Siberia Most Likely Cradle of New Russian Federalism, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 14 – Russia will not become a federation even if liberal groups take power in Moscow because even if the liberals do so, Vadim Shtepa says, they will “under Russian conditions … inevitably evolve in the direction of autocracy.” That means that federalism must come out of the regions, and the most likely region for that to happen is Siberia.

            “The restoration or more precisely the establishment of federalism as a system based on equal and treaty relations among regions is hardly going to take place at the initiative of the Kremlin,” the editor of the Region.Expert says (reforum.io/blog/2022/06/14/gde-rodina-novoj-rossijskoj-federaczii/ reposted at http://region.expert/treaty-state/).

            The movement for federalism in Russia is going to have to come from outside Moscow, he argues; and the region with “the greatest potential” to lead such a transformation of the country is Siberia, which by its nature, history, and thought is ready for federalism even if the rest of the country has not yet reached that point.

            “In his book Siberia as a Colony, Nikolay Yadrintsev, one of the leader ideologists of Siberian regionalism in the 19^th century, compared this gigantic space with America.” For him, it was a new world just like the new world Europeans found across the Atlantic in North America, Shtepa says.

            This sense of itself in Siberia played a key role in the revolutions of the first part of the 20^th century and during perestroika; and it continues to this day. “It is no accident,” the Russian regionalist says, that Siberian activists were the first [within the Russian Federation] to speak out against the invasion of Ukraine.”

            Again and again, Siberians have promoted a very different vision of the future than that offered by Moscow. By virtue of history and geography, they believe in the value of each region having the power to order its own life while remaining willing to cooperate with all the others, Shtepa says.

            In the future, if this Siberian project emerges from under Moscow’s yoke and shows its stability and effectiveness, the regionalist concludes, it is certain that other Russian regions, west of the Urals, will want to join. If that happens – and Moscow will do what it can to prevent it from doing so – then Russia will have the chance to become a federation and a democracy.