Decolonization Far More Likely to Happen in Russia if Its Backers Focus on Ethnic Russians who’ve Become Regionalists and not Just on Non-Russians Alone, Kuban Regionalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – There are two widespread misconceptions about the future of Russia, one of which holds that that country can continue in its current borders but be transformed into “’the beautiful Russia of the future” and the second that the only people who should be involved in decolonization are indigenous non-Russians, Vladimir Miroshnichenko says.

            The Kuban regionalist who now lives in Chile says that the first of these misconceptions has been widely examined and criticized but that the second has not. That is a tragedy because history suggests that there are very few cases when indigenous peoples on their own have achieved the goals of de-imperialization (region.expert/creoles/).

            In the case of Russia, Miroshnichenko continues, the exclusive focus on the non-Russians ignores that in many non-Russian areas, ethnic Russians form a significant portion or even a majority of the population and that in the Russian Federation as a whole, the ethnic Russians form at least a two to one majority over the non-Russians.

            Ignoring them is a serious mistake, because such an approach ignores the fact that many ethnic Russians who have moved into non-Russian areas in fact have become “creoles, descendants of immigrants from the empire for whom regional self-identification now takes precedence over ethnicity.

            Such people should be viewed as potentially important allies of the cause of de-imperialization rather than its inevitable opponents, Miroshnichenko says. If they are not, then the process of de-imperialization will be harder and more bloody and may even become impossible if such people come to view those seeking de-imperialization as their enemies.

            It is entirely natural that the Kuban is the region within the current Russian borders where talk like Miroshichenko’s about creoles is most natural because there ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Cossacks have intermarried and often changed identities (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/03/tradition-of-ukrainian-and-cossack.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/02/moscow-insists-not-only-that-kuban-isnt.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/07/faced-with-repression-in-1920s-many.html).

            That has sparked ever-increasing attention by Kyiv to the Kuban which Ukrainians refer to as “the crimson wedge” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/06/kyiv-must-devote-more-attention-to.html), attention that alongside the growth of regional identities there (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/11/crimson-wedge-activist-says-kuban-seeks.html ) has alarmed Russia and led the Kremlin to attack this development (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/02/moscow-insists-not-only-that-kuban-isnt.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/moscow-declares-two-ukraine-wedge.html).

            As I and others have argued in the past, Russian federalism has been at risk from the outset because too few people either in Moscow or the regions and republics paid attention to the Russians both in predominantly ethnic Russian areas and in non-Russian areas as well (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/02/tragedy-of-russian-federalism-now.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/12/russias-regions-not-just-its-non.html).

            And as both I and others have argued as well, the real disintegration of the Russian empire will occur when and only when the supporters of the coming apart of the Russian state focus as much on the ethnic Russians and their role in this process as they do now on the non-Russians (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/06/real-disintegration-of-empire-will.html).