Back to the USSR?

As a presidential candidate, Alexander Lukashenko was not what one would call timid. A dark horse with little experience in domestic or international politics, the former collective-farm boss launched his bid for the presidency of Belarus by pledging that his first official act, if elected, would be to throw the Prime Minister in jail. Then he promised to ban private property, purge the government and squelch free enterprise. Finally, in a televised debate, he named Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ghoulish founder of the Soviet secret police, one of his most admired heroes.

Lukashenko’s temerity paid off handsomely. Last week he swept up a smashing 80% of the vote to become the first elected President of this Kansas-size country sandwiched between Poland and Russia. Key to his victory was a program of reform that would have been unthinkable three years ago, when Belarus was sprinting off in the direction of independence. Instead of turning his back on Moscow, as most in the former Soviet Union did in 1991, Lukashenko proposed that salvation lay in closer links with Russia.

His win, along with that of Leonid Kuchma in neighboring Ukraine, was a measure of the deep disillusionment bedeviling many of the 15 republics that used to make up the U.S.S.R. Since the giddy days of 1991, when the republics scattered like schoolchildren at recess, independent life in what Russians call the “near abroad” has proved tougher than anticipated. Euphoria has slowly been replaced by disgust at the hardships of post-Soviet life: ethnic strife, political instability and government corruption. In the face of these problems, incompetent nationalist leaders, while touting the trappings of independence, have failed to deliver on essentials, such as economic prosperity and domestic tranquillity. The West, to which many of these new nations optimistically looked for salvation, has been both parsimonious and sanctimonious — long-winded on advice about the ABC’s of capitalism, short on change when it came to providing financial support. The disenchantment has altered the national demeanor of these prodigal states. After taking a new look at their Soviet past, some have tempered their defiance and long for the ! economic stability — though not the Russification and political repression — of U.S.S.R. days. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of new thinking about the old union came last week, when voters in both Belarus and Ukraine tossed out those who had led them after independence and replaced them with men who promise deliverance from economic chaos through closer ties with Russia.

Such offers were bound to strike a chord in Belarus, a country suffering from 500% inflation, whose national currency, adorned with the image of a hare, is derisively referred to as the “bunny rabbit.” Says Moscow economist Stanislav Zhukov: “The Belarussian economy is so unreformed, it has nowhere to go. It continues to produce goods that are so bad that even Russians don’t want them.”

Lukashenko, with a Reaganesque promise of “simple answers to complicated questions,” asked Belarussians whether they could possibly imagine being worse off than they are today. When crowds answered him with the inevitable no, the flamboyant populist declared, “Without Russia’s help, we don’t have a way out of the current crisis. Ruptured economic relations between the former Soviet republics must be restored.”

That message worked equally well in Ukraine, where Soviet mismanagement and a failure to begin privatization have left this country of 52 million saddled with unemployment and underemployment unofficially estimated at 40%. As bad off as Russians are, their average income is 10 times as high as that of Ukrainians. Ukraine’s industrial production has dropped as much as 80%, and energy has become so expensive that the heat is turned off — even in elementary schools — during the winter.

Amid this fiscal rubble, Ukrainians are eager to turn to Russia for help. And to make that rapprochement, they are looking to Kuchma, a former director of the world’s largest missile factory, whose production lines once cranked out giant nuclear-delivery systems “like sausages,” as Nikita Khrushchev boasted in the 1950s. The erstwhile industrialist won 52% of the vote, inflicting a shocking defeat on Leonid Kravchuk, who led Ukraine in breaking ties with Moscow, then spent the next three years quarreling with Russia, thwarting reform and cultivating ties with the West.

Despite the objections of nationalist critics who fear that Ukraine will lose control of its destiny if it reconciles with its longtime master, Kuchma emphatically told voters that the country has no other viable market and no other realistic source of oil and other resources. Without an “economic union” with Moscow, he declared, “there will be no Ukraine.”

Such statements are disturbingly compatible with the views of imperialists in Russia, who are bent on restoring Moscow’s control over the former Soviet empire. “The borders of the U.S.S.R. will be restored peacefully,” Russia’s firebrand politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky recently told TIME. “Ukraine and Belarus will be the first to rejoin Russia. Tajikistan, Armenia and Abkhazia are begging to be taken back as Russian provinces. As for the Baltics, they are welcome to their independence — if they have sufficient resources to sustain it after we cut short all energy supplies. Sure, they’ll be independent, but they’ll fall ages behind. In fact, independence has not given anything to anyone.”

That is a conclusion to which several of the former satellite republics of the old U.S.S.R. seem resigned. Nationalist movements that led sovereignty campaigns against Moscow have suffered election defeats in republics as diverse as Moldova and Lithuania. Georgia, once a leader in the struggle for independence, has swallowed hard and invited Russian peacekeeping forces into its breakaway region of Abkhazia. And Moscow’s troops have intervened in Tajikistan to stop a bloody civil war.

Russian neoimperialists like Zhirinovsky will be making a major mistake, however, if they try to project the election returns from Ukraine and Belarus onto all the former Soviet republics. The picture is far too complicated for that. Despite their economic problems, many republics continue — with good reason — to fear ethnic and military interference from their former Russian masters. Some, like Uzbekistan, have established authoritarian governments and are no longer willing to cede control back to Moscow. Other states, such as Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Moldova, view the large minority of ethnic Russians living in their midst as a fifth-column challenge to their sovereignty.

Paradoxically, the ambitions of the Russian imperialists have collided with a harsh economic reality at home: Russia simply cannot afford to revive the old Soviet Union, where Moscow called the shots and the republics were given economic support in exchange for obedience. “Any Russian who talks about restoring the Soviet Union has no respect for his own country,” says former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi. “We’ve had enough of a milk-cow-style union, where the head is in Russia grazing, and the milking goes on in other republics.”

The prospect of suckling at Mother Russia’s breast may have been a successful campaign promise for Lukashenko and Kuchma, but now they must deliver. Only hours after winning their respective elections, both leaders inexplicably disappeared from public view: Lukashenko reportedly holed up in his office on the corner of Lenin and Marx Streets in Minsk, while Kuchma told aides he was going to lay flowers on his mother’s grave. Perhaps victory brought them face to face with the enormousness of their tasks, and both felt the need to take a deep breath, in solitude.