Paul Goble
Staunton,
June 28 – The non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation are drawn to the
model of European nation states, Vadim Shtepa says; and it would be both
appropriate and valuable if the predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays
would be drawn toward “the American federal experience.”
If
those two things come together, the regionalist says, they would be in a
position to create a complex but voluntary synthesis, one in which “the
‘American’ component would appear to be more important simply because the
Russian-language regions of Russia form a majority in Russia” (afterempire.info/2018/06/28/euroamerica/).
“Present-day
political activists from the non-Russian republics should not repeat Kremlin
stereotypes that ‘all Russians are everywhere the same.’” Instead, they should
“seek out points of mutual action with the Russian regionalists.” Only when that
happens, Shtepa says, will there be “the final destruction of the empire which
in turn will bring freedom to all national republics.”
For
this to happen, the editor of the After
Empire portal says, will require a transformation of the thinking of both Russians
and non-Russians. The challenge for the former may be especially great. That is because so many Russians accept the
notion that the highest value is “the preservation of a single state centered
on the Kremlin.”
That
is not just a view held by nationalists and imperialists: it is found among
people across the political spectrum. “The Eurasian phantom of ‘great Russia’
can be present among the supporters of any ideology be they nationalists,
communists, liberals” or someone else.
And foremost, these views are held as unquestionable dogma.
That
arises from the notion, Shtepa says, that there is some “irrational
‘opposition’” of Russian space to that of the West. The behavior of many non-Russians who look to
Europe and have even formed European movements like European Tatarsstan or the
Buryat civic movement belie Russian beliefs on this score.
This
contradiction in Russian thinking was on display among the original
Eurasianists like Trubetskoy, Savitsky and Suvchinsky. “While criticizing
European civilization and opposing their Eurasian ‘Exit to the East’ to it,
they themselves after the Bolshevik revolution somehow preferred a personal
‘exit’ not to China, Mongolia or Iran but to hated and ‘spiritless’ Europe.”
Shtepa acknowledges that he also fell for these Eurasian
temptations in the early 1990s; but he soon saw through them after travelling
in various countries and various regions of Russia, an experience “which
clearly showed all the artificiality and archaic nature of the Eurasian dogmas.”
“For
example,” he continues, “the residents of Novosibirsk and Vladivostok hardly
consider themselves ‘Asians’ because the border between Europe and Asia is
accepted as passing along the Urals.”
But
his real epiphany came during a visit to St. Louis in the middle of the United
States, a city combining European order and Siberian spaciousness in ways that
any visitor from Russia could not fail to notice. It came to him, Shtepa says,
that “the future of the Russian space could be a similar synthesis of the
European and American experience, both cultural and political.”
Turning
to the non-Russians, he says, “the republics within the Russian Federation are
analogues of European nation states.”
That was obvious in the early 1990s, but now, with the liquidation of
federalism in favor of Putin’s vertical, “those who fight for the
national-cultural distinctiveness [have lost] a healthy federalist
consciousness.”
Today,
many non-Russian activists are fighting for the preservation of instruction of
their state languages in the schools. But all too often, their statements
resemble petitions to the Kremlin tsar and his duma. They should not be seeking
but demanding that the powers that be observe the principles of federalism” given
that the country calls itself a federation.
“Why
in Russia do Kremlin bureaucrats decide everything for everyone?” Shtepa asks
rhetorically. “One must force the authorities to answer this question or openly
acknowledge the fact that Russia is not a federation but remains a unitary
empire.”
But
everyone must recognize that “this imperial will not be destroyed by the
efforts of the national republics alone,” he argues. The situation now is fundamentally different
than in 1991. Then, the union republics which had equal status under the
constitution declared sovereignty and Russians supported them.
Now,
the republics are far fewer, less equal, and more repressed than the union
republics were, and it is inconceivable that Russians anytime soon would come
out in support of their right to exist from the Russian Federation. Far more
likely they would demonstrate against any such event. In short, “Tatarstan isn’t Lithuania;” and it
is a mistake not to recognize that fact.
Consequently,
he says, “the position of Andrey Illarionov who views the prospects for a new
disintegration of the empire exclusively with regard to the national republics
appears too narrow,” Shepa says, citing an article the Russian economist did
for his portal (afterempire.info/2018/05/10/illarionov/).
He is kind enough to say that the author of these lines
is closer to the truth when he argues that “in this process, namely the Russian
regionalists will play a decisive role” (“Regionalism is the Nationalism of the
Next Russian Revolution” (in Russian at
afterempire.info/2016/12/28/regionalism/).
In
Shtepa’s view, “any geopolitical transformations of the Russian space are
unthinkable until the Russians themselves want to play a new historical role,”
one in which they act for themselves and not as the force binding together the
Kremlin empire. Is that possible? Many like Aleksey Shiropayev have wrestled
with the question (afterempire.info/2018/02/15/shiropaev/).
Kremlin
propaganda treats any such shift toward Russians acting for themselves rather
than for the Kremlin as something that will inevitably lead to the
disintegration of the country. But Mikhail Epshtein is surely right when he
says that “the goal is not the dividing up of Russia but the multiplication of
Russias” (afterempire.info/2018/03/27/more-russias/).
“For
the majority of Russian regions, the American rather than the European
experience is more instructive,” Shtepa says, citing the arguments of Pavel
Ivlyev (afterempire.info/2018/05/06/ivlev/). He
adds that “not ‘separating from the empire’ but jointly liquidating ont his
space the imperial principle as such” is what can serve as the goal of both
groups.
“If the empire is preserved,” Shtepa
continues, “even in reduced borders, it will inevitably begin again to threaten
the independence of its neighbors” and repress its own people. The Kremlin likes to talk about “a Russian
world,” he notes; but as long as the country is an empire, it will be “’a
Russian war.’”
“A genuine Russian world will be
possible only after the empire, as a federative multiplicity of Russian-speaking
countries united not by someone ‘from above’ but on the basis of their own
voluntary agreement.” In the Russian
case, that means the oblasts and krays must be raised to the status of
sovereign republics.
Moreover, “in this case, the Russian
language will be transformed from an imposed ‘language of empire’ into a
post-imperial lingua franca.” Of course it is “completely possible” that
Russian in some regions will “evolve in the direction of regional dialects,
just as imperial Latin at one point ‘disintegrated’ into Italian, French,
Spanish and so on.”
But regardless of what happens, it is wrong to
view Russian as “’the property’ of the empire. It belongs to all who use it.” Unfortunately, “today, as a result of the efforts
of the Kremlin unifiers, language issues in Russia are again sharpening.” But
fighting only for language will in no way undermine the empire, he argues.
That is a different task entirely –
and it is one the non-Russian republics can win only if they adopt a new way of
thinking and work to help the predominantly Russian oblasts and krays to do the
same.
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