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Boris Yeltsin, seen here dancing during an election rally, saw unrecognized countries as the result of Stalin's forced borders

MOSCOW (Tiraspol Times) - Russia’s First President Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday of a cardiac arrest, oversaw the collapse of communist rule in Russia and its chaotic transformation into a market economy.

But he never finished what he started: The complete break-up of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of people trapped inside artificial Stalinist borders.

This was a concern to him which he voiced in the last public interview which he gave before his death.

In an interview to Rossiyskaya Gazeta last December on the 15th anniversary of the CIS (the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States), he particularly said that "foundation of the CIS was the only alternative to the inevitable and uncontrollable catastrophic collapse of the former Soviet Union" and noted that "the problem of unrecognized republics cannot be treated as a consequence of the CIS establishment. It is the legacy of the Bolsheviks and then Stalinist ethnic policy, when borders of republics were drawn with a stroke of a pen, whole nations were resettled, centuries-long traditions were wiped out and religious feelings of people were humiliated."

Joseph Stalin, one of history's worst dictators, tried to keep the union republics of the Soviet Union under tight control by drawing borders in a way that ran counter to natural historical and ethnic divisions.

Boris Yeltsin's last interview: "The problem of unrecognized republics is the legacy of the Bolsheviks and then Stalinist ethnic policy, when borders of republics were drawn with a stroke of a pen."

One such "artificial republic" was the Moldavian SSR, created in 1940 as the result of secret Nazi-pact.

Historically, Pridnestrovie - which is also commonly called Transnistria, or Transdniester after the Dniester river which separates it from Moldova - was never part of Moldova. For the first time ever, the two sides were forced into a joint nation in World War II when Hitler and Stalin redrew the borders of Europe.

Stalinism's artificial borders

As a result of Hitler's and Stalin's World War II plans for splitting up Europe between them, a secret protocol was added to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1940, Stalin invaded Moldova and forcibly annexed it to Pridnestrovie, which was at the time a separate autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, with Tiraspol as its capital. Before that time, Pridnestrovie had never - at any time in history - been part of Moldova, nor had Moldova ever - at any time in history - been part of Pridnestrovie.

The only link to Moldova owes its existence to political machinations of the communist era when the Soviet leadership created an artificial Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) by merging Pridnestrovie with a part of Romania that the Soviet Union invaded.

As soon as the Soviet Union fell apart, both sides wanted freedom and wanted to become independent of each other again. To withdraw from this forced and unnatural union, Pridnestrovie declared independence in 1990. Moldova declared independence one year later, in 1991.

Separate from its larger neighbor Moldova in language, culture, alphabet and history, Pridnestrovie / Transdnestr is today a 'de facto' independent nation located on the banks of the Dniester River.

Same modus operandi in Abkhazia

Abkhazia, which Stalin forced into the Georgian SSR, found itself in a similar position. Originally, it not part of Georgia, but Stalin set about to change that in the same way that he demoted the status of Pridnestrovie (then called the MASSR) by merging it with Moldova.

Before Stalin, the old Kingdom of Abkhazia, on the Black Sea coast between Georgia and Russia, was a separate Union Republic in the Soviet Union. Its status was equal to other USSR republics; not more and not less than the Georgian SSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and all the rest.

This ended in 1931, when Joseph Stalin - himself an ethnic Georgian - stripped Abkhazia of its status and made it an autonomous republic within Soviet Georgia. Despite its nominal autonomy, it was subjected to strong central rule from central Soviet authorities. Georgian became the official language.

Stalin's notorious henchman Lavrenty Beria - another Georgian - set up a program of Georgian migration to Abkhazia to dilute the original population. As the executor of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, Beria also arranged the killings and deportations of thousands of Abkhazians.

When the Soviet Union fell, the populations of the unrecognized countries tried to un-do the legacy of Stalinism with its artificial borders. In the summer of 1990, Boris Yeltsin sent an important message to everyone aspiring to self-determination by telling them to “take as much sovereignty as you can handle.”

Later, as president of Russia, he was too caught up in the often chaotic transition to a market based economy and had very little time to follow up on the final un-doing of Stalinist borders. However, this was a theme which he would often return to, as he did once again in his life's last interview.

After leaving the Russian presidency in 1999, Boris Yeltsin led an active life. He paid visits to the USA where he met Bill Clinton, and he also visited China, Israel, Kyrgyzstan and quite a few other countries. He often paid visits to his native Sverdlovsk Region, Bashkiria and other Russian provinces. He showed keen interests in sports, first of all, tennis.

Earlier this year, Yeltsin went on a tour of holy sites in Jordan. According to Russian tennis team coach and an old friend of the Yeltsins family Shamil Tarpishchev, after a recent trip to Jordan Yeltsin caught a cold and failed to come the Russia-France tennis game last week. He was 76 when he died. (With information from Regnum)

See also:
» The shared - and not so shared - history of Pridnestrovie and Moldova [1]
» The former Moldavian SSR: A non-country which broke in two [2]

On the web:
» Pridnestrovie's maps through history [3]