RUSSIA AND THE
THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE
LECTURE TO
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
NIHON UNIVERSITY
SHIZUOKA, JAPAN
MAY 28, 1993

http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzr.html

I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE
A. CENTRAL PLACE IN RECENT WORLD PROBLEMS
It has been said that the peoples of Eastern Europe have produced more history than they themselves can consume. That is to say, events originating there have reverberated worldwide and often unhappily. For example, Austria's fear of Serbian nationalism sparked off the First World War. The Second World War, really a continuation of the First and its unresolved national hatreds, began with Germany's attack on Poland. The Cold War that has so dominated the international arena for the last fifty years began largely because the Soviet Union forcibly imposed its satellite system of communist puppet states on the recalcitrant peoples of Eastern Europe. These submerged nationalities included those in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.(1) The recent collapse of imperial Soviet domination has unleashed new problems, most notably nationality issues similar to those which had led to the conflagration of World War I.

B. TIGHT SOVIET CONTROL, 1944-89: MILITARY REPRESSION, THE WARSAW PACT, AND THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE
From the time of their incorporation into the Soviet sphere during World War II until late 1989, the Soviet Union rigidly controlled the countries of Eastern Europe.(2) When independence movements threatened to destabilize Soviet control, as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Moscow sent tanks to crush them. The Soviets imposed more subtle but even more effective controls by integrating the satellites into the Warsaw Pact, a political, economic, and military bloc dominated by Moscow. They justified their domination over Eastern Europe by the "Brezhnev Doctrine," a policy inaugurated in 1968 which decreed it to be the collective obligation of all members of the "Socialist Commonwealth" to guarantee and defend socialism wherever it ruled.

C. SOVIET RETREAT FROM ITS SATELLITE EMPIRE
The recent retreat of the Soviet Empire from Eastern Europe has been one of the most important events in contemporary diplomatic history, comparable in magnitude to the events of the year 1848, and seemingly brings to an end the Cold War. It certainly has destroyed the diplomatic regime established after 1945 in Europe. Why did Moscow retreat from the area that had seemed so critical for so long?

II. INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGES TO THE SOVIET UNION IN MARCH 1985
A. MIKHAIL GORBACHEV COMES TO POWER, MARCH 1985
Immediately upon assuming office in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev grasped the connection between Soviet foreign policy and his country's deteriorating domestic political and economic predicament. After decades of stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev and Constantin Chernenko, the Soviet Union's command economy was breaking apart and could no longer support its international ambitions. Gorbachev had to restructure Soviet foreign policy goals, in major part, because he needed a respite from foreign complications. Such a lull would allow him to apply scarce capital—money, intellectual energy, productive resources—to solving critical domestic problems within the USSR. Put another way, only an atmosphere of peace could make possible the diversion of funds from military spending to the economic investment so necessary for Gorbachev's "perestroika" ("economic restructuring") campaign.

B. INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES
1. Afghanistan
In the international realm, in 1985 the USSR faced many problems. Moscow, for example, was still embroiled in its costly and bloody war in Afghanistan; victory seemed far away even after more than five years of fighting and despite considerable casualties and loss of international prestige.

2. The United States
Hostility toward the United States was greater than it had been for a long while. The relatively brief period of détente in the early 1970s had given way to mutual suspicion over Jewish emigration, human rights violations, trade disputes, and technology embargoes. The United States Senate failed to ratify the SALT II agreements even as the Soviet Union continued its support for national liberation movements in Africa and Central America and encouraged the declaration of martial law in Poland. President Ronald Reagan underscored the depth of mutual ill-will by declaring the Soviet imperial system to be the "Evil Empire." He countered Moscow's deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe with his own deployments of Pershing and cruise missiles, and he initiated his Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") program. The Soviet Union's increasing military vitality had only provoked an American response which by 1985 had left Moscow proportionately weaker and more vulnerable than before.

