The Trouble with Independence

By Michael Mandelbaum Michael Mandelbaum directs the Council on Foreign Relations'' East-West Project.

If Soviet domestic politics seem more complicated than ever, so does U.S. policy toward the U.S.S.R. Washington's endorsement last week of the Kremlin's decision to dispatch troops to stop the bloody fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Now that the Soviet military threat seems less menacing, other issues are coming to the fore, including the disputes among the various nationalities that make up the Soviet Union. The past few weeks have demonstrated just how tangled and explosive these conflicts are and how difficult it will be for the U.S. to decide on its response to each one.

About half the U.S.S.R.'s 286 million people are Russian; the rest of the population is splintered among nearly 100 other ethnic groups. The non- Russians best known in the West are the Baltic peoples -- Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians -- who are noisily resisting Moscow's domination. The three independent republics were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. For 50 years the U.S. has said Soviet rule in the Baltic republics is illegitimate.

But policy is not always as clear as principle. The Bush Administration does not want to see Mikhail Gorbachev unseated by conservatives who charge he has "lost" Lithuania. Neither, however, can Washington retreat from its historic position. The Administration has therefore said as little as possible, while hoping a compromise can be achieved.

Moldavia too was forcibly incorporated in the U.S.S.R. after the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact. Ethnically, linguistically and historically, Moldavia is part of Rumania, and some Moldavians now talk of reunification. Despite the justice of such an aspiration, achieving it would set the dangerous precedent of changing Europe's postwar borders. Hungarians, Poles, Germans and others all have potential territorial claims against their neighbors. The result of an epidemic of irredentism might be not merely political chaos but even war.

In the Caucasus the roots of the violence reach back centuries, to the time when the Ottoman Empire conquered the area. In 1920 Armenia, after a brief period of independence following the Bolshevik Revolution, sought protection from its Muslim neighbors and chose to become a Soviet republic.

Some Azerbaijanis have lately begun to demand a separate state for themselves and their ethnic kin on the other side of the Iranian border. Because such a state would violate the integrity of two existing countries, those demands are setting the stage for an unlikely, if not necessarily unholy, alliance between the Communists in Moscow and the Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran. Opposing Azerbaijani nationalism would align Washington with both.

Strange alliances, centuries-old feuds, hard choices between the national rights of captive nations and the political health of a bold reformer: these are the issues that U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union now confronts. In the post-cold-war era, Washington and Moscow are not necessarily at odds everywhere, and an American President can feel morally justified and politically comfortable in endorsing a Soviet leader's decision to send troops to keep order within his own country.