As at End of Soviet Times, Mass Actions Beginning in Regions Not in Moscow, Degtyanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 3 – No one should forget that in the late 1980s, mass protest actions in the USSR began first far from the Soviet capital and only later came to Moscow. In April 1986, for example, Yakuts marched under the slogan “Yakutia for the Yakuts,” and in December, Kazakhs protested Moscow’s removal of their leader and installation of an outsider.

            These actions were followed by demonstrations in Karabakh, the Baltic republics, Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere and by strikes in Vorkuta, Karaganda, and the Donbass. The first mass meeting in Moscow in perestroika times occurred only in May 1989 when some 150,000 people assembled in Luzhniki. 

            That history is especially worth recalling now, Russian regionalist historian Andrey Degtyanov says, because it is being repeated.  And the continuing protests in Khabarovsk in fact build on demonstrations in Shiyes, the Nenets Autonomous District, and opposition moves in the Komi Republic and Ryazan Oblast (region.expert/new-people/).

            And even opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, always a bellwether of Russian trends, has recently been adopting “regionalist rhetoric” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/07/russia-now-plantation-for-rich-moscow.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/08/long-dormant-institutions-of-democracy.html).

            (According to Degtyanov, the protests of 2011-2013 which were centered on Moscow were an anomaly and not the typical pattern of protests in Russia. Now, he suggests, with Khabarovsk, things have returned to where they are when the country itself is descending into difficulties.)

            To understand why the periphery takes the lead, one must understand that Russia lacks “a geographic metropolitan center.” Instead, “Moscow is just as much a province without rights as Ryazan or Khabarovsk.  “The metropolitan center” of the country is not a place but rather “a police-trading corporation.”

            Moreover, in contrast to other empires, Russia lacks a fully self-conscious stratum of colonizers. And in addition, there is “an obvious lack of correspondence between the imperial power in the regions with the social-economic realities of the beginning of the third millennium, as Vladislav Inozemtsev has been warning.

            As the economist puts it, “Moscow today governs territories where the very same Russians as at the center of the country live but who do not receive the benefits and do not have the same level of life as does the population of the capital city”  (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/07/protests-by-russians-east-of-urals.html).

            And in addition to these and making the situation still worse, Degtyanov argues, is the fact that “the Kremlin’s colonial policy lacks an adequate ideological basis.” There is no talk of “’the white man’s burden’” or “civilizing mission.” There are no modernizing projects. There is “only the cult of ‘the great past’ which must be defended against any review.”

            The periphery, which includes what some call “the deep Russia” is thus condemned to a future of ever greater impoverishment and with no inspiring models.  Not surprisingly, this can’t be counted on to last forever. It can’t even withstand a serious crisis of the kind Russia now is confronted with.

            Regionalism is “a serious problem for the Kremlin,” which isn’t willing to talk about either genuine federalism or a new agreement, attacking those who engage in it as “extremists.”  It only wants to maintain control so that it can enrich itself, even though that means beggaring the entire rest of the country.

            Putin has tried various tactics to obscure the fundamental “contradiction” between the corporate metropolitan center and ‘deep Russia.’” But with oil revenue gone, he has fewer and fewer resources to cover up this naked wound. He and his system cannot solve any of the problems of “the deep Russia” and members of this other Russia can now see that.

            What is now reemerging is something Russia has seen before – the populism which supported the country’s largest party in 1917: the Social Revolutionaries. They lost out to the more disciplined Bolsheviks, but such people aren’t going to lose out again at least in the longer term.

            Today, Putin is reprising the centralist drive of Lenin’s party while the people are coming out again in favor of decentralization and local control, two ideas at the center of Russian populism. Because of Russia’s historical traditions, many are better on the former rather than the latter. But that may now be a mistake.

            “Populism in Russia,” Degtyarov argues, “is a response to the crisis of a centralized imperial system with its official ‘nationality,’” when people can see that they are being impoverished with little hope of progress under the existing regime and thus are driven to seek its replacement.

            If regionalist groups coalesce with populist ones, he concludes, then there is a chance that “today’s regionalists will become the new populist movement and reflect the flourishing complexity of those who live in the varied spaces” of Russia and who want justice without repression at long, long last.