Staunton, February 6 – Like all
previous Russian leaders, Vladimir Putin has relied on the imperial nature of
Russian patriotism to build his authoritarian and aggressive political system,
Aleksey Shiropayev says; and the only way out of this dead end is to form a series
of Russian republics within the Russian Federation.
That idea, floated by Boris Yeltsin
and his entourage in the early 1990s, would have the effect of changing the
nature of Russian identity and thus of the way in which Russians manifest their
patriotism; but because that idea was not realized, the old and dangerous
matrix of Russian imperial patriotism has returned with a vengeance under
Putin.
In an essay on Rufabula.com, the
Russian regionalist points out that “Putin came to power on the basis of
patriotism,” and using it, he “was able to turn the country back to the past”
because he understood that “patriotism is a primitive but powerful instrument
for ‘the elite’ to govern ‘the herd’ in its interests” (rufabula.com/articles/2016/02/03/overcoming-of-patriotism).
The hopes of August 1991 were not
destroyed “by the absence of lustration or the preservation of the KGB but by
the content of the minds of the masses, above all by Russian patriotism” and by
the readiness of the powers to exploit this patriotism against democracy and a
peaceful life.
That was true at the time of the
1905 revolution when the authorities employed the Black Hundreds against the
liberation movement. That was true during perestroika when the regime deployed
Pamyat and its ilk against the democrats. And it is true now when the Kremlin
is using its version of patriotism against “the possibility of a Maidan.”
“Russian patriotism,” Shiropayev
writes, “is always about preservation, it is always conservative and always
statist and militarist and also oriented toward a strong power, toward a tsar.” It is in short always informed by reactionary
and imperial values and insists on “the idea of Russia as an empire.”
A Russian “may consider himself
whatever he likes, a liberal or a European, but at one fine moment, Russian
patriotism turns him against independent Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic
countries. It makes him ‘a Crimea is Ours’ supporter, a backer of “Novorossiya,’
and a hater of ‘Gayeurope.’”
“In the paradigm of Russian
patriotism,” the regionalist writes, “not only Crimea is ‘ours,’ but Kyiv is ‘ours
and also Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. Russian patriotism is informed by the phantom
losses of the Russian Empire and the USSR.”
The issue for today and the future
is whether this kind of patriotism can be neutralized and replaced by a genuine
non-imperial kind. According to
Shiropayev, that is possible but only if the Russian Federation is reformed as
Yeltsin proposed by adding to its “seven [ethnic] Russian republics – the Far
East, Siberia, the Urals, the Volga, Central Russia, South Russia and the
Russian North.”
“The regionalization of the Russian
people would lead to the collapse of the ‘big’ all-state Russian patriotism and
to the birth of an alternative, regional patriotism, one not aggressive and
free from the imperial ‘karma,’ one based on democracy and local
administration,” Shiropayev continues.
By awakening and strengthening
regional identitites, this change would “neutralize” what is “an extremely
dangerous factor of political reaction” – the imperial nature of Russian
patriotism as it now stands. Unfortunately, Yeltsin did not carry this out because
he and his team did not understand fully what was at stake, the need to change
values before institutions.
Putin, of course, is counting on the
imperial nature of Russian patriotism to keep him and his system in power,
Shiropayev says. But the current crisis is calling some of that into question
and may lead more people to begin to think about the need to change the
organization of the country and the values on which it is based.
There are indications that some
Russians are thinking about precisely this but also that the regime is counting
on being able to defeat them by conflating the pursuit of the regionalization
of Russia with the pursuit of its disintegration, something that the current
imperial nature of Russian patriotism will lead them to react against.
Yesterday, in the Altay Republic, the
local office of the FSB announced that it had launched a criminal case against
an unnamed individual for posting on Youtube a call for the independence of
Siberia, exactly how Putin’s version of imperial patriotism will present any
call for the development of regionalism (altapress.ru/story/172936).
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