Putin’s Russia has ‘Same Latent Potential for Disintegration that Led to Collapse of USSR,' Taskin and Lea Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 10 – The Russian Federation is “not ‘a new empire’ but rather a reduced-sized copy of the USSR with the same multi-layered national elites, resource enclaves and cultural identities, Borukh Taskin and Aaron Lea say. As such, Russia today has “the same latent potential for disintegration that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

            But there is one major difference, the two Israeli analysts of Russian background say. In the Soviet Union, these underlying factors were codified and strengthened by Moscow while in the Russian Federation, Putin has “systematically sought to destroy them” (moscowtimes.ru/2025/10/10/rossiiskaya-federatsiya-raspad-ili-konfederalizatsiya-a176772).

            What the current Kremlin leader has achieved is not so much the liquidation of the mosaic-like quality of the country “but only muffled it,” something that does little to eliminate the possibility of a new round of disintegration in many ways like the one that destroyed part of the Muscovite empire in 1991.

            Taskin and Lea point to five “drivers” that could push the Russian Federation to disintegration: a military defeat in Ukraine, economic exhaustion, increasingly public conflicts over symbols, the displacement of civic identity by an ethnic one, and the weakening of the administrative structures of Putin’s power vertical.

            These factors, they suggest, overlap the three possible triggers of collapse and disintegration that Western scholars have pointed to in recent years, including defeat in a foreign war, an economic shock leading to rapid decline, and the blocking of channels of internal dialogue within the Russian elite.

            What is important to keep in mind, Tashkin and Lea say, is that the disintegration of the Russian Federation can either be chaotic or managed and that both the peoples of the current Russian Federation and the international community have serious interests in ensuring that it will be the latter and not the former.

            And they suggest that the best long-term approach is to work toward a confederal arrangement in which some portions of the country will go their own way while others will combine in an arrangement that will leave regions and republics with more power and deprive Moscow of its current “sacral role.” Stability and peace require that, they argue.

            The West must rethink how it deals with Russia. “Accustomed to ‘peace dividends’ after the collapse of the USSR” and still “clinging to illusions about reforming the Russian Federation,” its leaders must recognize the need for Russia’s defeat and disintegration if the next generation is going to be a more peaceful one.

            In short, Taskin and Lea say, the West must face up to “the harsh truth: Russia has turned into a kind of giant Hamas, one that possesses all the hallmarks of a state and sovereignty” but one that “can prosper only through aggression and territorial expansion” given that its people have been “imbued with the nightmare vision of imperial ideology.”