Regions Must be Involved in Restructuring Russia or the Country Will Disintegrate, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 26 – Anatoly Nemiyan, a specialist on the Muslim world who blogs under the screen name “El Murid,” says that the country’s regions must be involved in restructuring the Russian Federation or the Russian Federation will face the prospect of rapid disintegration (business-gazeta.ru/article/432769).

            The reason that there is so much turbulence in Russia and the other post-Soviet states, El Murid says, is that “unfortunately” in most of them “the people are far from ready to share responsibility for their fate with the powers that be and the powers that be are completely unprepared to give the people the right to decide anything.”

            “Ukraine and Georgia have advanced along this path further than” Russia has, he continues; and the Russian Federation faces the prospect that it too will pass through many of the color revolutions and turbulence that the other countries have, albeit in a different form because of Russia’s size and diversity.

            According to El Murid, “in Russia at present there are only two organized forces – organized crime and the regional elites … As a result, either the regional elites will take the leader and regulate the process of the reformatting of the country, which perhaps will lead us toward federalization or organized crime will and lead to … the disintegration of the country.”

            The choice is not far off, he continues. “I think that already this fall will begin events which will very quickly push us toward such decisions. All the talk about liberals, patriots, leftists, rightists, and so on is meaningless because there are only these two organized forces,” one of which will gain the upper hand.

            Despite what many think, El Murid says, “the siloviki never were, are not today and never will be subjects of the political process.” They are only forces that will be used by one side or another in this conflict. They are quite prepared to follow one or the other side depending on who is on top.

           

            The blogger says that Russia must “as quickly as possible more from the feudal order in which an extremely small group of people take for themselves practically all the national wealth.”  When that happens, many possibilities will open up for Russians and for the country as a whole.

            To achieve that goal, “only regional elites are capable of carrying out a clear policy” if they stop trying to get as much from the federal budget as each can and think more broadly about the needs of the Russian Federation as a whole. Whether they can do so, he says, remains very much an open question.

            The danger of disintegration of Russia is real just as that danger is real for Ukraine, El Murid argues.  If that happens, the fate of these countries will depend in large measure on how those disintegrations occur. If they are organized, the problems will not be so great; if they aren’t, the situation will be a Hobbesian war of all against all.