Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 4 – President Vladimir
Putin on Monday signed the law making advocacy of separatism in the Russian
Federation a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. But a leading
specialist on Russia’s regions argues that a new wave of separatism around the
world will engulf the Russian Federation as well.
In a new book, “Global Separatism –
the Main Subject of the 21st Century” (in Russian; Moscow:
Liberalnaya Missiya, 2013, 132 pp.; text at csef.ru/files/csef/articles/4370/4370.pdf), St. Petersburg historian Daniil Kotsyubinsky
argues that the coming century will be a time of separatist challenges to many
existing countries, including the Russian Federation.
Kotsyubinsky’s
book is divided into two parts. In the first, he surveys various secessionist
movements around the world such as Catalonia in Spain and Scotland in the
United Kingdom in order to suggest some of the forces which he argues will lead
to the emergence of new secessionist challenges in a variety of places,
including some quite unexpected ones.
In
the second and more significant portion, the historian considers how these
general forces are likely to combine with those specific to Russia, “contradictions”
which he suggests are”pushing [that] post-empire of the ‘horde type’ to its
inevitable end” as a country run from a single imperial center.
According
to Kotsyubinsky, the last two centuries of Russian history have been marked by
the alternation between efforts by the state to modernize the country which
have “inevitably” led to the growth of “explosive internal conflicts” between
the authorities and society and between the center and periphery and attempts by
the rulers to stabilize the situation that have the effect of blocking “the successful
civil-political modernization of the country.”
But
because such attempts at stabilization inevitably have the effect of blocking
economic and social development, they ultimately limit the power of the state
to do what it wants, Kotsyubinsky continues, and thus cause some in the regime
to decide that they have to risk modernization even at the risk of instability.
From
the perspective of the population, especially now, this alternative reflects an
existential dilemma: “what should be chosen: the Motherland or Freedom? Or more
precisely, which Motherland should be chosen – a united, indivisible and unfree
one or a free but territorially smaller one?”
That
choice was recognized by some in late 19th century Russia, by some
dissidents like Andrey Amalrik in late Soviet times, and by an increasing
number of Russian analysts in the wake of the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. And despite Vladimir Putin’s claim in 2001
that his actions in Chechnya had ended the possibility of disintegration, such
an outcome continues to be recognized even by him -- as can be seen from the
measure he has just signed into law.
Discussions
about the possibility of the disintegration of the Russian Federation have
prompted some to argue that Russia as a continental empire won’t fall apart in
the way that empires with colonies across the oceans did. That is true, Kotsyubinsky agrees, but such
arguments miss the point.
Paraphrasing
Tolstoy, he argues, “all empires are unhappy” because “they are ‘families’
joined together by force,” but at the same time, “each o them is ‘unhappy in its
own way.’”
“The
more fully empires are drawn into the process of modernization and
globalization, the more quickly and irreversibly are sown inside them the seeds
of contradictions – political, economic, social and regional – which sooner or
later will destroy the archaic imperial framework,” he writes.
Moreover,
Kotsyubinsky insists, “the fact that Russian statehood has not yet fallen apart
is hardly an argument that it will exist into the future in its current
borders.” In fact, “just the reverse” is the case becaue “at the beginning of
the 21st century, Russia remains an archaic bureaucratic machine
incapable of the successful reformation of any aspect of itself.”
The
use of police power can hold things together for a time but only at the cost of
modernization and repression, he continues, and “sooner or later,” some in the state
will want to modernize in order to enhance their power and some in the society
will ask which is more important to them, “the Motherland or Freedom?”
“The
process of imperial restoration whicih began in 1993-1994 and sharply
intensified after 2000 has led to a situation in which the level of
hypercentralization and vertical integration of the entire state system in the
present-day Russian Federation is fully comparable to that which existed in the
era of the USSR and in certain respects even exceeds it,” Kotsyubinsky says.
Such hyper-centralization
blocked the modernization of the Soviet Union and ultimately led to its demise,
and it will have the same effect on the Russian Federation, he argues. People outside of Moscow increasingly view
that city as “a parasite” on the country and are looking to futures in which
they and not those within the ring road will make choices for themselves.
The center can buy off people for a
time but only for a time, Kotsyubinsky says. Ultimately, without economic
modernization, the center will lose the ability to do that and as it does the
current territory will come apart. Moreover, he suggests, there are additional
reasons for expecting that outcome in the coming years.
The current “unity and
indivisibility of the Russian Federation are being preserved,” he says, “not
thanks to historical trends with good prospects but rather by a banal system of
inertia, the potential for which is disappearing year by year and not being
replaced by new vital and creative impulses.”
