As the post-1989 outlines of historical evolution come into focus, two fundamental and ancient forces help shape post-communist societies, both in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and in the territorium of the once Soviet Union: one is dynamic cultural and political ethnicity; the other is potent revivals of religious activity. These phenomena are interrelated, perhaps inextricably intertwined, though conceptually distinct.

Just as Mikhail Gorbachev, in announcing the goals of perestroika and setting the spirit of glasnost', had no program in his scheme to resuscitate the Soviet Union to accommodate the explosion of republican separatism and the tidal wave of ethno-politics, neither had he given any thought to the potential of grassroots revitalization of religious life. To his surprise, spiritual and social religious activities forcefully entered onto the stage of post-Brezhnev civic society throughout the USSR.

In 1989, with the start of this series—so many momentous events ago—there existed a Soviet Union and, within it, there had been Soviet republics (all socialist!). The entirety was imperially presided over by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Chairman of the Communist Party and President of the USSR.

Communism in the Soviet Union has long served officially as religion's surrogate. It has offered an organized and compelling belief system with which to rationalize the misfortunes of the past, establish codes of behavior to manage the present, and conceptualize the future. Although communist theory categorically rejects religion, it actively promotes, and is itself predicated on, institutions of “faith” in the abstract sense. The herculean industrialization and literacy campaigns of the early decades of Soviet rule that forever transformed the USSR's largely illiterate, agricultural society vividly illustrate the power and popular legitimacy of communist institutions of “faith” such as the Party and the Komsomol. Trusting that earthly sacrifice will bring future rewards has been as much the basis of Soviet communism as it has been of the Abrahamic tradition of religion addressed in this issue.

The world changed on August 19, 1991. On that date, a self-styled “Emergency Committee” of conservative Politburo members attempted to derail and reverse the process of structural reform that had started some six years earlier under the sponsorship of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The coup backfired two days later because its leaders misunderstood a central political fact of life after perestroika—namely, that political events could no longer be scripted to suit the changing tastes of the party elitte. While the plotters probably suspected as much—indeed, that was one of the reasons why they initiated the coup in the first place—their mistake was in overestimating their capacity to put a stop to this “state of anarchy.” While the vast majority of Soviet citizens acted precisely as the Emergency Committee expected them to—with utter indifference to the ultimate outcome of this elite power struggle—a small minority did not. It was this opposition, not only in the streets, but within party, military, and security organs, that defeated the coup and ushered in the momentous changes that we are experiencing today.

The political role of the Orthodox Church in post-communist Russia is more difficult to assess than its social and cultural roles for several reasons. First, to offer any systematic observations on the matter one must attempt to construe the nature of the church-state relationship in Russia, a notoriously controversial subject. Second, one must make an educated guess concerning the part played by the huge internal security apparatus which only yesterday dominated the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, including religious affairs. The security establishment has been dislodged from its hegemonic role in the Soviet state as a result of the Gorbachev reforms, but there is little question that it continues to exist as a political force in the country. Reading the aims of this network is no easy matter, however, because by definition it operates in relative secrecy and by means of diversionary tactics. One also has to reckon with the possibility that the security network has been disrupted by the changes of recent years, and operates with less coordination than in the past.

On the theatrical stage, the term “dénouement“ refers to the resolution of a dramatic complication. On the stage of world events, few historical periods can rival the present situation in the Soviet successor states for satisfying this definition more exactly. On December 21, 1991, eleven men—all, ironically, former communist party officials—signed an agreement in Alma-Ata, Kazakhastan, resolving that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “henceforth will cease to exist.” With this announcement, the “Soviet experiment” came to an end and a new world, inchoate and uncertain, began to emerge.

