MOSCOW: The Commonwealth of Independent States, an organization loosely uniting all former Soviet republics minus the three Baltic states, was always fragile to begin with, but with three consecutive revolutions among its members within a year and a half, it is now all but crumbling. Even Russia, which has been the organization’s driving force since its inception 14 years ago, now seems increasingly resigned to seeing the 12-member CIS sink into irrelevance.
The CIS was founded in December 1991 on the very day the Soviet Union disappeared. Dominated by Moscow, it was meant to be the instrument that would allow Russia to retain its influence over the former Soviet empire.
But over the past year and a half, three faithful Kremlin allies were toppled in peaceful revolutions: Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine, and, last week, Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan.
In Moldova, the revolution occurred as a quiet change of hats at the top — the ruling Communists who came to power on a pro-Russia ticket won a recent election fielding a clear Western-friendly agenda.
In Georgia and Ukraine, the new authorities have swapped their predecessors’ pro-Kremlin allegiance for a clearly pro-Western stance.
Even though Kyrgyzstan’s new interim leaders have vowed to continue their deposed predecessor’s Moscow-friendly policies, the lightning toppling of the government there has spawned speculation that the CIS would soon collapse.
“The CIS is currently undergoing the most critical phase of its history,” Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, recently admitted. “There is more and more talk about its uselessness ... It has transformed, but no one really knows into what any more.”
Even Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the organization’s insignificance, during a visit to Armenia last week.
The CIS was only created “to allow a civilized divorce” between the Soviet republics and “never had economic super-tasks,” Putin said. But it remains “a useful club for exchanging information and studying political and humanitarian questions,” he said.
Even if this discussion club does survive, indications are that it will be little more than an empty shell, a far cry from the 1990s’ grandiose declarations on a common, 12-member common economic space and the thousands of joint documents its members have signed over the years, observers say.
“Many suspected the CIS was not viable, but the Russian president’s declarations are its official epitaph,” the Russian weekly Itogy wrote last week.
Aside from their shared Soviet past, the 12 members of the CIS never had much in common.
Concensus among all was always minimal, and reached only on such uncontroversial issues like sharing each other’s air space or fighting terrorism.
