Eastern Europe and the Future of the Soviet Empire

EASTERN EUROPE AND THE FUTURE OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE Vojtech Mastny or Moscow, whatever happens in Eastern Europe has an air of fatality. No other part of the world, apart from the Soviet Union itself, is as decisive in determining the future of the whole Soviet system of power. Not even relations with the United States bear so directly on the very existence ofthat system, except in the unlikely event of a war between the superpowers. Neither do relations with China, which Moscow can easily prevent from taking a dangerous turn. Eastern Europe is different because the six Warsaw Pact countries, though formally foreign, are, in effect, part of the extended Soviet homeland. As such, they are particularly vulnerable. This peculiar relationship is the ambivalent legacy of Stalin, who considered the acquisition of an empire the main safeguard of Soviet security as he understood it. Yet, forty years later the empire has become a major source of Soviet insecurity. Only in Eastern Europe (except for the special case of Afghanistan), has Moscow felt repeatedly compelled to intervene by force in order to safeguard its interests. As the empire was being formed in 1945, George Kennan anticipated with remarkable accuracy what might happen: Vojtech Mastny is professor of international relations at Boston University and fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. The author of Russia's Road to the Cold War and other studies on East-West relations, Professor Mastny has taught Soviet foreign policy at SAIS. This year he is also affiliated with the Center for European Studies and Center for International Affairs at Harvard, where he is writing a book on the Soviet Union and European disengagement from 1955 to 1961. 137 138 SAIS REVIEW Russian government now has a heavy responsibility to itself: namely, to hold the conquered provinces in submission. For there can be little doubt that many of the peoples concerned will be impatient and resentful of Russian rule. And sucessful revolts on their part against Moscow authority might shake the entire structure of Soviet power. The great question of Russia's new world position, as seen from Moscow, is whether the Soviet state will be able to carry successfully these new responsibilities , to consolidate its hold over the new peoples, to reconcile this with the traditional political structure of the Russian people, to make of its conquests a source of strength rather than weakness. This is the real question of Russia's future.1 Kennan derived his prescience from a keen sense of history—a quality more commonly attributed to East European, including Russian, than to Western political culture. For better or for worse, East Europeans have traditionally been inclined to look to experiences and antecedents for clues to their present predicaments. And in that longer-term perspective , the Soviet empire, like its predecessors, can only be regarded as a transitory one. Another American statesman with a historical bent, Henry Kissinger, remarked upon this elementary truth concerning the rise and fall of empires as he began his government career (although he did not find an appreciative audience when he applied his reasoning to the United States). As secretary of state under Ford, Kissinger also ventured to predict that therejust might not be a Soviet problem to worry about in a generation or two. However, the flaw inherent in such a long-term perspective is that predicting the inevitable is easier than estimating when and how it will happen. Nevertheless, it is possible and indeed necessary to pause and view the present as a stage in the process begun in 1945 (or, rather, in 1939 when Stalin, then in collusion with Hitler, first embarked on his quest for security through imperial expansion), and whose end cannot yet be foreseen. The historical vantage point can then help to account for what has changed over those years rather than to merely record what has remained the same. What has remained the same is self-evident and not very enlightening : namely, the Soviet desire and determination to preserve control over Eastern Europe. However, the desire and the determination were not enough to prevent one country, Yugoslavia, from evading the Soviet grip even as the empire was being...