3. China
Soviet-Chinese relations were also thorny. As much as 25 percent of Soviet defense spending was for deployments along the 4000-mile border with China. The Chinese demanded three concessions before normalizing relations: reduction of Soviet troop concentrations along their borders, termination of support for Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia, and Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

4. Eastern Europe
a. Drain on Soviet Resources and Stagnation
By 1985, throughout Eastern Europe there was the intense desire for national pride and economic vitality, both squashed by the deadening hand of Soviet-dominated, communist regimes. Politically and economically the East European societies were stagnating under the weight of leaders who were unable or unwilling to undertake serious reforms. The major exception was in Poland, where an immensely popular national movement, Solidarity, commanded substantially more authority than did the Polish Communist Party led by General Wojcjech Jaruzelski. From Moscow's vantage, by the time Gorbachev had taken the reins of power, Poland already was out of control.

b. Problems and Reform?
Gorbachev's acknowledgment of the profound problems facing Eastern Europe only led to increased agitation in the satellites. As a general principle the most dangerous time for brutal dictatorships is the moment when they attempt to reform; just at the point when the crushing burden of repression is lightened, when the repressed are allowed to hope for a better future. Some of the problems facing Eastern Europe openly confessed by Gorbachev's government included official corruption, demoralized populations, defection of many members from the communist parties of the region, and, later, difficulties in transforming ruling parties into competitive parliamentary parties.

III. GORBACHEV'S "NEW THINKING" (Novoe myshleniye)
A. INTERDEPENDENCE AND SECURITY THROUGH DISARMAMENT AND DIPLOMACY
These were the foreign policy problems that demanded solutions, and, unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev was psychologically prepared to try to deal with them. Paralleling his domestic perestroika, Gorbachev began to restructure Moscow's foreign policy. The outlines of his new approach began to emerge at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986. By the time of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on December 7, 1988, Gorbachev had fleshed out the fundamental principles of his "novoe myshleniye" (New Thinking"). Gorbachev reiterated these principles in July 1989 in his address to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, even as mass demonstrations were showing the unpopularity of the Soviet-imposed communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's speech sanctified and encouraged these demonstrations.

In his address to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev noted that international security is integrally linked to a country's domestic security. The rapid decline in Soviet economic performance demanded rigorous efforts to eliminate the USSR's economic isolation from the European and global economies. Thus, Gorbachev advocated reducing trade barriers, embargoes and other forms of economic coercion. He demanded the transfer of resources from the arms race to mutual US-Soviet cooperation in developing Third World countries and relieving debt burdens on developing states.

A fundamental principle of novoe myshleniye was the promotion of human rights at home and abroad. Gorbachev convened an International Human Rights Conference in Moscow in February 1987. He released his country's leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov, from house arrest, and he used the celebration of Christianity's millennium in Russia to ease restrictions on churches and religious practices. Finally, the Kremlin relaxed the regulations governing foreign travel and emigration, and many Jews, Germans, and Armenians took advantage.

B. NON-MILITARY COOPERATION IN RESOLVING GLOBAL PROBLEMS
Gorbachev emphasized that humanity faces global problems, such as pollution and the depletion of natural resources, that can be resolved only through global cooperation. Given the growing tendency toward global interdependence, Gorbachev said, it is dangerous to continue to view the world as divided into opposing social systems. And given the danger of nuclear weapons, humanity must, in fact, talk about the "interdependence of survival." The new party program, approved at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, stated that nuclear deterrence must be replaced by nuclear disarmament. This puts the emphasis on the right of all nations to enjoy equal security. Because such safety cannot be based solely on nuclear parity, ensuring national security is becoming less a military problem than a political and diplomatic task. Gorbachev became increasingly willing to work through the United Nations. Traditionally, the Soviet Union had tended to pursue direct, bilateral solutions to problems rather than granting multinational institutions the authority to mediate disputes.

C. NON-INTERFERENCE IN FOREIGN STATES
Novoe myshleniye also included the concept of noninterference in foreign states, and while not altogether shedding their rhetorical support for world socialism, the Soviet leadership no longer advocated exporting violent revolution. As the USSR acknowledged the problems and instabilities within the socialist bloc, policy makers also maintained that the further development of socialism has to proceed at its own pace, dictated not by the Kremlin but by local conditions. Gorbachev also used the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of foreign states to justify withdrawing Soviet military forces from Afghanistan and refusing to commit forces to the Persian Gulf War. The most dramatic illustrations of this new principle of permitting socialist societies to determine their own fate came in 1988 when Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and in 1989 when he allowed this implied death sentence for all of the East European communist regimes to be carried out.

