TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011392/0113001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8KB | 175 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 25

RUSSIA

Scrambling for the Pieces of an Empire


With nukes and navies up for grabs, not to mention the
Bolshoi and the Hermitage, the republics try to sort out their
inheritance

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by James Carney/Moscow and Bruce
van Voorst/Washington


    Even if its long-term durability has not been tested, the
nascent Commonwealth of Independent States is firmly established
in the world of symbols. When the Presidents and Prime
Ministers of the 11 former Soviet republics met in Minsk last
week, delegations arrived in former Aeroflot airliners carrying
the name of their states painted across the fuselage. As the
leaders sat down to begin negotiating their future, the red
Soviet banner was nowhere to be seen: the concrete-and-glass
conference hall was bedecked with the multicolored flags of the
11 new nations.

    The trappings of empire, of course, extend far beyond
banners and palaces. When the domain was as vast as the U.S.S.R.
with a single ruling center, its possessions were almost
incalculable. They include not only the military forces,
treasury and administrative machinery of the former rulers, but
also the common cultural, scientific and intellectual property
of the union. Sharing out the inheritance among the survivors
is proving to be complicated and contentious.

    At the Minsk meeting, the new states made a little
progress. They agreed that the intercontinental ballistic
missiles of the former Strategic Rocket Forces -- renamed the
Strategic Deterrent Force -- will be centrally controlled by the
Commonwealth. Over the next few years, three of the four states
with nuclear weapons on their soil -- Ukraine, Belorussia and
Kazakhstan -- are expected to destroy them or hand them over to
the fourth, Russia.

    U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, cautious in his
estimates, says he is "reasonably confident" that the weapons
are under tight control now, but he worries about the future.
"We want to help them shrink their stockpiles," he says.

    The Minsk conferees made less headway on the former Soviet
conventional forces and weaponry. The numbers are still
gigantic: 3.7 million men in uniform, more than 10,000 combat
aircraft, 56,000 tanks, nearly 90,000 artillery pieces, 800
warships. Russian President Boris Yeltsin argued for central
control over all this too, but Ukraine, Moldavia and Azerbaijan
insisted that they had to have their own national armies. Most
Soviet naval bases were in Russia, but Ukraine was quick to
claim the Black Sea Fleet, which had its home port in Ukraine's
Sevastopol. Without warning, Russia ordered the newest aircraft
carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to its port of Murmansk. Yeltsin
later defended the transfer, noting that the Black Sea Fleet was
"historically Russian." But he grudgingly conceded that Ukraine
is entitled to "a share" of the Black Sea Fleet.

    In the end, the conference, said Yeltsin, "confirmed the
right of each state to decide" how to organize its military "in
accordance with its own laws." As it turns out, the other eight
will operate under a Commonwealth "single command," dominated
de facto by Russia. But whether they will be willing or able to
pay the staggering costs of modern, multimillion-troop armed
forces is a question they have not yet faced.

    The Russian President pre-empted some of the inheritance
debate. Even before the U.S.S.R. went out of existence, he began
to seize for his republic such Soviet structures as the
Kremlin, the presidential office and staff, the Foreign Ministry
and its embassies abroad, the security forces, the Communist
Party's Central Committee headquarters and banks and foreign
currency accounts.

    Not all this high-handed accumulation is likely to stick.
While Russia is the legal successor state to the Soviet Union
and has taken its permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council,
Ukraine and other republics are demanding a share of the
diplomatic dowry. Now Yeltsin has offered to give a portion of
embassy property in each foreign country to any republic that
opens formal relations with Russia.

    That was not good enough for Ukrainian President Leonid
Kravchuk, who insisted that every state in the Commonwealth had
a right to a fixed part of the former Soviet holdings overseas.
He won his point, and the 11 foreign ministers are to meet this
week in Minsk to discuss how to divide the property.

    Much of the inheritors' discussion is over more prosaic
issues of money and facilities. Russia has automatically assumed
control of property and natural resources on its territory, and
the other republics are doing the same. That may work for
buildings, mines and wells but not for everything. The state
treasury, for example, is in Moscow, but some of the wealth
obviously belongs to other republics. Anticipating a challenge,
Russia has warned that if Commonwealth members want to continue
receiving gold mined in Russia, they will have to leave their
reserves in the now Russian state vaults.

    Even currency is a problem. Kravchuk complains that while
the Commonwealth has accepted continued use of the ruble for
stability's sake, the printing of ruble notes has not kept pace
with inflation. Since the printing presses are in Russia, he
says, "we could find ourselves in the ruble zone without any
rubles."

    Similarly, the central television network, claimed by
Russia, will have to figure out how to provide national,
local-language coverage to the 11 states it serves or be split
up. Now that the Soviet Academy of Sciences is the Russian
Academy again, some of its non-Russian members may decide to
return to their home states to join existing academies there.
At Minsk, the Commonwealth agreed to create an "interstate
committee on space" to keep the space stations up and running;
but funding has dried up, and new projects have been curtailed
since the union began to come apart in August.

    Great cultural monuments like the Hermitage Museum in St.
Petersburg and the Tretyakov National Gallery in Moscow, though
they are national treasures, can hardly be split up and parceled
out. Their problem may be finding anyone to keep them, in an
era when funds just for basics are short. "We do not have
enough means," Yeltsin has admitted, "to tangibly improve the
disastrous situation culture finds itself in." The Bolshoi
Theater in Moscow and the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg could
probably make it as private enterprises -- if they can keep
Western companies from luring away their stars with fat
contracts.

    As for those Soviet sports powerhouses, only tentative
decisions have been made. The Olympic team will hold together
for next month's Winter Games in Albertville -- more or less.
Athletes will compromise their national differences by marching
together under the Olympic flag, and any victories they score
will be marked by the Olympic anthem. The outlook for the Summer
Games in Barcelona is even murkier. Russia has proposed a joint
team there too; but Ukraine is balking, and several states are
applying for separate membership in the International Olympic
Committee. So none of the famous pair skaters or hockey and
basketball teams have been broken up, but no one knows how they
will fare in the future.

    Disputes about how to divide the national inheritance will
certainly go on for years. Yeltsin, master of the largest and
richest state, has a clear edge in the bargaining, if
territorial possession counts. The other Commonwealth members
are so hostile to central government that they refused to
designate a capital and created only an administrative hub in
Minsk. By pointing out that Russia is just another state and
Moscow just another city, Yeltsin can continue gathering up most
of the pieces of the fallen giants, the Soviet Union and its
Communist Party.