The current powers that be may think
they are in control for a long time, but “the recent historical experience of
the USSR” shows that the radicalization of the population and divisions of the
elite “can occur extremely quickly” and, at the same time, efforts to find a
compromise with such opposition groups will only lead the latter to make more
radical demands.
Both the authorities and many among
liberal reformers discount this possibility. The powers that be think that “the
conservative potential of society, passive b definition, can be ‘sublimated’
and made military by combining the spontaneous government feelings of Russian
citizens with the ideology of the Uvarov trinity ... adapted to contemporary
realities.” And part of the liberal community fear that such an approach by the
powers that be will become “a trigger” that will lead to the emergence “from
below” of “’Russian fascism.’”
There is some basis for both these
views, but there are reasons to believe that neither is correct. The Kremlin is “inable of giving birth to a
powerful ‘lower’ Russian-nationalist movement,” Kotsyubinsky says, and such a
movement even if it was started would be unlikely to lead to the fascism
liberals fear.
The reasons for that lie in the
nature of the Russian state and Russian identity, he argues. “Inspite of the widespread publicistic
stereotype, the Russian state is not the historicl product of the Russian
people. Instead, the Russian people is an ‘artifact’ which arose as a result of
the actions of the Russian state and exists as a single civil-political whole
exclusively on the basis of power ‘imposed from above.’”
As those who served in the Soviet
army will remember, Kotsyubinsky says, those who had “Russian” as their
passport nationality did not unite as such but rather formed groups on the basis
of where they were from: Siberia, Moscow, the Urals and so on. That is still
the case for the population of the country.
“An all-Russian level of
self-consciousness exists exclusively as part of a complex with ‘an imperial charge.’”
The motherland of a ‘Russian man’ is not a concrete territory with specific borders
but ‘limitless and largest country in the world’ at the head of which stands ‘the
most important’ ruler in the world (tsar, general secretary, or
president) and which is called upon to be the ‘chief power in the world,’” even
though that requires a constant sacrifice of “victims.”
Given that reality, he suggests, it should come as no
surprise that no rise of “’national self-consciousness’” from below has
occurred. Instead, Russian national self-consciousness as far as its
civic-political aspect is concerned “can be compared with the Stockholm syndrome,
if one defines the Russian authorities as an aggressor and society as its
defenseless victim.”
As
a result, Kotsyubinsky concludes, when the state ceases to be effective, “Russian
national self-consciousness immediately ceases to work as a politically
motivating factor.” On those occasions, religion doesn’t change that equation
as some think, and location becomes “decisive” as far as individuals are
concerned.
According
to the historian, this all flows from the “horde” principles which continue to
inform relations between the state and the population in Russia and the fact that
“the absolute majority of the territories of which the Russian Empire consisted
and of which the Russian Federation consists now were unified to one degree or
another by force.”
Many
understand the ways in which that history helps to explain national movements
among the non-Russians of the empire, but it also explains why “the Russian
people, put in simplest terms, represents a combination of the descendents of
Orthodox Eastern Slavs ... which at one time were forcibly integrated into the Muscovite
imperial statehood” but never formed a self-standing nation.
That
has led to the victimization of the ethnic Russians. “Over the course of the
history of Russia,” Kotsyubinsky writes, “the Russian people formally assumed
the role of the most privileged group” but in fact was the ethnos “most exploited”
and never developed the idea of a specific motherland of its own with clear
borders. Instead, it looked only to the empire.
Many
in the Russian regime assume this is a source of strength for them, but in
fact, the weakness of Russian national identity means that it is “not too
reliable” –and whenever there has been a crisis in state power, Russians have
been at a loss to define themselves as a single group until the state
recovered.
But
such recoveries, based in almost every case on the use of force, prevent the
modernization that the state, the economy and the people need, and thus do not
last very long. That is all the more so
because Russians on the basis of their experiences with the powers that be,
especially now, are deeply suspicious of the latter.
And in the next round of the decay
of the state, many Russian regions have in the past and will in the future join
the non-Russia ones in seeking a way out because their identity is tied more
closely to the territories on which they live than to Moscow, however much
those in Moscow believe otherwise.
In
each cycle, the number of those going their own way has increased, with more having done so in 1991 than in 1917 and
more likely to do so in the future, Kotsyubinsky says. Some will view this as “a catastrophe” but
others will recognize it for what it really is: a way to promote freedom in a
world where “states come and go but regions remain.”
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