Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 10 – Vladimir
Putin will likely leave office in three or four years either by appointing a
successor as Boris Yeltsin did him in 1999 or as a result of being confronted
by popular uprisings like 1991 and 1993, risings that the Russian military will
not want to crush by force, according to Valery Solovey.
The MGIMO professor and frequent
commentator says that the latter events show that the military would only
“extremely unwillingly” shoot at Russian citizens and the killing of 120 people
by the authorities in Kyiv at the time of the Maidan shows that “even a
peaceful revolution after the first deaths radically changes its nature.”
In the course of an interview taken
by Dmitry Bykov for the latest issue of Sobesednik,
Solovey says that if Putin can exercise the 1999 option, he will not select
Sergey Shoygu or Dmitry Rogozin and Aleksey Dyumin couldn’t handle the job (sobesednik.ru/dmitriy-bykov/20170908-valeriy-solovey-naverhu-preemnika-opredelili-no-budet-inach#).
When
Putin leaves one way or another, his system will disappear with him because it
is a pyramid that was built from the top down, Solovey says. Asked whether this
would lead to territorial disintegration, the MGIMO scholar says no because the
country is held together by “the Russian language, the Russian ruble, and
Russian culture.”
But
the main reason for that conclusion is that no one is pressing to leave. Even
in Tatarstan, centrifugal forces are minimal: the most Kazan will seek will be “some
symbolic preferences.” As for the North Caucasus, no one there has figured out
how to live independent of Russia.
According
to Solovey, there is also little chance of fascism or mass repressions: “Even
FSB generals do not get real satisfaction from that.” What they want is a
personal yacht. And their children are
the same. They want to be in charge but
they don’t want to expend the effort that real repression would require.
Solovey
devotes much of his interview to issues surrounding Ukraine. He says that “relations
between Russia and Ukraine will never be what they were,” that the longer the
Donbass is under Russian influence, the less likely it will be to return to
Ukrainian control, and that Ukraine may agree to federalize if Europe rather
than Russia pushes that idea.
At
the same time, however, he argues that Moscow has no interest in or even
ability to achieve the absorption of all of Ukraine. It is finding it difficult
to incorporate Crimea with its 2.5 million people; it was face a much bigger
and likely impossible task if it were to try to take in 45 million.
Solovey
dismisses the idea that anyone will pursue war as a policy: It is “a wonderful
means of resolving internal problems if it doesn’t lead to suicide;” and he
argues that there is no wave of conservative revenge sweeping the world despite
what so many had concluded last year after Donald Trump won election and Britain
voted to leave the EU.
As
for Russia, he continues, it will have to cure itself because “now the country
and society are serious ill, and we all feel this. The problem even isn’t in
corruption: that’s a secondary issue. It is rather in the thoroughgoing and
general amoralism” that has affected everything.
This
has assumed forms of “absolute absurdity and idiotism which we feel at all
levels. In the medieval world into which
we are falling not by someone’s evil will but simply because if there is no
movement forward, then the world rolls backward.” What is needed, Solovey says,
is “a return to the norm.”
Almost
everyone “with a few exceptions” even in Putin’s entourage understands this and
wants it, the MGIMO scholar concludes. And if the new government moves in that
direction, it will have support except from the five percent that exists in
every society and wants to remain opposed to whatever is going on.
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