Main Divide in Russian Political Life ‘Not Between Ethnic Russians and Non-Russians but Between Imperialists and Regionalists,’ Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 26 – Putin’s demand that Moscow scholars focus on the ethnic Russian nation is likely to backfire by highlighting the regional differences among Russians and demonstrating that the main divide in Russian political life is “not between ethnic Russians and non-Russian nations but between imperialists and regionalists,” Vadim Shtepa says

            The editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal says that both Muscovite imperialists and many non-Russian nationalists fail to understand that and so take positions that are increasingly indefensible (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2025/12/26/ne-russkie-protiv-nerusskih-a-regionalizm-protiv-imperii-a183822).

            On the one hand, it causes many in Moscow to fail to understand how diverse the ethnic Russian nation is and how most of the issues in non-Russian republics are less about ethnicity than about how the center rules both them and the more numerous predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays.

            And on the other, it leads many non-Russians to conclude that the ethnic Russians are the enemy rather than fellow victims of Muscovite imperialism and thus not only spark the development of radical Russian nationalist groups like the Russian Community but also lose allies who can help them achieve their goals.

            According to Shtepa, “this empire should more precisely be called not ‘Russian’ but Muscovite because it is precisely Moscow that has all the levers of power and that gets the larger part of the resources of both Russian and non-Russian areas.” As a result, “ethnic Russian regions are precisely the same colonies of Moscow as are the non-Russian republics.”

            As historian Aleksandr Etkind pointed out in his 2013 study Internal Colonization. The Imperial Experience of Russia, the Russian state “as an empire began not with campaigns against Kazan and Siberia but much earlier with the seizure and subordination by the Muscovites of Tver, Novgorod, and Pskov” and sought to make their residents Russians like any others.

            But enormous differences remain among them not least of all because Moscow not only treats all of them much worse than it treats Muscovites but treats them differently and in ways that are more similar to the ways it treats the non-Russian republics than the ways in which it treats the Moscow population.

            Unfortunately, many non-Russians ignore these differences among Russians as well, something that helps Moscow pursue its divide and rule policies and in fact “repeats the very same imperial-unitarist treatment of ‘Russianness’ [as that of the Muscovite state] but with the opposite sign.”

            This compromises the ability of non-Russians to form alliances with ethnic Russians within their own republics but also to do so with neighboring Russian oblasts that could become the basis for joint action against the imperial center, the regionalist writer continues.  Both non-Russians and ethnic Russians need to change their approach if either is to succeed.