IV. THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNIST REGIMES IN EASTERN EUROPE
A. GORBACHEV'S NEW APPROACH
Gorbachev's approach to Europe was dramatically different from that of his predecessors. He saw Eastern Europe, as well as the USSR, in the larger context of a United Europe, a "Common European Home." This phrase, first uttered by Gorbachev during his visit to Paris in 1985, became a frequent theme in his speeches thereafter. He just as frequently invoked Charles de Gaulle's vision of a "Europe extending from the Atlantic to the Urals." At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, he called for an end to the division of Europe. Gorbachev's desire to reunite Eastern and Western Europe was, in part, a response to plans by the European Community to integrate economically by 1992. Gorbachev feared that such an united Western Europe would further isolate the USSR and its East European satellites and further mire them in stagnation.

B. SOVIET POLICIES DESTABILIZE ITS SATELLITE EMPIRE
By the late 1980s, Soviet policies had destabilized its satellite empire by causing a crisis of legitimization. Traditionally, the satellites had found legitimacy in two ways. Ideologically, they had sought "legitimization through utopia," that is, through the promise of prosperity and happiness guaranteed by communism. The economic problems facing the regimes and the growing gap between standards of living in the East and West destroyed this source of legitimization. Secondly, Moscow had imposed legitimization on these regimes through the threat of Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of their capital cities as they had in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Gorbachev's novoe myshleniye and perestroika blew apart Moscow's threat to resort to violence to maintain its control.

To keep an open door to Western Europe, Gorbachev initiated a series of moves that critically affected both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1986 and 1987, he traveled throughout the area preaching his gospel of perestroika, "glasnost" ("publicity"), and democratization to skeptical party leaders. While the East European leaders, most notably Erich Honecker in East Germany and Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia, hesitated to follow Gorbachev's advice, huge crowds enthusiastically welcomed his message.

Glasnost played its part in weakening the East European regimes and Soviet determination to hold on to them. For example, in 1988 the Soviets aired exposes of the 1968 Czech invasion on television to mark its twentieth anniversary. These scenes challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party's dominance in Czechoslovakia, and Vaclav Havel, the founder of Civic Forum, echoed the sentiments of most when he dared express his utter contempt for a system that was a living lie. In another example, admission, first by the Polish government and then by Moscow, of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in 1939 at Katyn Forest electrified the traditional hatred for Russians in Poland and smeared its communist government with complicity in the decades-long coverup of the truth.

On the Soviet side, the openness of glasnost, the necessary precondition of perestroika, showed the Soviet peoples the extent of the economic and spiritual sacrifices that continued imperial control demanded of them. They declared their unwillingness to make them, because the economic and moral rejuvenation, so essential to political rebirth in the USSR, could not happen if the Soviets insisted on continuing to impose their will on others.

Responding to these problems in Eastern Europe, the Soviet leadership ceased using party channels to coordinate Soviet policy in the region and began working exclusively through official governmental channels. This diminished the importance of the communist parties throughout the satellite system just at the time they needed support from Soviet Russia to maintain their positions.

C. THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE
1. THE FALL OF 1989
As the Berlin Wall, which had long symbolized Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, fell in 1989 before delirious crowds, Gorbachev proclaimed that a new world order had arrived. The best symbol of this change in Kremlin policy was Gorbachev's surprising support for German reunification in 1990. It had taken just a year to obliterate the forty-five-year-old division of Germany, although early optimism about the ease of integrating the two Germanies has foundered on economic difficulties and neo-Nazi violence.

If Moscow was willing to let Germany go, then the retreat from the rest of its satellites was inevitable, and during the fall of 1989 the Soviet leadership watched as former Communist Party regimes were toppled not only in East Germany, but also in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. The peoples of Eastern Europe rejected the past and seized their futures not only through action in the streets but also in the voting booths. The basic process was first to abolish the Communist Party's legal claim to its monopoly of power, and the spring of 1990 saw elections in all the former satellites and everywhere threatened the old, totalitarian rulers. As in all revolutions, however, the revolutionaries found it easier to tell what they were against than what they were for, and often fractious multiparty systems have arisen as communists left the scene. Only in Bulgaria did the communists, now disguised as socialists, manage to win these initial elections, but even they confronted a formidable opposition in the Union of Democratic Forces.

As Soviet Russia's satellite system collapsed, so too did its puppet, the Warsaw Pact, which had been renewed for another thirty years in 1985. For a brief while, Gorbachev had suggested that it would change from a military-political alliance emphasizing the former to one stressing the latter. But this was a hopeless middle position. East Europeans so hated the Warsaw Pact that it could not survive.

