Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 27 – Many assume
Vladimir Putin’s obsessive attention to the defense of Russia’s borders is
rooted in the loss of Moscow’s control over the former union republics and
occupied Baltic countries in 1991, Pavel Luzin says. But while that matters, in
fact, Putin has become especially nervous about it since his occupation and
annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.
In addition to everything else, the
Anschluss not only meant that Russia is was again like the USSR (given the
Baltic countries), a state with only partially recognized borders but also
created new problems for domestic territorial arrangements within the country,
the Perm political analyst says (region.expert/forbidden-lands/).
On the one hand, except for Moscow
and some of its closest clients, members of the international community do not
recognize Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Sevastopol, a reality that
undoubtedly reminds the Kremlin of the situation before 1991 when most Western
countries did not recognize the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania.
Many both in Russia and the West
believe that the West’s non-recognition policy with regard to the Baltic
countries not only encouraged the non-Russian union republics to seek
independence but made it far easier for Western governments to move from
recognizing the continuing independence of the former to recognizing the new
independence of the latter.
By annexing Ukraine’s Crimea, Putin
has thus put a delayed action mine under the Russian Federation potentially far
more serious than any he continues to blame Soviet leaders for doing, something
that explains his obsession with including in the constitution and drafting new
laws against any call to change Russia’s borders against Moscow’s interests.
Putin has made this problem worse,
Luzin suggests, by keeping the door open to moving them in the opposite
direction and expanding Moscow’s rule over an ever greater territory, an
approach that has further undermined the notion that the borders of the Russian
Federation are really permanent.
And on the other hand, because of
two decisions Putin made following the Anschluss, Moscow potentially faces more
challenges to its rule than anyone could have expected. It absorbed Crimea as a
republic but delinked it from ethnicity, and it allowed the relatively small
city of Sevastopol to enter the Russian Federation as a federal subject.
The first of these, obviously, raised
the possibility that other federal subjects not defined in ethnic terms could
aspire to republic status, something that is now on view in the Khabarovsk
demonstrations. And the second raised the equally unsettling notion that other Russian
cities larger than Sevastopol could aspire to a similar status.
Those two innovations, along with Putin’s
push for the establishment of “federal territories” to be run directly from Moscow,
have the potential to disorder the entire system of federal arrangements that
the Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union, at the very least
provoking debate and more likely in the current climate creating demands.
To prevent that from leading to what
the Baltic and union republic experiences did in 1991, Putin has thus become
obsessive about punishing anyone who talks about any revision of federal
arrangements, something that he clearly recognizes could tear the country apart
even though he bears full responsibility for creating this situation.
“And although Russian society so far has avoided a wide
discussion of these issues,” the Perm scholar says, “for the Kremlin they are
real questions of political survival.” And its new laws punishing any questioning
of the country’s borders are its attempt at creating “a defense mechanism,”
although in fact, such laws have the opposite effect, calling attention to the
problem and its seriousness.
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