Resize Text: The “Commission of the Congress of USSR People’s Deputies for the Political and Legal Estimation of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939” (hereafter, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Commission, or MRC) was an important landmark in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The pact and the secret protocol attached to it, signed by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939, drastically redrew the map of Eastern Europe. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, Karelia, and the eastern territories of Poland into its domain. The existence of the secret protocol was a long-established concern of Baltic intellectuals, although Soviet authorities repeatedly denied its very existence.
Perestroika changed the situation. On June 8, 1989, pressed by the Baltic republics, the first Congress of USSR People’s Deputies decided to set up the MRC. As Table 1 shows, the MRC included a disproportionately large number of Baltic representatives, who earnestly debated against the MRC majority that continued to hold the traditional view of the pact’s exploitation of “contradictions between imperialisms to earn time.” On December 24, 1989, having listened to the report submitted by the MRC, the second Congress of USSR People’s Deputies declared the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocol null and void since the time of their signature. This decision facilitated the overwhelming victory of the national democrats of the Baltic republics in the republican Soviet elections held in February-March 1990.
Looking at the MRC retrospectively, one would be surprised at the Caliber of its members: Aleksandr Yakovlev (chairman), Yuri Afanas’ev, Georgi Arbatov, and Chingiz Aitomatov as star ideologues of Perestroika; Baltic nationalists or grave diggers of the Soviet Union, such as Vytautas Landsbergis, the future chairman of the Lithuanian parliament Seimas and Edgar Savisaar, the future Estonian prime minister; and Metropolitan Alexy II (Alexy Ridiger), the future patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
What is less known is the role played by the MRC during the beginning of the post-Soviet era in the emergence of secessionist territories that strove to gain international recognition as independent states in their own right. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocol were the legal foundation of Soviet Moldova, which integrated the left and right banks of the Nistru River. During the interwar period, the former Tiraspol Uezd of Kherson Gubernia (in the Russian Empire) had its own autonomy, the Moldovan ASS, as part of Soviet Ukraine; the right bank, Bessarabia, belonged to Romania from 1918 to 1940. On June 23, 1990, the Moldovan Supreme Soviet confirmed the conclusion of the MRC and declared Moldova’s sovereignty, identifying the territorial transfer of Romanian Bessarabia to the Soviet Union as illegal from the beginning. Responding to this, the left bank, Transnistria, organized numerous local referendums and town meetings during the summer of 1990 and declared the foundation of the Pridnestr Moldovan Republic on September 2, 1990.
This idea of restoring sovereignty to territories incorporated into the union republics of the USSR, confirmed by the second Congress of People’s Deputies, was transferred to other more eastern territories of the union republics of the former USSR that were never subjected to the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Georgia and Azerbaijan began to identify themselves as successor states of the democratic republics, which existed for a short period after the Russian Revolution. This restorationism made relations between secessionist territories (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh) and their mother union republics (Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) barely reconcilable. In 1989, the ethnic Polish districts of Lithuania, Gagauz, and South Ossetia only requested to have autonomous status to resist the language laws adopted by their mother union republics, but in 1990, the restorationism that the mother republics adopted as an official ideology of state building caused these territories to pursue the status of union republic. The secessionist territories argued that the union republics to which they belonged had abolished the legal foundations of their own statehood adopted during the Soviet period, with the result that their sovereignty over the secessionist territories ceased to be effective. To put it differently, the secessionists argued that it was not they but the mother republics that made their secession (from the mother republic, but not from the Soviet Union) inevitable.
According to the ideologues of Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-20) and the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-21) were not recognized internationally and did not have definite borders; during their existence, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia were in a state of civil war or under illegal occupation. They were forcibly incorporated into Soviet Azerbaijan and Georgia by the treaties imposed by Moscow. Once Baku and Tbilisi declared these treaties
ineffective from the time of their signature, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia automatically became independent.
This paper does not try to establish whether the secessionists’ arguments had respectable reasons or whether they just used their opponents’ restorationism for justification. Rather, this paper exploits the archival documents of the MRC, preserved at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (f. 9654), to explain the diversion of three nationalizing republics: Lithuania, Ukraine, and Moldova. My conclusion is that restorationism did not always provide secessionists with convenient fuel, as the case of the Lithuanian Poles shows. Moldova’s split into two states should be explained by the indecisiveness of the Moldovan political and intellectual elite at that time, rather than by the restorationism that the Moldovan Popular Front was pursuing.
Keiji Sato is a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and at Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Center. He recently received a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to study in the department of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. An early draft of this article was presented at the March 2009 conference “The South Ossetian Conflict and Trans-Border Politics in the Black Sea Rim,” held at Hokkaido University.
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