2. WHY SOVIET ACQUIESCENCE?
a. Drain on Soviet Resources
Why did Gorbachev permit events in Eastern Europe to unfold as they did? In the previous three decades, the satellites had become a drain on Soviet economic and military resources. The USSR supplied oil, gas, and other raw materials to the East Europeans at below market rates, while it paid inflated prices for their manufactured and consumer goods. This exchange also denied Moscow the hard currency desperately needed to purchase Western technology and expertise. Many Soviet commentators, including former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, noted that an independent and economically vibrant Eastern Europe could be a bigger asset to the Soviet Union than docile but economically backward allies. Gorbachev himself on a visit to Finland in October 1989 used that country as an example to prove this point.

b. Refusal to Use Force, A Grand Leap of the Imagination
Further, the use of force to stop the tidal wave of social and political change in the region, even if it had been possible, would have been too expensive. Military force also would have damaged Soviet efforts to improve relations with Western Europe and the United States—the necessary precondition for shifting investment from military spending to economic development, that is, perestroika. Additionally, Gorbachev could not suppress perestroika and democratization abroad without undercutting those policies at home. One of the reasons why Gorbachev eschewed violence was that, even as the peoples of Eastern Europe were emboldened to express their hatreds because of Moscow's withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Soviet leadership was suffering a loss of confidence, an "Afghanistan Syndrome," which so demoralized them that they lost the national will to continue imposing themselves on their satellites. Even so, it was a grand leap of the imagination for Gorbachev not to have resorted to tanks. It would have been far easier for him to have relied on the tried-and-true tactics of repression used by Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and, if he had, he might well still be in power.

c. Miscalculation
Yet, the most compelling reason explaining why the Soviets did not respond more vigorously to stop the avalanche of change is that they had underestimated the extent of public disaffection in their satellites, and by the time they understood the magnitude of the problem, events had moved beyond their control. The peoples of Eastern Europe understood that perestroika in the USSR was empowering them viz-à-viz their own governments, particularly as Gorbachev was pressuring the satellites to institute their own perestroika campaigns.

Why were East Europeans so anti-Russian and anti-Communist, and why were the Soviets so blind? Tsarist and Soviet Russia's imperialist expansion over hundreds of years in Eastern Europe has caused intense anti-Russian feelings there. Poland is the clearest example. Only Bulgaria has a long tradition of friendship with Russia. Ideology also got in the way of Moscow's coming to grasp reality. The Soviet leadership was incapable of seeing harsh truth through its Marxist-Leninist glasses. They just could not understand that the peoples of Eastern Europe could take such a "non-progressive" stance.

The Soviets in their almost fifty years of control of Eastern Europe had tried to destroy all institutions independent of the Communist Party but failed, especially in those countries where religious and ethnic identities coalesced. In Catholic Poland and Lithuania and Lutheran Estonia, religiosity became a public statement of anti-Russian and anti-Communist nationalism. The local communist governments could not suppress the churches with-out sparking nationalist disturbances.

Many East Europeans managed to create other groups independent of the Communist Party. They formed Green Movements which publicly protested the ecological devastation of Soviet-style economic development that had wrecked their countries. The Green Movements also strongly objected to the environmental damage done by the occupying Soviet military which had turned large areas into toxic dumps. Ecological concerns inevitably led to political demands, and the various Green Movements were often at the core of early public criticism of the USSR and its satellite regimes.

V. CONSEQUENCES OF THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE
A. PROBLEMS
In these countries, as in Russia, the birth of democratic and free market mechanisms have not been unalloyed blessings. Albeit at the cost of stagnation, the communist regimes and their command economies had provided subsidies for basic commodities, and their termination has raised the cost of living. Other economic woes remain: foreign debt, high inflation, archaic infrastructure, and a serious environmental crisis. Perhaps the worst problem is the vanishing of capital as old plants and their workers that had formerly contributed, however inefficiently, to the gross domestic product, no longer can compete in the world market economy and have ceased functioning. As these plants close, spiraling unemployment has replaced the comparatively benign underemployment. All of these problems guarantee that, in the aftermath of their liberation, most of these peoples are finding themselves trapped between two economic systems and facing a dilemma: complete change is necessary, yet painful.

