Russia will Either Be a Unitary Dictatorship or a Number of Independent Countries, Yakovenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 4 – The lack of a civil society in Russia and consequently the tendency of Russians to go from one extreme to another mean that Russia will either be a single country ruled by a dictatorship or a number of independent countries at least some of whom may be democracies and at the very least will not attack others, Igor Yakovenko says.

            “Today,” the Russian commentator writes on the Region.Expert portal, “the imperial unitary dictatorship has exhausted its historical resources, and the demand in the regions for an independent existence separate from the Kremlin is sounding ever more loudly,” with Khabarovsk as a clear example (region.expert/pendulum/).

            According to Yakovenko, the Kremlin and its hangers’ on understand this and so have introduced “criminal penalties for ‘calls to violate the territorial integrity’” of the country. But with equal success one could introduce criminal penalties for calls to recognize Newton’s laws or the multiplication tablets.”

            “Russia in its existing borders will not fit into Europe and the world of the West as a whole not only and not so much because of its enormous size as because of the fact that this expanse” reflects a belief on the part of rulers and ruled in the empire that ever more new territories together with their population must be added to the state.

            Yakovenko concedes that “no one can guarantee that life in separate Far Eastern, Siberian, or Urals republics or in an independent Sakha and Tatarstan will be better and freer than within the Russian unitary dictatorship. But the chances for the creation of the preconditions for such a life will be greater,” just as they are in the former union republics.

            That is because at the very least, these newly independent states “will not begin to fight in Ukraine, Syria or Libya and spend the money of their taxpayers on undermining the lives of people in Europe and America, interfering in their elections, carrying out cyberattacks, and arranging terrorist actions.” 

            Yakovenko reaches these conclusions on the basis of an examination both of Russian history and of proposals to transform the current “Russian system” from a dictatorship to a democracy, something he says almost certainly won’t work as long as the country remains in its current borders.

            What is especially disturbing, he points out, is that many of “’the Russian Europeans’” who want their country to be a democracy and a federation hope that someone else – the Belarusians, the people of Khabarovsk, or the West – will do it for them while they remain locked in the same paradigm which has given rise to the dictatorial system of today.

            These people believe that all that is necessary to change things is either to put a new good ruler in place of the current old evil one or to tamper around the edges by playing at dividing power, forgetting that in Russian history, any division of power has inevitably led to dual power, collapse and then the restoration of an authoritarian system.

            Moreover, Yakovenko continues, these people forget that whenever European institutions have been transferred to Russian conditions, they are “transformed into something completely different and at times directly the opposite” of what they were in Europe. There is no reason to think that giving the prime minister more power and the president less will change that.

            Instead, any division will simply trigger a new struggle of the one against the other with various power centers and population groups lining up on one side or the other committed to the destruction of the other rather than to living in balance. Unfortunately, that approach is rooted in both Russian history and Russian culture and shows no signs of change.

            And it is so deeply rooted in Russian culture that the Russian people as a group are quite prepared “to live poorly in exchange” for being given the feeling by their rulers that “we are the biggest and everyone fears us.” They have this feeling even though outside of a few buildings in Moscow, everyone is in a colony.

            The Russian people have a bifurcated worldview. On the one hand, they understand that they are living in colonies from which everything is being taken. But on the other, they are “given to being proud of the power and size of the empire which they nonetheless consider to be their own.”

            That leads them to shift from one extreme to the other. After the demise of the USSR, “which was a unitary state where all the main decisions were taken in the center, Russia without pausing passed the station of ‘federation’” or even “’confederation’” and opened the way for the rise of a variety of independent countries.

            “Putinism became the reaction of the empire to the threat of [yet another wave of] disintegration,” Yakovenko continues. But now that Russians are turning away from it, there is little chance that they will do something different than they did 30 years ago or that Russia will not spasmodically move first toward disintegration and then a new unitary dictatorship.