Surkov Says Russian National Unity Day Designed to Hide Moscow’s Imperial Plans from West

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 4 – In a Youtube address that has now been taken down, Vladislav Surkov, longtime ideological advisor to Vladimir Putin, says that the Russian Day of National Unity was created “to speak about the empire and our desire to expand” Russia’s borders “but not offend the international community.”

            According to Surkov, the Day of National Unity became “the day of Russian nationalism in its essence. There was such a task: how to speak about the empire, about our desire to expand, but at the same time not offend the hearing of the world community” (emphasis supplied) (vnnews.ru/o-chem-v-rossii-nyneshniy-den-narodnogo/).

            In highlighting Surkov’s acknowledgement of the real purpose of the holiday, Vadim Shtepa, editor of the Tallinn-based Russian regionalist site Region.Expert, argues that in fact the Day of National Unity has always been divisive rather than unifying – and has led to Kremlin actions that will hasten the end of the empire (sibreal.org/a/edinstvo-titanika-s-aysbergom/32114416.html reposted at region.expert/titanic/).

            Today, Shtepa continues, “Putin continues to treat ‘uity’ in a completely imperialist manner,” completely “ignoring the post-imperial history” of the country “when Russia and Ukraine again became different states. And this archaic thinking has become the ideological basis of a full-scale war against Ukraine.”

            But this effort to turn back to the past, the Russian regionalist says, has had “an unexpected impact on those who are attempting it: it deprives them of a future.” Indeed, as he points out, some both in the emigration and inside the country are now “actively discussing whether a protracted war in Ukraine lad to the collapse of Russia.”

            “Since the beginning of the war, a League of Free Nations, a Forum of the Peoples of Post-Russia and other organizations of representatives of various regions who are critically inclined toward imperial policies have arisen,” he continues. One may be skeptical about their manifestos. “But all the same, they are in themselves ‘a sign of the times.’”

            Fears or alternatively hopes for the rapid collapse of Russia are “exaggerated,” Shtepa says. But the current situation is very different from the one before 1991. Then, each union republic had a leadership interested in going its own way; now, “the regions are ruled by Kremlin governors who are terrified of free elections” and are unlikely to demand independence.

            But Russian defeats in Ukraine “increasingly undermine the credibility of imperial propaganda,” and consequently, even though the center appears to have crushed everything around the country, there is the possibility as in 1905 and in the lead up to 1991 that risings are entirely possible and will transform the situation.

            Again as in those two earlier years, “the authorities will once again talk loudly about ‘nation unity’ – although in fact they are destroying that with their war.” And once again, attempts at imperial expansion may “bring the end of the empire itself closer,” however much the Kremlin thinks it is “an exception” to world history.