If Moscow Again Adopts Imperialist Agenda, Russia will Collapse Completely and Violently, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 23 – Those like the Eurasianists who call for Russia to become an empire are putting Russia on course to become a country without the possibility of real development and cooperation with others and one certain to collapse more completely and violently than it ever has before, Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name El Murid says.

            “When I hear the word ‘empire,’” he says, “I don’t reach for a gun,” as some Nazis did; “but I close the page” because I am well aware that “the main problem of Russia as a state consists in the constant reproduction of one and the same imperial model which doesn’t work” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6305083993D8B&section_id=50A6C962A3D7C).

            Empires work in the pre-industrial stage of development, but  “for industrialization, an empire is impossible in principle since it requires the distribution of resources” which preclude the further development of the country. In the past, these systems lasted 400 to 500 years at most; now, they will last far less long, El Murid says.

            And any country which commits to rebuilding an empire on the model of the past as some in Russia want to do will put their land on the road to “complete and total deindustrialization and the reforming of the social system on a strata basis in which only the military one will have real rights.

            Moreover, if such an empire will be buitd on the basis of “ideas of extreme nationalism approaching Nazism,” then everyone around it will be its enemies; and that will lead to the demise of such a country even more rapidly than ever before by depriving it of a major source of development.

            “The industrial phase of development requires decentralized structures of administration, and the post-industrial one will require network and network-centric decisions,” El Murid says. There will be mistakes in making this transition, but they will be small in comparison with a decision to try to return to imperial past.

            Such a return is “complete idiotism” in the full medical meaning of the term especially for a country with 20 percent of the world’s natural resources and only two percent of its population. Such a country needs trade to develop, and cutting itself off from that will only leave it further behind, weaker, and at greater risk of collapse.

            Indeed, El Murid says, “if we again turn to that path, we will again pass along exactly the same path with exactly the same end as before. Only this time, the end will come more quickly and be much more destructive than any of the previous ones.”