Three Émigré ‘Corporations’ at Odds with Each Other and also with Challenges Ahead, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 3 – The three major émigré political “corporations” are not only at odds with each other about the future but are at odds with reality because each of them offers a vision of the future without having focused on how that future might be achieved, shortcomings that make it likely none of them will achieve their goals, Vadim Shtepa says.

            The editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal Region.Expert says that those grouped around the Forums of Free Russia talk about “a free Russia of the future” when power somehow magically drops into their hands (svoboda.org/a/ni-tam-ni-tut-vadim-shtepa-ob-oppozitsionnyh-korporatsiyah/33144349.html).

            He says that the Forum of Free States of PostRussia also talk about the future but not about how to get there, a particular failing since talking about disintegration, something very unpopular with most ethnic Russians and many non-Russians, makes the achievement of their goals particularly problematic.

            And Shtepa continues, the third corporation of the political emigration, Ilya Ponomaryev’s Congress of Peoples Deputies, continues to pass laws that it assumes will be put in force when its members somehow in an unspecified way return to Russia and come back to power.

            Both these factors are reflected in another commonality. None of these three “corporations” has any place for those who focus on regionalism and the complexities of the developments there and the possibilities for cooperation as well as conflict in the future, the regionalist specialist says.

            Shtepa points out that he and some colleagues launched Region.Expert in Estonia five years ago but have not been welcomed by these corporations each of which has a party line as it were or supported by Western grant-making institutions who appear to fear that talk about regionalism is necessarily about secession and instability, exactly what the Kremlin suggests.

            One of the most important themes the portal regularly explores is the link between genuine elections and decentralization, a focus reflecting both what happened in the lead up to 1991 and what may well represent a necessary way forward for those now living within the borders of the Russian Federation. 

            The project which remains a small and largely voluntary one supported by a small number of individuals, its editor says, has published “authors with a variety of points of view from radical supporters of the independence of their region to moderate federalists” and thereby helped promote discussion of all these things.           

            Region.Expert has  not lost hope and will continue to cooperate with free media and analytic institutions, Shtepa says, but it will do so “without joining any of the opposition corporations” which increasingly seem to “need only ‘correct’ conclusions.” He adds that he “didn’t leave Russian censorship in order to find some other émigré ‘party line.’”