Paul Goble
Staunton,
June 16 – One of the most widespread assumptions among those who think about
the future is that if the Russian Federation disintegrates, it will all apart
along existing nationality lines, with the non-Russian republics each going its
own way and the ethnic Russians staying together in a single rump state.
Both
those views are almost certainly wrong. On the one hand, regions and regional
identities among those Moscow classifies as members of a single Russian nation
are far stronger and less interested in a common Russian future than the
Kremlin insists or than many observers inside Russia and abroad feel.
And on
the other, the divisions among non-Russians that Moscow has worked so long to deepen,
by splitting up nations such as the Circassians or by drawing borders in ways
that promote tensions, as part of its “divide and rule” strategy are not nearly
as permanent as Moscow hopes and many expect.
Even more,
there is virtually no acknowledgement of the possibility that some Russian
regionalist and nationalist groups will find a common language and
understanding with non-Russian groups and that in certain mega-regions, they
may even decide to form new states combining both of them.
That
makes an interview, Ruslan Kutayev, the head of the Assembly of the Peoples of
the Caucasus, to Vyacheslav Puzeyev of the After
Empire portal especially important because he discusses the reasons why
Moscow’s approach is failing and why Russians and non-Russians in the North
Caucasus may work together (afterempire.info/2018/06/15/kutayev/).
The activist, who only
recently was released from a nearly four-year jail term and who is restricted
in his activities as a condition of his parole, says that the Assembly of the Peoples
of the Caucasus is directed in the first instance at promoting a rapprochement
among the peoples of the Caucasus.
“Russia, tsarist, Soviet and
Putinist have constantly sought to divide them,” not just by artificial borders
such as exist across the region but also by playing one against the other in
some cases and suppressing whole groups in others, the regional activist says. That
must and, what is more, can be overcome.
The Assembly includes
representatives not only of the North Caucasus nations but also Russians and
Cossacks and representatives of Georgia and Azerbaijan. Its members include scholars who work on past
problems and future possibilities, possibilities Kutayev suggests Putin by his
policies is making ever more immediate.
“I have no doubt,” the regional activist
says, “that Putin himself is leading Russia to collapse. He perhaps doesn’t want this but that is the
logical outcome of his policies. He and his team are concerned only with stealing
as much as possible, and therefore they are undermining ties both with the
peoples of Russia and with the entire surrounding world.”
At some point, that world will take
steps to remove him in order to prevent him from unleashing a global war; and
when that happens, “our task will be the establishment of a new Caucasus
Republic” which will include “not only the currently existing republics of the
North Caucasus but Rostov Oblast, Krasnodar and Stavropol Krays, Kalmykia and
so on.”
“This is a large and interconnected
region with a population of about 15 million people,” Kutayev points out, far
larger than any of its parts who many assume cannot possibly survive
independently because of their small size.
According to the regionalist, “our
Assembly has extremely close ties both with local Russian nationalists and with
the Cossacks. We all understand that in the case of the disintegration of the empire,
all of us will have to organize cooperative and good-neighborly relations.”
“And I do not think,” Kutayev says, “that
any particular problems will arise between a future Caucasus Republic and the
civilized world.” Moscow is trying to
undercut that possibility by suggesting that only it can fight Islamist forces
in the region; but in fact, those forces have been introduced there from the
outside and not least by Moscow itself.
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