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Gorbachev's Nationalities Predicament |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / ETHNIC NATIONALISM AND EUROPE |
| Author: Hugh Ragsdale |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1989 |
| Size: 4,673 Words, 29,753 Characters |
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About a decade ago, an eminent French scholar made a considerable splash in the press with a book virtually predicting the early ethnic dissolution of the Soviet Union. Helene Carrere d'Encausse's work was titled, in English translation, Decline of an Empire (1979), but its original French title, L'empire eclate (1978), was more faithful to the book's contents. Eclater means to explode, to shatter, rupture, or fragment. In a pre-perestroika age, the book was met by veterans of the Cold War with a good deal of satisfaction, a kind of gleeful rubbing of the hands and self-congratulation. The consensus among other specialists, by contrast, was skeptical: They found the prognostication premature. As some observed, the surprising thing about the Soviet ethnic problem was not that it was serious...
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... more conservative than nationalism. From the viewpoint of American interests, we could scarcely conceive of a more advantageous political design for Eastern Europe and western Asia than an economically unworkable but ethno-politically functional Soviet system. Shall we not pray for its halting, limping, crippled, stumbling, bumbling survival at a time of debilitating but ambulatory crisis? vbcrlf
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