Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 2 – Vladimir
Kagansky, a Russian economic geographer, says that in the absence of real
politics, “the only opposition in Russia are the regions,” and that
regionalization of the country, something he argues is irreversible, will lead
to the country’s decolonization and de-ideologization.
In his The Cultural Landscape and Soviet Habitable Space (in Russian;
Moscow: NLO, 2001), Kazansky outlines the challenges that any Russian leader
would face in trying to rein in the challenges to the territorial integrity of
the country given the “chaotic” nature of its space.
The main
institutions holding the USSR and now the Russian Federation together are the force
structures and the military-industrial complex which cut across the
administrative and regional divisions of the country. “For the authorities of
Russia today, the regions are an opposition,” but the regions cannot win out in
the short term, Kagansky says.
Over time, however, “the
regionalization of the Russian Federation is already an irreversible process.
The main distinction from the regionalization of the USSR is the absence [in
Russia] of a region which is able to claim and genially control ‘the
indivisible inheritance’ (Moscow’s pretenses in this regard are insufficiently
funded).”
Writing just before Putin came to
power, the geographer offers a spectrum of five scenarios for this regionalist
process:
1.
“Revenge
(USSR), restoration, re-militarization, attempts at military control over the
main part of the USSR, permanent conflicts.”
2.
“A world of regions and a
center-mediator” in Moscow which “plays the role of mediator between the
regions of the Russian Federation, the CIS countries, the rest of the world,
and the armed forces. The functions of the center are financial, judicial, and
formally legal.”
3.
“The Russian Federation as a rickety
superstructure over regions that are independent in varying degrees and in part
states preserving control over strategic forces.”
4.
“A minimal Russia. The preservation
of the Russian Federation as a state on a small part of the former territory
with the rest being independent. The outlines of ‘the new Russia’ will be
defined by the dislocation of strategic forces, the resource-industrial base,
and conflicts with the regions.”
5.
“Each region for itself. A multitude
of practically independent equal state regions (including coalitions) without a
center. Moscow will be converted into a city state.” This situation will also
be “unstable.”
More
generally, Kazansky says, the process of regionalization is destabilizing, but
that destabilization will have the effect not of limiting it but of
accelerating the process. And consequently, regionalization “will continue,
involving both new levels of the hierarchy and also new territories which for
the time being have only weakly manifested this trend.”
All
this is because, the geographer argues, “the Russian space is a Great
Semi-Periphery, that is, a sum of border regions.” It includes within its
borders the peripheries of various other projects but has no real center of its
own. Thus, “the phenomena are within the Russian space, but their focus is
outside its borders.”
This
“poly-periphery is also a syncretic one,” he says. It doesn’t have natural borders, a natural
center – “Moscow is 20 times closer to the Western border than to the Eastern
one. In fact, “all the leading centers of the territory are situated in its
border regions and/or borders but are poorly connected with each other.”
The
radical centralism of the Russian state is incompatible over time with this
arrangement. The state is not held together by tight bindings. And Kazansky
concludes that “the general construction of the Russian space is a carcass of
several powerful centers connected hierarchically. An external ring and an
internal deposit of centers.”
Or
to put it in a more lapidary way, Russia has “centers on the periphery and a
periphery in the center.”
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