Another difficulty threatens post-communist Eastern Europe even more. Soviet domination and the Warsaw Pact had kept the lid on the tribal nationalisms which infect Eastern Europe. Despite naive optimism, George Bush's "New World Order" proclaimed in the euphoria of "victory" in the Cold War presages a frightening future. In Eastern Europe for so very long, too many peoples too often have defined themselves primarily in terms of whom they are not—that is, their enemies who are also their neighbors. And for far too long and for far too many, "freedom" in Eastern Europe has meant little more than the right to abuse their neighbors as they themselves have been abused. Unfortunately, memories have been very long.

World War I, which had begun for essentially trivial reasons, ended up being fought to "Make the World Safe for Democracy." According to the determining-voice in writing the peace treaties ending the war, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, "democracy" meant "self-determination"—the right of all peoples to join together voluntarily with others like themselves, those having like language, culture, and history. Eastern Europe, however, is such a conglomeration of intermixed, non-homogenous groups that creating territorially-defined, sovereign, nation-states with contiguous territory is impossible, and attempts to glue them together artificially have caused problems. The national hatreds seen today in Yugoslavia are only the most extreme example of similar difficulties in all the countries that stretch from the Baltic to the Black seas.

B. PROBLEMS LEFT TO SOLVE
Starting in the north, Estonia and Latvia, both former republics of the Soviet Union itself, are doing relatively well, but their restrictive ethnic policies have earned international criticism.(3) After 1945, Moscow sent Russians to these republics as colonists to assure political control. Today these huge and not well-assimilated Russian minorities have been denied citizenship unless their families had been there prior to 1940, that is, before Estonia's and Latvia's forcible incorporation into the USSR. In Estonia their naturalization has been made difficult, taking a minimum of three years and requiring fluency in the Estonian language. Ethnic Latvians barely number 50 percent of Latvia's population, and, consequently, they have made naturalization impossible and have denied non-Latvians even the right to own property. A slow process of nonviolent ethnic cleansing is occurring in both nations.

Lithuania, another former Soviet republic, has a relatively small and well-treated minority Russian population, and Vilnius (former Polish Wilno) and Klaipeda (former German Memel) have large Russian minorities. A recent Gallup poll showed Lithuanians to be the most content and optimistic of the Baltic peoples. Even so, voters returned the former Communist Party to power in the November 1992 parliamentary elections, and in February 1993 they elected as president the former head of the Lithuanian Communist Party. Though hardly a return to communism, these votes show a disenchantment with capitalism and a strong Russian minority opposition to ethnic Lithuanian domination.

For the most part, the Russian minorities in the three Baltic States have remained passive. However, as Russian nationalists in Russia itself take up the cause of the twenty-five million Russians left outside the homeland, these Russian irredentas will pose a huge threat to peace in all the former Soviet republics, including the Baltic States.(4)

Lithuania faces another irredentist threat. Germans are attempting to reclaim their property lost when Stalin annexed German Memelland to Lithuania. The Lithuanian government has shown a certain acceptance of such claims so as to encourage German economic investment.

A more destabilizing threat from German irredentism lies across the border in Kaliningrad, the former German city of Koenigsberg and the former capital of East Prussia. Kaliningrad Oblast was annexed directly into the Russian Republic in 1945. Populated by Russians, now it is cut off from the rest of Russia by over two hundred miles of foreign territory. Will this geographic curiosity remain Russian forever? To whom would it go? Neither Lithuania nor Poland have a claim. While Germany does, the mere mention of a return of German control over any part of East Prussia would set off alarm bells throughout Europe. Even though the economic hardships caused by German unification have dampened support for German annexations of lost eastern lands, the continued growth of extreme, right-wing nationalism in Germany is cause for concern.

Poland is blessed with a homogeneous population, the ironic result of the Holocaust and the postwar removal (ethnic cleansing) of Germans out of the country, whose borders were moved westward. The international situation has encouraged moderation, and Warsaw's fear of German irredentism in the west has discouraged its desire to reclaim lands lost in the east after World War II to Ukraine, Belorus, and Lithuania.

In 1990, the most encouraging developments in Eastern Europe were in Czechoslovakia. Ethnicity, however, proved too strong, and on January 1, 1993, Slovakia and the Czech Republic separated, thereby breaking up the seventy-four year old federation. The Czech Republic is better off, but Slovakia faces problems. Under its vocal nationalist leadership, its large Hungarian minority—600,000 people or 11 percent of the country's population—have lost rights and now fear for their security. In addition, there are 700,000 Gypsies in Slovakia, proportionally the largest Gypsy population of any country.(5) Human rights organizations and the Hungarian government are carefully watching the ethnic situation in Slovakia.

