"Having dismissed the alliance, you just threw us into the stones." Why did the Euro -Asian SSR not arise on the site of the USSR

The collapse of the USSR is still ongoing. Evidence of this is more than enough and 30 years after the document signed on December 8, 1991 in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, according to which the Soviet Union as a subject of international law ceased to operate-which was enshrined in the Declaration on the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 21, 1991 in Alma-Ata. It is enough to recall the unheated war in the South Caucasus, constantly reproduced by the militaristic hysteria around Ukraine (and here again), hot armed conflicts on the borders of the countries of Central Asia ...

In these mournful, for others, holidays for others, everyone who is hunting (and who has already been overwhelmed), consider it their duty to summarize the collapse of the Union, impose its lessons and build forecasts for the following disasters. The initial thesis for most “anniversary” is the thesis about the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, which the current Russian president gave the world.

The words are already carved in stone. We will not like the vandals and destroy the monuments. But we will not even pour crocodilov tears on the Soviet Atlantis melting in the past.

She died so died. All empires are dying.

But, on the other hand, why not live a little in the past, especially when you do not know it, at best, you don’t remember, but you only study by a nimble-rocket cinema with Love Orlova, Nikolai Cherkasov and Mark Bernes.

Especially thoughtful reconstructors of the past go further and try to recreate the virtual image of the Atlantis that could be saved from disappearance in 1991. A rich imagination and an inexhaustible supply of conspiracy training allows them to present a half surviving alliance without European and Caucasian republics, only Russia with Central Asia and Kazakhstan (this is how in Soviet times it was called that today is called Central Asia). As if Eurasia, but still Soviet - the symbiosis of the blue dreams of Leo Gumilyov and Nursultan Nazarbayev.

- Motivate! - People will tell the reconstructors boring and incredulous.

And then the apologists of the light version of the USSR will be selected as an argument by the date of proclamation of state independence of Kazakhstan, well, just inappropriately late for those days-December 16, 1991. Already behind was not only the GKChP, not only the institutions of its sovereignty of all the Union republics, which followed this, but also the most fatal meeting of the three Slavic leaders of the Great Soviet Power in Belovezhie. Nazarbayev pulled to the last. The classic explanation of such tolerance is known: the Kazakh party boss still hoped that he would receive the prime minister in an updated union, who, even before the August rebellion, allegedly promised him by Mikhail Gorbachev.

All these hopes, like sand palaces on a wet beach, were swept away a few days after December 8, when all five leaders of Central Asia gathered in Ashgabat on December 13 and agreed to join the Belovezhsky verdict of Slavic colleagues: the Kirdyk Union. And a week later, on December 21, in Alma-Ata, they already signed the declaration with all the refuseniks from the USSR and confirmed the proclamation of the CIS.

Yes, it was a decision of the bosses, with their peoples who voted at the Gorbachev referendum on March 17, 1991, they did not consult. And who, in those days, with these peoples, and even in those spaces consulted?

But if you try to return in the time machine 30 years ago, then I think that the vast majority of residents of Central Asia would say “no” to the idea of ​​leaving a huge country.

Firstly, people would not understand the question itself, they say, why, and who needs it, but how will we live?

Having been engaged in this region, almost all these 30 years, starting from August 1992, visiting all five republics, dozens of times in different years, meeting with a huge number of people in the province and capitals, from ordinary police and street merchants to prime ministers and presidents, I almost never heard expressions of joy and triumph about a new independent life outside Soviet state.

I still remember the Tajik traffic cop, who stopped my car in 2001 in the city of Dangar, the small homeland of the current president of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon, halfway from the Afghan border to Dushanbe. Upon learning that I was from Moscow, the senior lieutenant asked - is it true that the Soviet Union will be restored soon?

- Why did you get? - I was surprised.

- On TV I heard, Nazarbayev said.

-Yes, he was joking, he wanted to say, they say, if in a good way we will not begin to cooperate in the CIS, we will have to restore the alliance. Have you seriously hoped?

- Well, yes, I have an apartment in St. Petersburg and my wife and my wife is there, I don’t get back, wait ... And here I don’t marry, although the children are already from another ...

I advised Starley to marry and forget about the St. Petersburg apartment: the USSR will not be. When asked why, he answered the question: what do you think, your fellow countryman will want to voluntarily give his power to Moscow and become the chairman of the state farm again?

He only grinned in response.

Of course, in humility from a divorce from Moscow, first of all, the habit developed by the centuries was affected - the decision of Raisov, the bosses, that is, not discuss, the case is risky: live and adapt to new realities when they change, they will inform you. Needless to say, what was the millions of Russian or Russian -speaking in these parts, when, waking up one morning, they found that they were outside Russia.

However, this is still more a beautiful and catchy phrase than the truth of that time. It must be remembered that the founders of the CIS seriously at first believed that the Commonwealth proclaimed by them is just another form of the existence of a huge space, tired of living in the conditions of ideological dictates and a planned economy. There will be no rigid impassable boundaries inside the CIS, the army will actually be common, they convinced themselves and, it seems, were ready to believe it.

