Putin’s Monopoly on ‘Russianness’ has Allowed Him to Continue to Wage War in Ukraine and Must Be Challenged, Bilunov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – Ever more people around the world recognize that the Russian Federation includes a variety of non-Russian nations who make up an increasing share of that country’s population and aspire to greater autonomy and in some cases even independence from Moscow.

            But they still treat those whom the Russian census counts as “ethnic Russians” as an undifferentiated whole and even accept the idea that even those who speak Russian should be included part of that community. That is no small thing, and Denis Bilunov argues that it has given the Kremlin the ability to continue its war in Ukraine (region.expert/monopoly/).

            The former editor of Kasparov.ru who is now a graduate student at Prague’s Charles University says that the Kremlin leader’s “monopoly on ‘Russianness’” is so strong that many in both the Russian Federation and the West accept it as somehow natural and fail to recognize that those called Russians are extremely diverse culturally and politically.

            As long as Putin can successfully make this claim, his regime will remain stable and he will be able to conduct aggressive wars as now in Ukraine. But, Bilunov says, “if this monopoly can be challenged convincingly enough, the regime will lose its stability, and the chances for real change for the better will emerge.”

            To that end, the West must adopt “a proactive strategy” aimed at challenging Putin’s claims  to have a monopoly on the representation of ‘Russianness,’” depriving him of the chance to claim to speak for all Russians and Russian speakers and supporting the diversity of people lumped together as ethnic Russians so that these can lead to “an organic process capable of garnering mass support.”

            These must involve first of all the recognition of how diverse those labelled ethnic Russian by Moscow in fact not only politically but culturally and even linguistically as well are and then on “institutional recognition” by such means as allowing representatives of these multiple Russias to compete under their own flags or have their own places in activities of various kinds abroad.

            That is going to be difficult given Moscow’s media campaign and the inertia of western thinking, but the fact that there has been so much change first in recognizing that the union republics of the USSR were different and now in acknowledging that the non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation gives hope that Bilunov’s call will gain support.