In 1944, the Soviet Army recaptured Galicia and Transcarpathia from the Germans, and the last stronghold of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism fell under Soviet control. Following the arrests of all Uniate bishops and of the “recalcitrant” clergy, the Lviv Sobor of March 1946 nullified the 1596 Union of Brest, which first established the Greek Catholic Church, and forcibly “reunified” the Uniates with the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. The post-World War II period saw the gradual suppression of the Uniate Church throughout Carpatho-Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Slovakia, and marked the beginning of more than four decades of struggle for Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholics in the USSR to maintain their banned Church against the overpowering alliance of the Soviet regime and the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the enforced “reunification,” the Greek Catholic Church has remained the most important cultural and institutional preserve of national identity in Western Ukraine. The following is an examination of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's attempts to assert its right to legal existence since the beginning of political and social revitalization under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Alexander Motyl (Chair): Introductory Remarks

This is the fourth and final Conference sponsored by the Program on Nationality and Siberian Studies. While you are witnessing the final act of this particular institution, the traditions of this program—that is, the study of the former Soviet republics and their nationalities—will be carried on by the Harriman Institute.

The Bends, otherwise known as Caisson Disease, is according to my dictionary, “a condition marked by paralysis, pain, etc., developed in coming from an atmosphere of high pressure, as in a caisson, to air of ordinary pressure, and caused by the formation in the blood of bubbles…” The malady of Bends, provides a metaphor, if not too closely scrutinized, for the condition of the successor states of the former USSR.

In August of 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev sent a message to His Holiness Vazken I, Catholicos of All Armenians, “pleading” with him “to use the influence, authority, rich life experience and the higher feelings of your humanitarianism and your responsibility for the fate of the Armenian people to work for the immediate ending of ethnic violence and fighting in the Transcaucasian region.” The message reveals the deep historical and cultural relationship of the Armenian Church to the Armenian nation. It also is a reminder of the long established Soviet practice of prevailing upon the church to assist the central government in imposing its will upon a subject people.

The following statement was delivered by His Holiness Vazken I, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, over Yerevan State Television following the bloody confrontation on July 5-6, 1988, at Yerevan's International Airport in which Armenian activists and Soviet troops clashed.

My beloved people, citizens of our mother country, at this hour of trial, I, Catholicos of All Armenians, address all of you from Holy Etchmiadzin. First, I must express my condolences to all those who suffered on July 5 this year during the events that took place near Zvartnots International Airport. I was told that one of [the activists] died. I pray for his soul, and grieve over his death together with his relatives. I also deeply regret that our soldiers were among the wounded.

While some groups are discovering new opportunities in the shifting political and economic structures of the former Soviet Union, others are finding that their paths towards upward social mobility have become less clear or blocked. There are also growing regional differences in benefits and losses. Although privileges in the old system often translate into advantages in the new, a contracting economy and the redrawing of political boundaries are altering the social order.

On November 9, 1989, Vazken I addressed the members of the Armenian National Movement at Etchmiadzin, Armenia, illuminating the evolving nature of church-state relations.

The migration and settlement of Russians throughout the former Soviet Union in combination with rising nationalism have resulted in a set of conditions that will probably result in considerable national conflict. From an operational perspective, the subjective definition of a nation is the most useful. A nation is a self-defining community whose members claim a common ancestry and a common destiny. They also claim a common geographic origin, the national homeland, over which they claim an exclusive, proprietary right. In fact, nations seek to ensure their destiny by controlling the national homeland for the benefit of their nation, and by promoting the indigeneous nation to a dominant, preferential position. A primordial connection between nation and homeland—blood and soil—is claimed, which results in a geographic or spatial identity, imbued with great emotion as the sacred ancestral land. The national homeland is delimited and justified by either history, demography, or both. Although demographic dominance can generally be claimed by only one nation, the historical claim can be made by more than one, and frequently the demographic claim is reinforced by the historical argument. Most national and ethnic conflict is provoked by conflicting claims to the homeland or aliens residing in the national homeland. Thus, as a rule, the more ethnically homogeneous the homeland, the less the conflict among nations. Of course, this is not always the case. A major national goal is ethnic homogeneity in the national homeland, as various restrictive language, citizenship, and immigration laws demonstrate. Yet this aim will not be sought at the expense of control over ancestral territory.