It didn't work out. And after a very short time after Belovege and Alma-Ata, it became clear what could not work. Who now remembers that in Russia itself, in certain circles of its elitarians, intellectuals and soils, communists and liberals, the reasoning was popular that the imperial metropolis feeds the parasites in the colonies (so they said) on the outskirts of the union, who were almost pairing to her mother breast, and it is time to tear them away from her, otherwise she will not survive on the verge, being on the verge of being on the verge. exhaustion.

Therefore, the collapse of the Union is not only the result of a power fight in the Kremlin between Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev. This is also the exposition of the will of the vast majority of Russian national patriots. Of course, this took shape in the resonant volitional impetus of national movements in the Soviet republics west of Moscow - Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, and to the south in the Caucasus. The GKChP has become there everywhere a powerful motivator to escape from Russia.

On the outskirts of the empire, the acquisition of national identity in the second half of the 1980s worried people much more than the confrontation in Moscow and St. Petersburg “Democratic Russia” with the marginal scraps of the CPSU, led by Ivan Polozkov, forgotten now. It is enough to recall how the Azerbaijani Azerbaijani with Azerbaijanis in the north of Iran fraternized in 1989, when the borders opened there. Or the same fraternity on the shores of the border rod between the Romanians and Moldavians, who at once also felt the Romanians.

Yes, Central Asia did not want and was not going to leave the Union. In none of its republics, during the restructuring of structures similar to popular fronts in the Baltic countries or in the South Caucasus, striving for secession.

Even such an anti-nuclear movement as Nevada-Semipalatinsk, which arose in Kazakhstan in the late 1980s on the initiative of the famous writer Olzhas Suleimenov, the leader of the Kazakh National Patriots, set its goal only to close the Semipalatinsk nuclear landfill (this happened only a week after the failure of the GKChP, August 29, 1991). And this is despite the fact that the backbone of this movement was made up of the activists of Zheltoxan, a powerful protest of Kazakh youth in December 1986, who opposed the decision of Moscow, to appoint the head of Kazakhstan Varangian, who did not even speak the Kazakh language, Gennady Kolbin, who replaced the popular party leader Dinmuhamed Kunaev.

In either case, no calls to the withdrawal of Kazakhstan from the USSR sounded, but everything that was happening, of course, contributed to a sharp increase in anti -Soviet sentiments. The republic, without exaggeration, was the supporting design of Soviet Central Asia, whose Russian -speaking population was approximately equal to the Kazakh population.

Nazarbayev, already for several years led the Kazakh SSR, on the territory of which part of the nuclear arsenal of the Union was located, obviously, could hardly imagine how to separate from Moscow. Therefore, he pulled to the end, trying to make sure of the inevitability of such a finale.

It took place differently in the remaining four republics of Central Asia. The wave of the proclamation of their state independence swept immediately after the failure of the State Emergency Committee: in Kyrgyzstan - August 31, in Uzbekistan on September 1, in Tajikistan - September 9 and in Turkmenistan - September 27.

And the consequences of this were also different there. The most dramatic events developed in Tajikistan, where an extremely cruel and bloody civil war began. It was in Tajikistan that the Russian division became their support base, deployed in the republic after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989), which defended Soviet power against local Islamists, united with a democratic opposition.

In Turkmenistan, the main beneficiary of the Union was the local party bonza Saparmurat Niyazov, who extremely quickly appreciated what unprecedented generosity he received from Moscow. Niyazov turned out to be the main and unconditional owner of Turkmen gas, whose reserves were evaluated as the fourth in the world in volume, promised to turn Turkmenistan into the second Kuwait, to give free gas, water and electricity, the country is constant neutrality, and to himself the title of Turkmenbashi, the “father of all Turkmens”.

In Uzbekistan, the collapse of the USSR also made the local party leader Islam Karimov with a sovereign master of the country. But, however, not earlier than he suppressed the attempt of the former Uzbek Komsomol members, who instantly turned out to be ideological Islamic leaders (it was they who later created the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, which became part of the history of the post -Soviet Central Asia), to establish justice according to the laws of Sharia.

The post -Soviet transit in Kyrgyzstan, the only republic of the region that refused to obey the orders of the State Emergency Committee, was most painless. This was facilitated by the change of leadership in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, when the intellectual Askar Akayev, a protege of the famous writer Genghis Aitmatov, replaced the party nomenclature in perestroika. In the 1990s, Kyrgyzstan even began to call the “island of democracy in Central Asia”, but this did not bring prosperity and stability to the country of Kyrgyz. As the former Foreign Minister of Kyrgyzstan Muratbek Imanaliev once noted, "by dissolving the Union, you just threw us into the stones, survive as you want ..."

It was this that some democratic deputies of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR from Central Asia were afraid of Russian leaders not to leave them, separating from the "Asian ballast" upon leaving the Union, alone with local party bonzes, otherwise they will immediately turn to feudal rule.

Most fears were justified. But could it be otherwise?

The energy of the collapse of the empire created by the power of the empire, albeit the source of the great historical significance of cultural projects for Central Asia, of course, turned out to be a drama for the inhabitants of a huge region. But to confront this energy, not to be plunged, and in some places-and overturned into the past, was not given to Central Asia.

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