Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 15 – For decades, Moscow has told Siberians that they must remain colonies of the Russian Federation or they will become the colonies of the Peoples Republic of China. Such efforts at intimidation are failing, Stanislav Suslov says; and now those east of the Urals see themselves as an independent United States of Siberia.
The Siberian regionalist who now lives in Serbia where he works to help others who have fled from Muscovite imperialism says that despite what Moscow says, Beijing does not aspire to that kind of an empire and in any case, the international community won’t allow that to happen because it would make China even more dangerous (region.expert/uss-vs-china/).
“I think,” Suslov continues, that “the West is far-sighted on this issue and considers Siberia itself as a potential regional counterweight to China; and therefore I hope that Western partners will be ready to support Siberia as an independent country,” something especially likely because Siberians take as the model for their statehood the EU.
According to Suslov, “the internal arrangements of a future Siberia will certainly be ‘multipolar because in it there are so many major cities with their own specific features … and there is no sense in transforming one of them into something like the hyper-centralized ‘Moscow” of today.”
Instead, the Siberia of the future will be built “according to the European-American principle of subsidiarity, that is ‘from the bottom up’ and not by the arbitrary action of any ‘central’ bureaucrats.” All local self-administration will be supported; and all efforts to create a new “imperial ‘vertical’” will be opposed.
For these reasons, the new independent state is likely to choose to call itself the United States of Siberia, with its peoples speaking Russian where they now do, albeit a distinctively regionalist Russian and those who want to speak the language of their titular nationality having new and far greater opportunities to do so.
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