Secessionist Challenges, Exploited by Putin, Almost Certainly would be Used by His Successors in the Same Way and with Similar Success, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – Vladimir Putin won Russian support by presenting himself as the man who stopped secessionist challenges in Chechnya and elsewhere, Abbas Gallyamov says; and his successors will do the same thing and perhaps in even more radical ways if they are faced with even more such challenges in the future.

            The former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says that this is something that those advocating secession from Russia out of the belief that only a smaller Russia will have the chance to democratize and be less of a threat to Russia’s neighbors and the world all too often forget (pointmedia.io/story/66b1e5e8dc48800406e0f495).

            Once the danger of those possibilities is recognized, Gallyamov continues, it should be obvious to everyone that the only way forward to a better future is to democratize the Russian Federation as a whole rather than assuming that it can’t be and that the only reasonable strategy is to dismember it.

            History strongly suggests that when a country does not liberalize or democratize, the remnants of what was the imperial center “very often consolidate” by become revanchists. That has happened again and again elsewhere, and it has certainly happened in the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin, the commentator argues.

            Ukrainians should recognize this reality given what has been happening to them, but instead, Gallyamov continues, they have fallen into what might be called a “cartographic” fallacy, the belief that the threat from Russia arises from its size rather than from its culture and history.

            In fact, he says, “a large state may be peace-loving – consider the second largest country in the world, Canada – and small countries” anything but as Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini prove. What this means, Gallyamov insists, is that people should not be dreaming about the disintegration of Russia “but about its democratization.”

            But many of them and many others do not understand that because they have forgotten the events of the last 30 years in Russia. “One of the key factors which allowed Putin to turn into what he has was the struggle against ‘separatism’ and ‘regionalism.’” And there is every reason to fear that an undemocratic post-Putin state’s leaders would exploit such challenges similarly.

            “After the fall of the Putin regime, his supporters will be demoralized and demobilized,” Gallyamov writes. “The only thing which will be able to return them to politics would be the threat of the disintegration of the country.” If that threat exists or can be made to appear to exist, they will recapitulate Putin’s moves.

            “With shouts that ‘the Fatherland is in danger,’ they will go into the streets and polling stations, and it is from this environment than a new Putin will emerge. Consequently, the task of the supporters of democracy is to prevent such a scenario and to avoid all actions that might contribute to the mobilization of these ‘patriots.’”

            And he concludes: “Decentralization within reason, reform of federal institutions and the institution of local self-government, revival of freedom of speech, fair elections, restoration of the principle of separation of powers, and lustration” will all be needed. In short, “there will be a lot of work without the collapse of the country itself.”