This is a presentation that will be more concerned with impressions than with numbers. I suppose we could count the number of theaters or schools that have gone out of business. Yet I am not sure that would be an advantage in a presentation about culture. Two years ago, I was having lunch at a Theater Institute in Alma-Ata. It was a very special occasion because that morning they had just slaughtered a horse for us. And as my host told me this, he loooked me right in the eye and said, “You know, this is freshly-killed horse meat. We did it just for you.” As I responded, I returned his gaze, and said: “I love it.” And actually, it was very good, but remember that the Kazakhs, like all people of the East, are very sensitive to how people from the West regard them. That is but one small demonstration of this tendency. Another was that in the course of the meal someone suddenly came in and whispered something to someone else—remember the date, late May 1990—and everyone stood up and cheered. And I asked, “What's happened?” Somebody else said, “Yeltsin has been elected.” Two people at the table subsequently made mention of Yeltsin's popularity in the non-Russian areas and said that that this was an exciting development. Kazakhs really thought that this was a change for the better. And they were right.

On the eve of the referendum on Armenia's independence on September 21, 1991, Vazken I issued the following appeal to voters.

By the will of God, the citizens of our freedom loving nation and newly born Republic will respond on September 21, 1991, to the invitation for independence by declaring unanimously and loudly, “yes.”

The Soviet Union has a Muslim population about the size of Turkey's. Definition is a problem because Soviet censuses do not ask about religious convictions. All one can say is that those nationalities which have traditionally been predominantly Muslim number, according to the 1989 census, approximately 55 million people out of a total population which exceeds 285 million. Although it is common to refer to “Soviet Muslims” as if they constituted a monolithic community, these millions of people are in fact diverse in terms of their religious traditions, current attitudes toward their ancestral faith, nationality, and numerous other secular aspects of life as well. This essay will attempt to describe all the forms of Islamic activity among the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union, but will consider the status of Islam primarily in Central Asia, where the largest number of the Soviet Union's traditionally Muslim nationalities live, and especially the republic of Tajikistan, where the status of Islam largely resembles that of other important parts of the region.

We should not be surprised if we find each of the former republics of the Soviet Union placing foremost in their foreign policy the desire to achieve a truly recognized statehood. Obviously, developing their constitutions, and internal political and economic structures, is an internal matter, but it is closely related, of course, with the foreign policy that they can pursue. The principal aim of a foreign policy—just as perhaps the principal aim of an individual—is self-preservation. And once the entity has been created, either because of a long struggle of important forces within the society or, in a few cases, because independence is handed to them due to events elsewhere, the fact is that once you are independent you must act in a way that defends your independence. You defend the ability of whatever political system you have to make its own autonomous decisions. And I believe that what we are seeing today reflects this imperative. We see it most spectacularly, of course, in the jockeying of Russia and Ukraine within the Commonwealth of Independent States.

I'll start with culture. Today we have been speaking principally about culture in the republics. I would like to address the common problems facing the post-Soviet republics. I agree with Edward Allworth that there is a crisis or trauma not only for the national intellectuals, but for intellectuals as a whole. This is especially a trauma for intellectuals who were supported by the state. They had very comfortable lives inside the institutes and the cultural unions. Now these privileges are disappearing. Previously intellectuals’ lives were characterized by a kind of self-adoration of their positions, of their purity, of their disengagement from political life, and this stance is now also in crisis. Recently, I read a very interesting article which said that today nobody wants to engage in the escapist literature that was once so popular. Nobody wants to hear about themes of history, of Egypt, the Silver Age, and so on because politics is now the hot topic in cultural life. A similar situation occurred in the Prague Spring, and we know that the results in this case were very fruitful. Havel, who was a very sophisticated journal writer, became a very contemporary, very active, and essential writer. And I consider this crisis, this struggle of intellectuals, a good sign. The people who will survive will be those whom other people read. Conversely, Chengiz Aitmatov, who was long a friend of the national struggle, who made a name for himself as a writer concerned with conditions in Kirgizia, and who was a defender of the national traditions, now prefers to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. While I was very surprised by this, this is also typical of the struggle to which I refer. Secondly, as Professor Allworth noted, it is true that Kazakh leaders