Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 20 – In the minds
of some, Vladimir Putin used his press conference this week to demonstrate his
conviction that he will remain president of Russia forever (replika.com.ua/ru/3_politika/zadacha_putina_probivat_na_prochnost_zapadnuyu_koalitsiyu), ever more
Russian commentators are asking “What will be the situation after Putin?”
Among those doing so is Daniil
Kotsyubinsky, a historian and journalist, who gave exactly that title to an
article he published this week (novayagazeta.spb.ru/articles/9385/). Such
questioning about a post-Putin future is more important than any of the answers
however well-informed they may be.
That is because it shows that
Russians are thinking about something that was unthinkable only a few months
ago and that Putin himself is doing everything he can to prevent them from
thinking about because the sense of his irreplaceability is one of the key
foundations of his regime and personal power.
According to Kotsyubinsky, the time
has come to consider calmly two questions: how likely is Putin’s rapid
departure from office? And what will happen with Russia and Russians when he
goes?
Putin has been much weakened over
the past year, the commentator argues, and not by economic problems. Russians
will put up with those. He has been weakened because he “has lost a war which
he himself declared and on which was based his imperial restorationist project.”
That is something much more serious.
Russian history shows, Kotsyubinsky
says, that whenever Russia proclaims itself as opposed to the whole world and
then loses, it enters into “a zone of turbulence” as Putin’s own press
secretary Dmitry Peskov recently put it.
In each case, loss in a war was followed by reforms and then “the growth
of revolutionary attitudes.”
Putin has not only lost “a super
power war” based on gas and oil, but he has “lost it without any chance at
revenge,” the commentator says. As a
result, there is an increasing sense among many in Russia that the entire Putin
edifice could come crumbling down and yet another new Russia emerge.
“How this will happen – ‘from above,’
‘from below,’ ‘from the outside’ or by a combined campaign of ‘the national
traitorous Entente’ is not so important.” What matters is that it will happen,
Kotsyubinsky argues.
That sense that it will has led some to alarmist and
apocalyptic predictions, but the commentator says that he thinks that what will
occur will be “something much less” eschatological but nonetheless critically
important. And he suggests that it could occur by the spring or summer of 2015.
He predicts that regardless of
who heads “a provisional government” after Putin goes, “the very first point of
the new agenda for the new authorities must be elections. Not just
presidential, but also Duma and – what is most important – regional.” That will
mean not just the change from one presidential vertical to another but to the
end of this vertical altogether.
Even if the Kremlin “political
technologists” succeed in winning the election for their candidate, “he will
not have even a tenth of the extremely conditional power which Poroshenko has
at present in Ukraine.” Kotsyubinsky’s reasoning on this point is especially
interesting and instructive even if his overall prediction turns out to be
incorrect wishful thinking.
“The ‘latest Russian autocrat’ will
himself be glad to share responsibility for ‘a situation which cannot be run
politically’ with the parliament, and at least for a time, he will be forced to
move toward the “parliamentary republic standards of Europe,” standards in
which the president matters less or even not at all.
Among the most serious challenges a
post-Putin regime will face is the reawakening of regional ambitions, ambitions
that were stifled after the mid-1990s but that now have returned because “the
majority of Russian regions have a not bad idea about how they can live and
flourish without the Kremlin’s direction.”
The North Caucasus could be the
first of these to rise up, but “it is possible that the scenario of the peaceful
resolution of the Russian-Caucasus crisis will turn out to be ‘a model’ for
Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha, Buryatia, Tyva and other national republics
and also for Siberia and other regions of the Russian Federation” which feel
themselves abused.
And that in turn means that in a
post-Putin Russia, “the process of transforming Russia from a presidential
unitary republic into a parliamentary federation may completely demolish the
imperial ambitions which it suffers from today.” Whether this is a good or bad
thing is up to Russians to decide, he concludes.
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