Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 8 – On this Easter,
Ukrainians must pray for the survival of the Russian Federation because if it
disintegrates, that will lead not only to massive refugee flows into Ukraine
but technogenic disasters that will make Russia’s current aggressive actions
against Ukraine look like a time of peace, according to Ukrainian commentator
Vitaly Portnikov.
Some Ukrainians have placed their
hopes in the demise of Russia as the basis for the restoration of Ukrainian
control of Crimea and the Donbass, but Portnikov in a Facebook video says that
it would be a disaster for Ukraine and for Russia’s other neighbors (facebook.com/portnikov/videos/2125473177479071/
and newsland.com/community/4109/content/ukraintsy-dolzhny-molitsia-za-sokhranenie-rossii/6289736).
But he says that
Russia may come apart and that Moscow will be to blame for that outcome even as
it struggles to prevent it. Nationality problems are the main threat to Russia,
but “over the last 25 years, the Russians have done more to assimilate
non-Russian peoples than the Bolsheviks did over 70 years.”
The kind of “aggressive chauvinism”
one sees in Russia today was never in evidence during Soviet times or even
those of the Russian Empire. And that policy, Portnikov argues, means there are
“ever fewer chances” that Russia will come apart and “ever more” that that
country will be “transformed into a unitary state of guberniyas.”
Whether that will be sufficient to
keep Russia together is uncertain, but it likely means that if Russia comes
apart, it will do so more violently like Yugoslavia rather than largely peacefully
as did the USSR. On another Facebook post, Vadim Shtepa, editor of After Empire, explains why this is
likely to be the case (facebook.com/vadim.shtepa/posts/1835878066463175).
The Russian
regionalist says that he was recently asked by St. Petersburg journalists
whether regionalism inevitably means separatism. He responded by pointing out what happened in
Yugoslavia before and after Tito’s death. Under Tito, the Kosovars asked only
to be a republic like Serbia or Slovenia rather than remain “’an autonomous kray.’”
“But the federalist Tito died in
1980, and in 1984, Yugoslavia hosted a remarkable winter Olympiad.” After that
disaster struck the country. “In 1989,
Milosevich committed a great crime: he replaced the idea of Yugoslavia as an
international federation as it was under Tito with the idea of Serbian national
imperialism.”
Imagine what would have happened had
Gorbachev in the spring of 1991 done the same thing, proposing that all the
republics within the USSR should accept diminished status within a new “Russian
nation state.” They would have declared
independence immediately and fought their way out in much the same way the
republics of Milosevich’s national empire did.
Indeed, Shtepa continues, it was
that vision of Yugoslavia which led the Kosovars to shift from federalist
aspirations to demands for independence, a pattern that can be repeated whenever
and wherever the central government tries to reduce the status of republics and
regions in the name of transforming a federal system into a unitary nation
state.
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