Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 12 – “All empires,”
Pavel Luzin says, “stimulate migration from the metropolitan center to the
colonies and among the colonies,” sometimes by economic stimuli and sometimes
by force. “Russia in the past was no exception to this pattern.” But today it is, and that casts doubt on the
future of the empire as such.
In a discussion on the After Empire portal, the Russian
commentator says that the Russian metropole followed the same pattern of other empires
in the past, but in the last generation, not only has the center given
independence to much of the periphery but “colonial migration in post-Soviet
Russia has ceased” (afterempire.info/2017/10/12/migration/).
Instead of moving from the center to
the colonies, every year now “hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens prefer independently
to leave small cities and settlements and move to major cities or leave the
country entirely.” The only exceptions
are moves to oil and gas extraction points.
This might not seem to be a serious
problem, Luzin continues, but “without colonial (administered) migration, the
empire can no longer plan its own economic development and support its own rule
over it subjects.” Instead, the imperial center becomes something “unnecessary”
for them.
“Of course,” the Russian analyst
says, “the metropolitan center is still powerful and overwhelmingly controls
the economy.” But “this resource isn’t
infinite,” and over time, the economy without imperial migration, more or less
rapidly “loses its effectiveness in maintaining rule over its subjects” who
view the center as an obstacle rather than an asset.
Given the importance of colonial
migration, he continues, it is no surprise that “since the beginning of the
1990s,” there have been many proposals advanced to try to restart it. Some want
to send university graduates to work in distant areas, others want to
decentralize management, and still others say Moscow should give citizenship to
those who settle the Far East.
But none of these things has really
taken off, and “without the return to a colonial (administered) migration
system, the next step will be the deconstruction of the empire itself,” Luzin
suggests. Talk will continue, but it is unlikely to have the desired result of
restarting something that has lost its meaning.
Imperial migration always rested in
the final analysis on the profitability of the colonies, “but Russian colonies,
the regions, with the exception of oil and gas provinces, in the existing
system of organization of power rely on subsidies from the center and in the
best case can only support their own existence.”
“Without economic modernization, the
majority of colonies are condemned to continual decline,” Luzin argues. But modernization presupposes an influx of
foreign technology and “this flow stopped long ago.” To change that will require fundamental
change, and “systemic modernization will mean the disintegration of the
imperial mechanism.”
According to the analyst, it is no
accident that “the majority of empires disappeared in the last century.” Russia
has lost part but not all of its empire. And it hasn’t found a way to have
people move to places where the economy is the least promising. Russians are too educated and too
knowledgeable to want to move from where things are better to where they are
worse.
Luzin’s argument is at a high
theoretical level, but this week brought three stories about the specifics of
what he is talking about. Another
Russian expert pointed out that the differential pay system intended to get
Russians to move to the north “no longer exists except on paper” (svpressa.ru/society/article/183330/).
A former leader of the Sakha
Republic argued that development of the North must be suspended until Moscow
can improve the IT network there (regnum.ru/news/polit/2333350.html).
And despite what many believe, Russians aren’t moving to the oil and gas
fields. Instead, non-Russians and even Ukrainians are doing so (ura.news/articles/1036272589).
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