In Hungary, which has little democratic tradition, economic hardship could lead to the reemergence of an extremist, nationalist, anti-Semitic, and irredentist Hungary. The two-and-a-half million ethnic Hungarians living in Romania are a major focus for Hungary's right wing, and the creation of a cabinet minister in Budapest to represent the interests of foreign Hungarians was a concession to them. For a while it appeared that these two ex-satellite allies, Hungary and Romania, might actually go to war.

The exception to the peaceful collapse, the going out with a whimper, of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was Romania's ruinous dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Last to fall and with the most bloodshed, he had defied the USSR on foreign policy while maintaining a Stalin-like rule at home. The popular demonstrations that overthrew him in December 1989 actually began with ethnic disturbances in the Transylvanian city of Timusuara, now held by Romania but claimed by Hungary. Other nationality issues also tear at the fabric of Romanian life. With its history of the most extreme anti-Semitism in Southeastern Europe and its huge minority population, including 2.5 million Hungarians and 2.3 million Gypsies, the tendency toward rightwing extremism in Romania is greater that anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Romania's own irredenta, the war-torn, former Soviet republic of Moldova, adds greater uncertainty to the future.

The Bulgarian situation is more encouraging. Animosity toward the large Turkish minority has greatly lessened since the fall of communism, and Turks are now included in the government. It is possible that the irredentism, especially against Greece and Macedonia, which has historically prevented the Bulgarians from focusing on real problems and cooperating with neighbors, will resurface. But for the moment, Bulgaria and Greece have buried their historical animosity and are closely cooperating for the first time since the First Balkan War of 1912.

Albania's future is not certain. The poorest country in Europe almost lapsed into anarchy not long ago, although order is now returning. Almost 70 percent of the population is Muslim, and Iran has begun to establish fundamentalist Islamic elementary schools in the country. The potentially more destabilizing consideration in the region would be Albanian aid to their two million compatriots in Serbian Kosovo and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

This brief tour, North to South, of recent political events in Eastern Europe reveals the former Yugoslavia as the most troublesome spot. World audiences on their televisions nightly watch the ethnic cleansing and bloody fighting which have turned neighbor against neighbor. Even worse, Yugoslavia's troubles could spread. If, for example, current ethnic turmoil spills over into the Kosovo region or Macedonia, the Greeks might well be drawn into the civil war. This would mean that the Turks would also be pulled in to protect their religious brethren. Already, Islamic mujahedin (freedom fighters), distressed with what they see as the West's inaction in protecting Bosnia's Muslims, have entered the fighting. A Jihad (Holy War) in Bosnia would have dramatic repercussions throughout the Middle East.

While the renewed vigor of the United Nations, the European Economic Community, and other international organizations indicate that many nations are voluntarily willing to give up some of their sovereignty for the common good, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union seem to represent a different path—increased ethnic fragmentation. Yugoslavia's dissolution says something powerful about the transcendence of nationalism over all other ideologies and religions in the modern world. Could the future of the former Soviet Union merely become that of a Yugoslavia—writ large and with nuclear weapons? The West might yet regret its victory in the Cold War through the total collapse of its adversary.

NOTES
1. Yugoslavia and Albania, slightly different cases, escaped the Soviet satellite system in 1948 and 1961 respectively.
2. Much of the following discussion is based on Gordon B. Smith, Soviet Politics: Struggling with Change, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 310-30; Roland N. Stromberg, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 430-45; William Laird Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Twentieth-Century European History (Saint Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993), 777-803; and Krzysztof Jasiewicz, "Elections and Political Change in Eastern Europe," unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, Atlanta, GA, March 19, 1993. The October 1992 issue of The American Historical Review was dedicated to Eastern Europe under the title of "Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe." This excellent source includes information on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. See pages 1011-17.
3. For much of the following description of current nationality problems in Eastern Europe, I am indebted to L. H. Curtright, "Eastern Europe in Historical Perspective: Another Look," unpublished paper presented to the Florida Conference of Historians, annual meeting, March 12, 1993, Orange Park, FL.
4. See Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
5. In absolute terms, however, there are more Gypsies in Hungary and Romania, and the same number in Bulgaria.

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