Popkov is Wrong: Putin’s Russia is an Empire, Lindel Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 2 – Roman Popkov says that empires are built “exclusively on an idea” and that because Putin’s Russia doesn’t have one, it is not an empire and will not become one (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/03/putins-russia-isnt-empire-and-wont.html). But the Russian commentator is wrong and that Putin’s Russia is an empire, Vyacheslav Lindell says.

            “The presence of absence of a global idea and even form of administration,” the Russian regionalist who cooperates closely with the After Empire portal on which Popkov’s article appeared, “do not indicate in any way the presence or absence of an empire or if you like the imperial model of development” (afterempire.info/2019/03/02/imperiya/).

            In his articles and book on the future of Russia, Lindell points out, Vadim Shtepa, the former editor of the After Empire portal, argues that an empire exists when a state has a large, poly-ethnic space, is hyper-centralized and authoritarian, and seeks to expand by military means into the territory of other countries.

            “Of course,” Lindell acknowledges, “empires build on an idea and having a revolutionary impulse are more productive, more vital and more aggressive.” But countries can become empires without such qualities because empires do not require in every case “a clear and conceptual idea” around which the state and population are organized.

            That becomes obvious if one examines the Russian revolutions of the past century. The 1917 revolution in Russia “created a hyper-centralist, expansionist, aggressive in all respects” state that in fact had an ideology that justified all of this and means that it was an empire in Popkov’s understanding as well as Shtepa’s, Lindell says.

            But the regionalist argues that he is nonetheless convinced that the1917 revolution “did not a priori mean the continuation of the empire of the establishment of some new, more powerful one.”  Rather, he suggests, this revolution marked “an attempt at creating in Russia the most clear-cut Republic,” but that that effort “unfortunately failed.”

            As far as the current situation is concerned, Lindell says, Popkv calls for the establishment of a civic nation “which will form ‘a genuine Republic’ and ‘a great, strong, and European Russia’ in opposition to ‘the thieves, idiots, and obscurantists.’” And that in this move, there is no place for regional movements.

            The Great Russia which both those in power and those in opposition seek to create, however, is not great for everyone. Indeed, it is “not needed by anyone and is useful in our time, a chimera” regardless of the form it takes.   What the peoples of that country need is freedom and the right to choose how to live their own lives.

            “Imperial rhetoric and a paradigm including talk about ‘greatness’ is the only thing that the archaic rulers have for the assertion of their power.  And such talk gets in the way of the creation of a civic nation and a Republic “within the current hyper-centralized power vertical,” Lindell continues. No “good tsar” is going to create those things.

            “In my view,” he says, “neither a civic nation nor a republic can be established without people taking power into their own hands in the localities, without a clear establishment of local self-administration at the lowest levels, without the acquisition by the regions of full status as subjects, and without arranging relations among the regions on the basis of a treaty.”

            Projects like Zalesiya and Ingermanland will play an important part in that process.  They are in the first stages of their development but that doesn’t mean they won’t grow in significance over time.  Precisely such movements are “creative and futurist” and will define changes in the future Russia.”