Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 22 -- Russia has been
able to defend and then expand its empire only when it has “recruited new and
good people,” according to Vitaly Averyanov, the director of the Institute of
Dynamic Conservatism and a leader of the influential Izborsky Club headed by
Aleksandr Prokhanov.
Averyanov told a St. Petersburg
meeting of that group on Thursday that when the Russian elite has not been “renewed,”
as he says occurred during Perestroika, the
country’s elite split apart along ethnic lines with its members seizing the
assets of the union republics for their personal gain but ignoring the
interests of the nation as a whole (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2014/06/20/postroenie_kontinentalnoj_imperii_zadacha_sootvetstvuyuwaya_russkomu_masshtabu/).
As a result of those divisions and
individual selfishness, he said, a renewal of the elites that could have saved
the Soviet Union did not happen. And unless a renewal of the elite happens now,
that group of people will not be able to fulfill the task of rebuilding the
empire set by the supreme authority.”
“For the Russian nation today, the
myth of empire is needed as a so-called ‘attractor’” to win support for
achieving that goal. Only new people, without the burdens of the last two
decades, can hope to do so, words that appear to call for a wholesale
re-division of property and a purge of at least some of those now close to the
top leadership.
Maksim Kalashnikov, a longtime
member of the Izborsky Club, focused on where the Kremlin might find
replacements for some current officials in order to be successful in promoting
the imperial project and the re-industrialization of the country that
Kalashnikov argues is a pre-condition for that.
He pointed to four “reservoirs”: innovative
business leaders, heads of regions where
progress is being made – there are “not so many” of these, Kalashnikov
acknowledged – municipal and district political leaders, and those who will
emerge in the course of re-industrialization.
Other speakers at the Izborsky Club
meeting echoed these themes.
The club’s president, Prokhanov,
said that the time had come for his group, which enjoys enormous influence in
the Kremlin, to move beyond general declarations about the need for a new
empire to specific suggestions for how such a state should be prepared for and
built. That empire, he continued, must involve the promotion of a powerful
state along with “a synthesis of cultures, faiths, and the potentials of
various peoples.”
St. Petersburg Governor Georgy
Poltavenko held up his city as a place around which the Russian empire was
built and suggested that “today a large and best part of [its] preserve in
themselves the ‘genes of state-centered-ness.”
To build on that, he called for the creation of an internet museum on
the Russian Empire.
Publicist Nikolay Starikov said that
the restoration of the empire must begin as a thought experiment, one that the
intellectual elite must describe in terms of a militarily strong state, an
ethnically and religiously diverse population, the setting of imperial goals,
and viewing the Eurasian and Customs Unions as the places where “our statehood
must develop further.”
Valery Korovin, director of the
Center for Geopolitical Expertise, said that Russia’s elites must be prepared
to demonstrate the differences between Western “oceanic” empires “which
enslaved their colonies” and the “land” Russian empire “which brought to its
borerlands the best cultural and scientific achievements, development and
well-being.”
And Andrey Vassovich, a nationalist
commentator, added that Moscow must block the penetration of ideas opposed to
such values and should even consider the creation of an all-Russian radio
station devoted to the promotion of imperial values and the creation of elites
capable of implementing them.
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