Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 14 – The Pugachev
events like “a magic crystal” allow one to look into Russia’s future, a future
that will involve either an authoritarian disintegration resembling that of the
former Yugoslavia and likely extending over several years or a democratic one
that could occur more quickly and easily, according to a Russian analyst now
living abroad.
In a 2000-word article posted on
Inache.net on Friday, Leonid Storch bases his conclusion on three aspects of
contemporary Russian life: First, the share of the Russian population that
benefits from and therefore is willing to support the current regime is
declining, especially in the regions outside of Moscow (inache.net/mnogo/793/).
Second, the
regime is unwilling to conduct dialogue about or even acknowledge the presence
of three distinct conflicts – between liberalism and authoritarianism, between
the regions and Moscow, and among ethnic groups – and the propensity of these
conflicts to coalesce thus making the resolution of any one of them more
difficult if not impossible.
And third, the combination of
massive corruption in the elites and the absence of popular participation in
the government are now so widespread that in the absence of truly revolutionary
change one or the other of these or quite possibly a combination of the two
will survive the departure of Putin.
Putin will not go voluntarily,
Storch says. He has some decided that the laws of historical succession and the
replacement of political generations do not apply to him: he was, is and will
be and he and his entourage are irreplaceable.”
But given the main tensions in Russiann society, “a revolution,”
peaceful or violent, “is practically inevitable.”
“Theoretically,” the Russian analyst
says, “the replacement of the Putin stagnation autocracy with an all-Russian
centrist dictatorship is possible,” and also “theoretically possible” is the
transformation of the country “into a genuine and not nominal as now federation
with a liberal-democratic form of administration like for example Belgium.”
But the first of these variants is
something old-fashioned and unlikely because of that, and the second
presupposes “too high a level of civic consciousness which Russians do not have
and will not have in the next few decades.” Consequently, “the most probable
scenario” will be one in which “the Russian Federation will disintegrate on the
initiative of regional elites.”
The Pugachev events show how such
“an authoritarian de-federalization” could occur, Storch argues, all the more
so because “the murder of Mardhanov was only the occasion for the protest”
rather than its real cause which was opular anger about the inability of the
authorities to provide adequate living conditions.
The events in Pugachev are “much closer to a
popular revolution” than were the Bolotnoye demonstrations. Unlike the latter, the Pugachev rising was
spontaneous and reflected feelings in the depths of the population. Much more important, Pugachev was not a
middle class enterprise but something that reflects the real demographic face
of the country.
So far, Pugachev has been a series
of protests and demonstrations, but it is easy to imagine how it could turn
into a revolutionary situation, Storch says.
If an angry crowd confronts a group of policemen who are suffering the
same waya the protesters are, the situation could lead either to a bloody clash
or worse the police going over to the side of the people.
In this way, the new Russian
revolution “will begin according to the scenario of [1905’s] Bloody Sunday and
end like the post-August 1991] putsch with its flight of republics out of the
USSR.”
“The disintegration of Russia
appears to be a more than realistic outcome of a revolution especially because
it already began a long time ago,” with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That
was “its first phase, because with the exception of the Baltics and the
Trans-Caucasus, the territories which separated were part of the Russian [world]
… or historically close to it.”
And “present-day Russia,” Storch argues,
“despite its name was and remains a downsized variant of the Soviet Union; that
is, not a federation but an empire with a presidential form of administration.”
It is falling apart and will continue to do so possibly all at once or possibly
“over the course of several years as was the case with the collapse of
Yugoslavia.”
In place of the Russian Federation,
he suggests, “several dozen new states” – he suggested “about 30” – will appear,
“connected by the principle of collective security and in the political arena
[with] 30 little Putins instead of one.” It could happen, however, that in some
regions, “good sense will triumph” and the regimes will be better than that.
And there is a powerful reason for
assuming that will be the case: “to create an effective, democratic, and
non-corrupt system on a small territory is much simpler than on one which
occupies a seventh of the earth’s land surface.” That is the lesson of what has
happened in the Baltic countries, Poland and Finland.
But at the same time, there is the
danger that this process of disintegration will feature at lest in some places “armed
conflicts, ethnic purges and the establishment of local authoritarian regimes.” That mixed picture is the case in the
post-Soviet states, and it thus likely to be the case in the post-Russian ones
as well.
Putin’s unwillingness to address the
problems Russia faces and his blocking of any democratic means of succession ensures
“the regime will be replaced by revolution,” and “one of the results of the
revolutionary transformations will be the partial or complete defederalization”
as a result of “dissatisfaction with the extraordinary centralization” of the
Putinist state.
What is most likely, Storch
concludes, is that “defederaliation as was the case with the disintegration fot
he Soviet Union will be carried out from above by regionl elites without any
taking into account of the opinion of the electorate” and that this in the
future “will generate new social tensions across the Russian space.”
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