Union After the Union: Problems of Ordering National and State Relations in the Former USSR

Abstract

The reasons for the demise of powerful states are never fully clear, either to contemporaries or to historians—the varied interpretations of the fall of Rome are only one case in point. But this applies especially to empires, i.e., state structures that, over an entire geopolitical region, come to dominate nations whose statehood has thereby been destroyed or partially preserved, albeit with some portion of sovereignty, large or small, having been lost. In this sense (but only in this sense), the USSR was an empire like the Russian tsardom. But in this sense as well, the United States of America is an empire—true, a modern one, ruling as if by remote control, indirectly. Understood in this way, empires are a function of the entire world system and will disappear not only, and not so much, by dint of internal turmoil, as simply because "the world has become different."¹