Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 7 – Unless Moscow
gives territorial autonomy to ethnic Russians and ends as much as possible
inter-regional transfers of government spending, the Russian Federation “in the
near future” will explode in “a civil war analogous to the Ukrainian one” and “inevitably
“disintegrate,” according to Mariya Butina.
In a post on Ekho Moskvy, the Moscow
analyst argues that “what is taking place in Ukraine is the logical extension
of the mass of inter-ethnic conflicts” which are to be found “on the entire
periphery of the post-Soviet space” and within the Russian Federation as well (echo.msk.ru/blog/maria_butina/1334562-echo/).
The Soviet system and its updated
variants in the post-Soviet states involve “positive discrimination” on behalf
of the titular nationalities, she says, something that in turn involves the
suppression of and discrimination against ethnic Russians. When the CPSU was
strong, that was not allowed to affect politics, but when the communist system
weakened, it came to define it.
Such weakening of central power, she
suggests, is “inevitable for any regime, sooner or later,” and hence the
tensions inherent in the post-Soviet countries, including the Russian
Federation, are bound to break out into the open.
To avoid such destructive developments
in the Russian Federation, she continues, Moscow must take two steps. On the one hand, it must allow ethnic
Russians “in places of their compact settlement to have their own national
autonomy, like Chechnya for the Chechen and Tatarstan for the Tatars.”
And on the other, Moscow must simultaneously
amalgamate the countries federal subjects into ever larger units and end or at
least reduce to a minimum inter-regional transfers of government money. Otherwise,
Butina says, Russians will be left in the status of “orphans” in this federal
system, will become increasingly angry and will spark inter-ethnic clashes.
Still worse, she suggests, Russia would in that
event become the scene of a civil war much like the one in Ukraine “with its
territorial disintegration then inevitable.”
Many believe that a strong central government can prevent that, but such
a government can do so only while it is strong. “Inevitably,” she says, it will
weaken and lead to “a collapse of legitimacy.”
That is what happened in Russia after the Rurik
dyanasty, the Romanovs, and the CPSU, she writes, “and there is no basis for
supposing that now the situation will be different if the system is not
strengthened” by the steps she outlines. The events in Ukraine, Butina
suggests, should be both a warning and a guide to action.
Butina puts her finger on one of the most important
sources of tension in the Russian Federation, that between ethnic Russians and
non-Russians. But her prescription could easily make the current situation even
worse by sparking a new upsurge in nationalism among the non-Russian quarter of
the population without giving the Russians what they think they deserve.
And that in turn could lead to the disintegration
of the country in much the same way that Mikhail Gorbachev’s turn to the right
in 1990-1991 did, with both ethnic Russians and non-Russians increasingly
convinced that they would not live within the framework of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, Butin’s
words unwittingly recall something else that was said at the end of Soviet
times: “The most difficult time for a country in trouble is when it begins to
try to reform itself.” That explains
both why governments so often put off reforms and also why such delays, as
politically attractive as they may seem, usually fail.
In short, the Russian Federation is
caught in the same trap that the Soviet Union was at the start of Gorbachev’s
time: a liberal Russia carved out of it might be possible, but a significantly
liberalized Russian Federation is almost certainly an ever greater
contradiction in terms.
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