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Another test was acceptance by foreign governments, and the commonwealth was doing well on that score too. There was still a great deal of apocalyptic talk from analysts like CIA director Robert Gates, who warned that the former Soviet Union faced the greatest potential for explosive civic turmoil since the Bolsheviks consolidated their power roughly 70 years ago. But as the week wore on, the U.S. and its friends were beginning to face up to life without Gorbachev or a Soviet central government and to conclude that it might not be so awful after all.
In fact, the Western powers seemed informally to be coming together on a common approach. Its main elements: 1) they will, properly, leave the shape of a future union -- or commonwealth or whatever -- to be decided by the Soviet people and their leaders; 2) they will insist that whatever governments arise on the territory of the old union respect human rights and abide by all the U.S.S.R.'s treaty obligations, including commitments to reduce both nuclear and conventional arms; 3) they will strongly urge the successor states to preserve a unified command over nuclear weapons and offer money and technical assistance to dismantle any and all warheads that the republics want to destroy -- Secretary of State Baker set out over the weekend on a five-day, five-city swing through the former U.S.S.R. for exactly that purpose; 4) they | will speed up and coordinate aid to any republics that meet these criteria. As Baker put it, "We will continue to work with reformers wherever we find them."
Though this approach is fundamentally realistic, there are problems and ambiguities in it. The commonwealth, if it establishes itself as a going concern, is likely to include both fledgling democracies like Russia and Ukraine and unreformed authoritarian regimes like Uzbekistan. Baker specifically mentioned the southern republic of Georgia as one that would not qualify for American aid because its government is authoritarian. But can Washington maintain such a stance if Georgia is accepted into a commonwealth where most or all of the other members are getting Western aid?
At this point probably only some loose association like the proposed commonwealth, without any true central government, can bring the republics together at all. But the difficulties of making it work are immense. Of all people, Joseph Stalin gave the most eerily prophetic description. When the Soviet Union was founded on Dec. 30, 1922, he enumerated the conditions attending its birth: "devastated fields, factories at standstill, destroyed productive powers and exhausted economic resources render insufficient the separate efforts of separate republics in economic reconstruction." The union is now dying of exactly the same ills, and its heirs have yet to prove that they know how to build something better.