language, they don’t let us…”. This grandmother, who fluently switched from one Slavic language to another without even realizing it, showed how fluid identities could be in the spaces of the former Soviet Union several decades after her disappearance.
More information
When the USSR collapsed as a subject of international law in 1991, many in Russia and the West believed that they were witnessing a short and relatively bloodless process of dissolution, the protagonists of which were the 15 federated republics that made up that state. But the clear break with the past that the leaders of the Soviet socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus proclaimed on a December night was accompanied by more complicated, unforeseen and longer developments, and in them the war against Ukraine that Russia waged actually began in 2014 and peaked in 2022.
In the early 1990s, under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the idea prevailed that the independence of the USSR’s federated republics (particularly the Asian ones) would free Russia from territories that parasitized its resources. Over time, however, relief in Russia at freeing free riders turned to resentment and frustration at the loss of land and influence.
If you would like to support the production of quality journalism, subscribe to us.
Subscribe to
In addition to the 15 internationally recognized countries searching for their own identity, the collapse of the USSR left its “edges” or territorial scraps, the origin of which lay in the pyramidal structure (like self-contained matryoshkas) of the Soviet state. These “peripheries” were spaces of “frozen conflict” that were not internationally recognized as subjects and were theoretically subordinate to one or other of these new states that did not actually control them.
Initially there were four unrecognized territories: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Transnistria in Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. With the exception of this last case, which was tied to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, the security and survival of the others depended (and depends) on Russia. Each of these areas had (and has) its historical and political arguments and, in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, its own languages.
For years, Russia positioned itself as part of the solution to the “frozen conflicts” (as a participant in dialogues and mediations as well as peace missions with international legitimacy), but none of the rebel areas were ever reintegrated into the new post-states. Soviets.
In 2008, the conflicts that had been dormant for years were intensified again following Georgia’s armed attack on South Ossetian separatists. After its military intervention, Russia unilaterally recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as states, blocking their reintegration into Georgia. In this way, the perspective of reintegration, which until then had been the goal of all the “fringes” of the USSR, openly gave way to a new model that gave Moscow more opportunities to strengthen its influence in its environment.
Starting in 2014, Russia added more to the conflicts inherited from the USSR, as fruits of its own destabilizing harvest. After annexing Crimea and taking parts of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia from Kiev, Moscow is now trying to reshape the European map to its own advantage.
Before February 24, 2022, the date that marks the beginning of a new stage, a trip through the problem areas of the Soviet Union made it possible to observe the evolution of these conflicts on the ground. The geographical distances between recognized and unrecognized areas had become political or military and travel had become labyrinthine.
In 2008, South Ossetia was isolated from Georgia and I remember a family from Tskhinvali (the capital of South Ossetia) who was never able to complete the renovation of their bathroom because the bricklayers who did it were in Tkwiani (in the Georgian controlled territory). lived in Georgia) and suddenly an insurmountable barrier appeared on the 18 kilometers that they covered every day. On one side were the tiles and the workers; on the other hand, the tools.
In 2014 the labyrinths multiplied. Legal travel from Kiev to Crimea or the independence areas of Donbas required long detours, sometimes hundreds of kilometers, between locations that were physically only tens of kilometers apart. In contrast, Moscow’s military intervention also enabled risky shortcuts between Russia and the Donbas, without tariffs and borders.
From 2022, the labyrinths will become much more extensive, fragmenting the spaces that should have been integrated into a European “Common House” from the Pacific to the Mediterranean under the failed globalization vision of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, to the Atlantic. To get from Moscow to Western Europe today, Russians land in Turkey or Armenia, and these routes could become even more difficult in the future if drone strikes cause air traffic to shift from Moscow airports to other more eastern locations in Russia.
In the crisis areas of the USSR, Russia presents itself as a savior. Moscow distributes Russian passports to its residents, pays their pensions, welcomes them into its education and labor systems, and manages local budgets. However, in several of the “saved” environments, this journalist heard the reassurance of influential members of the local communities: “We know that the Russians have not come to help us.” These helplessly spoken words sounded when it was too late, the time to turn back and return to failed negotiations, also because the West did not want to take into account the realities that had survived after the official dissolution of the USSR.
Years of travel through the troubled territories of the Soviet Union gave this journalist the opportunity to observe how the heirs of this vanished country perceived themselves and the world around them. Now that Russia’s war against Ukraine and its political and diplomatic consequences make access to these territories even more difficult, it would be useful to remember the problems and options that the citizens of the former USSR faced and are facing, be it from a wide perspective areas or from attacked areas and from forgotten corners.
This is an article by Pilar Bonet in connection with her new book “Náufragos delimperio” (Galaxia Gutenberg), which will be published this Wednesday, September 6th.
Sign up for the weekly Ideas newsletter here.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits