Russia: Scrambling for the Pieces of an Empire

Even if its long-term durability has not been tested, the nascent Commonwealth of Independent States is firmly established in the world of symbols. When the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the 11 former Soviet republics met in Minsk last week, delegations arrived in former Aeroflot airliners carrying the name of their states painted across the fuselage. As the leaders sat down to begin negotiating their future, the red Soviet banner was nowhere to be seen: the concrete-and-glass conference hall was bedecked with the multicolored flags of the 11 new nations.

The trappings of empire, of course, extend far beyond banners and palaces. When the domain was as vast as the U.S.S.R. with a single ruling center, its possessions were almost incalculable. They include not only the military forces, treasury and administrative machinery of the former rulers, but also the common cultural, scientific and intellectual property of the union. Sharing out the inheritance among the survivors is proving to be complicated and contentious.

At the Minsk meeting, the new states made a little progress. They agreed that the intercontinental ballistic missiles of the former Strategic Rocket Forces -- renamed the Strategic Deterrent Force -- will be centrally controlled by the Commonwealth. Over the next few years, three of the four states with nuclear weapons on their soil -- Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan -- are expected to destroy them or hand them over to the fourth, Russia.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, cautious in his estimates, says he is "reasonably confident" that the weapons are under tight control now, but he worries about the future. "We want to help them shrink their stockpiles," he says.

The Minsk conferees made less headway on the former Soviet conventional forces and weaponry. The numbers are still gigantic: 3.7 million men in uniform, more than 10,000 combat aircraft, 56,000 tanks, nearly 90,000 artillery pieces, 800 warships. Russian President Boris Yeltsin argued for central control over all this too, but Ukraine, Moldavia and Azerbaijan insisted that they had to have their own national armies. Most Soviet naval bases were in Russia, but Ukraine was quick to claim the Black Sea Fleet, which had its home port in Ukraine's Sevastopol. Without warning, Russia ordered the newest aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to its port of Murmansk. Yeltsin later defended the transfer, noting that the Black Sea Fleet was "historically Russian." But he grudgingly conceded that Ukraine is entitled to "a share" of the Black Sea Fleet.

In the end, the conference, said Yeltsin, "confirmed the right of each state to decide" how to organize its military "in accordance with its own laws." As it turns out, the other eight will operate under a Commonwealth "single command," dominated de facto by Russia. But whether they will be willing or able to pay the staggering costs of modern, multimillion-troop armed forces is a question they have not yet faced.

The Russian President pre-empted some of the inheritance debate. Even before the U.S.S.R. went out of existence, he began to seize for his republic such Soviet structures as the Kremlin, the presidential office and staff, the Foreign Ministry and its embassies abroad, the security forces, the Communist Party's Central Committee headquarters and banks and foreign currency accounts.