MOSCOW — When the Soviet Union broke apart two years ago, Russia's idea of itself as an empire refused to die.
Russian chauvinists kicked up a storm of protest as upstart republics like Azerbaijan, the Baltics and Ukraine not only shed the Soviet hammer and sickle but spun far beyond Moscow's orbit, building their own defenses, printing their own currencies and seeking new allies elsewhere.
Who "lost" those outposts of a millennium-old, multiethnic empire was a dagger-pointed question raised by Communists and radical nationalists in their long struggle and bloody showdown with President Boris N. Yeltsin for control of democratic Russia.
But in the weeks before and since crushing his rivals with an Oct. 4 assault by troops and tanks on the Parliament, Yeltsin has achieved a less visible although equally dramatic turn in regional politics--a parade of supplicants from the periphery, humbled by ethnic strife and economic disarray, pleading for Moscow's help.
"Nobody should doubt that the mentality and reflexes of Russian imperialism are still alive," said Georgia's Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the latest leader to swallow a nation's pride and surrender its fate to the Kremlin.
In recent days, at Shevardnadze's reluctant urging, the Russian military has intervened in Georgia's civil war--handing over some tanks, parking warships off the Black Sea coast, sending 200 marines ashore to guard a port and a threatened railroad--just enough to turn a rebel offensive into a retreat.
Russia acted only after Shevardnadze's Parliament endorsed his decision to take Georgia into the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose alliance of 11 other former Soviet republics that is run from Moscow.
The Commonwealth had gained a new partner Sept. 24 after a similar about-face in Azerbaijan. Frustrated by defeats in a war against Armenians, an Azerbaijani warlord, flush with extra weapons from a local Russian base, overthrew a president who had embraced Turkey as a regional big brother. He was replaced by a pragmatic veteran of the Soviet Politburo, Geidar Aliyev, who traveled here to ask Yeltsin to help stop the fighting.
Just as remarkable was a Sept. 3 agreement by Ukraine, the most militarily powerful and independent of the former Soviet republics after Russia, to sell its half of the prized Black Sea Fleet to the Russian navy in exchange for urgently needed debt relief.
