Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 19 – Russia today
does not face the kind of general disintegration that led to the end of the
USSR, but it may lose the North Caucasus and several other republics along its
southern borders, something that will cost it less than one percent of its
territory and less than seven percent of its population, Vladislav Inozemtsev.
The notion that the country will
fall apart the way the Soviet Union did, the Moscow analyst says, ignores
economic and political realities – the integration of the existing regions in
terms of production and distribution and both the levers Moscow has and the
threat of foreign occupation (snob.ru/selected/entry/96635).
His
analysis is a response to speculation that Russia is at risk of coming apart. (See,
for example, nr2.ru/News/politics_and_society/Rezhim-uslovnogo-Girkina-razorvet-Rossiyu-v-klochya-104044.html and worldif.economist.com/article/2/what-if-russia-breaks-up-the-peril-beyond-putin,
the latter of which Inozemtsev sites.
Most of his 3500-word article is
devoted to explaining why the Russian Federation now is not like the USSR in
1991; but that makes what he says about a related threat that Inozemtsev says
may prove even more significant: the emergence of a pan-regional fronde in
which the regions impose on Moscow their conditions for remaining within the
country.
The Moscow economist says there are
three reasons for concluding that the Russian Federation is not under threat of
disintegration. First, he says, “in contemporary Russia, there does not exist
that national-religious basis for ‘the sovereignization’ of its component
parts,” except along the southern border.
Second, he argues, “the disintegration
of a country like Russia cannot bring economic benefits to either the Russian
people as a whole or any of its potentially independent territories.” And
third, in his view, “the disintegration of Russia … would be marked by the
transfer of part of its present-day territory to the jurisdiction of foreign
states.”
That in itself would “inflict
significant harm to Russian national self-consciousness and become the basis
for unpredictable forms and amount of Russian nationalism.” (Putin’s comments
in occupied Crimea about Ukraine being under “foreign” rule are an example of
this, although one Inozemtsev doesn’t mention in this essay.)
“Taking all these circumstances into
consideration,” he says, he “cannot foresee the causes and occasions from ‘centrifugal’
forces in Russia now to become a dominant political trend.”
“With one exception,” he then adds;
and that involves something that the authors of the Economist article do no
consider, although it is potentially more attractive and likely than the
others. “This variant,” Inozemtsev says, “could be called the scenario of ‘an
anti-Moscow fronde.”
Historically, he points out, Russia
came into existence “not as a federation of territories … but as a classical
colonial power. From the late middle ages, Muscovia having freed itself from
the protectorate of the Horde began to expand first by settlement and then by
military colonies in the adjoining territories.”
Until the middle of the 20th
century, it was able to pursue that policy, but “at the end of [that] century,
imperial overstretch reached its limit, and the military colonies ... fell
away. What remained were only those in which the colonizers formed a majority
and secured the assimilation of local peoples,” something that supports Russia’s
current borders.
But as the experience of many
colonies elsewhere shows, anger at and opposition to the metropolitan center
occurred even when “the population overwhelmingly consisted of people from the metropolitan
country,” as happened in the case of the US.
To be sure, the UK and the US were separated by an ocean, “but this can
change the details, not the principle.”
If Russia enters into a prolonged
period of economic decline and politican instability, Moscow as the center of
power almost certainly will face demands from Russians that the government be
accountable to them, both individually and collectively in the form of the
regions and republics in which they live.
Such a demand will not entail one
for “the separation of part of the state from Muscovy but rather the
subordination of [the current center] to the will of the rest of the population
of the country.” Those that have separated from the former empire” have
experienced difficulties that these new demanders will seek to avoid.
“The Soviet Union fell apart,”
Inozemtsev says, “because it lacked the strength to overcome its imperial
nature. Russia will not repeat that path since now it is already not an empire,
but a nation state daydreaming about empire. And thus the only real goal of
Russian separatists would be not separation from Moscow but its subordination to
their will.”
That would reflect a dawning
understanding that Russia is not something finished as a project but rather
that it must be structured to reflect the fact that it is “a complex country”
and that “in its current borders, Russian represents a conglomeration of
Muscovy and its colonies by settlement.”
The task ahead, Inosemtsev
continues, lies “in the revival of self-consciousness and local identities of
citizens iin various pars of this strange formation” so that those regions
which produce the most will have more power and Moscow which produces very
little will have significantly less.
To the extent that Russia moves in
that direction, the Moscow economist argues, its course will not be like the disintegration
of the USSR or Yugoslavia but rather more like “the path chosen 800 years ago
by the English barons who forced the kind to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede.”
“The transformation of Russia into a
genuine federation, even with the right of exit for its component subjects and
of Moscow into one of its largest” but least productive components represents,
he argues in conclusion, “not the salvation of the country from disintegration …
but a basis for development in which all Russians without exception have an
interest.”
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