No One in 1916 Thought the Russian Empire would Cease to Exist or in 1990 that the USSR would Disintegrate, Aysin Reminds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 1 – The Kremlin has done everything it can to narrow the opportunities non-Russian nations within the Russian Federation have to preserve their identities; and Moscow has had some tactical successes, Ruslan Aysin says. But precisely because of Russia’s enormous diversity, Moscow is setting itself up for strategic failure.

            The war in Ukraine has only exacerbated the tension between Moscow’s drive for a Russian world and the desire of the various nations and peoples now within the borders of the Russian Federation to retain their identities, according to the political analyst of the IdelReal portal (idelreal.org/a/32201253.html).

            Moscow has acted as it has precisely because it “fears Kazan” and the other non-Russian centers. It recognizes that they can become centers of separatism and that sooner or later they will be able to pursue the goal of national independence. And it believes that promoting the Russian world idea can prevent or at least forestall that outcome.

            But, Aysin says, “in 1990, no one thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart; and no one thought that in 1917 the Russian Empire would be no more. But both disappeared from the political map of the world.” In each case, neither the center nor those abroad understood the forces that were working toward those ends.

            Given those precedents, many more recognize that the Russian Federation is approaching its end not only because of the aspirations of the nations living under Russian rule but because of the nature of that rule, a rule that is based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of the country.

The Russian Security Council which now runs the country for Putin is filled with people who grew up in the security services in Soviet times, Aysin says. “they see a conspiracy and a threat in everything and aren’t interested in any other problems. They live in the era of the Cold War.”

“For Putin, Patrushev, Bortnikov and the others, the main thing is to revive the Soviet empire, but they do not understand well that history must not be turned back,” the commentator continues. And so “they are fighting against the future, progress and civilization itself.”

They view the non-Russian republics as “the source of separatism, and they want to make Russia a unitary country. But that is impossible because Russia is a complex land” of enormous diversity. “But they don’t want to see this because they have a colonial mentality and dream about an empire with a single religion and a single nation.”

Moscow leaders dream of this but they can’t create it; and so what they are doing instead is pushing policies that will accelerate the demise of the system they rule and lead to its end. Both in Ukraine and in the non-Russian republics, Moscow is engaged in what in all likelihood is its “last colonial war.”

It is fated to lose these two interrelated wars, and what will emerge as a result will be something fundamentally different from what the Kremlin wants or what existed before Putin came to power.