Regionalist Political Projects Face Challenges from Above and Below, Sidorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – The approaching Duma elections highlight the fact that regionalist political projects, regarding both the formation and participation of regionalist parties and the decisions of regionalist voters among others if parties speaking directly to their interests are excluded, face serious challenges from above and from below, Vadim Sidorov says.

            The Prague-based Russian commentator says that on the one hand, regionalists face the problems of all opposition groups who have become a target of the regime as it seeks to “cleanse” the political system of any resistance but on the other, are particularly at risk because of the ban on regional parties and the danger of criminal prosecution for talk about regionalism.

            And if there are no real regionalist parties available and if those on offer are divided or are being used by the regime against other parties as seems to be the case, regionalist voters can’t follow the Navalny principle of voting against United Russia because the opposition to it may be even more centralist and imperialist (region.expert/elections2021/).

            Divisions within potential regionalist parties are rampant, he suggests, because many who flock to regionalist groups are doing so not for genuinely regionalist principles but as a means of supporting ethnic autonomy. That has the effect of driving away support for regionalism in predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays.

            The Kremlin is fully cognizant of these difficulties and has been exploiting them via the KPSS, not the CPSU as some might think but as the Communist Party of Social Justice which has now renamed itself the Russian Party of Freedom and Justice led by journalist Maksim Shevchenko.

            It seems clear, Sidorov says, that this party and its leader are being used wittingly or not by the authorities to take votes away from the KPRF; but it should be obvious to all that this grouping is not promoting in a consistent way the kind of agenda that those committed to regionalism and decentralization want.

            What this means this time around, Sidorov says, is that those who want to see the regionalists gain ground in the Duma have to focus on non-party candidates in single-member districts rather than place their hopes on any party list, an approach that requires much closer attention than many voters are inclined to give.

             Just how dire the situation of regionalists in Putin’s Russia has become and how dangerous that is for the future is underscored by the decision of regionalist commentator Fyodor Krasheninnikov to flee Russia for Lithuania and to speak out at an online conference of the Vilnius-based Institute of the Regions of Russia (region.expert/blocked-regionalism/).

            Arguing that “regionalism in present-day Russia has been blocked,” Krasheninnikov says that voters nonetheless have a chance to “put a stick in the wheels” of the regime in the upcoming elections by voting against Kremlin candidates and that they can be aided by the West if governments there refuse to recognize the upcoming “vote” as legitimate.

            Russians and the West must see that “politics in the regions of Russia has been ‘cleansed’ no less than at the federal level” and that as a result, “the alienation of the authorities from the voters is growing,” something the Kremlin is seeking to hide by blocking any role in the elections by regionalist groups and preventing the existence of any “real regional elites.”

            According to Krasheninnikov, “the suppression of the Urals Republic in 1993 and the including of officials in the imperial ‘vertical’” has largely achieved that end. Moreover, “even regional brands are being subsumed by invented ‘all-Russian’ identities” from one end of the country to the other. But despite that “imperial consciousness does not have any prospects.”

            And everyone concerned needs to recognize what this means. Without democratically legitimated regional elites, there is a great danger that when the next round of the disintegration of Russia occurs, it will be chaotic and violent because it will involve the shift from “one imperial dictatorship” by “a multitude of local but even more cruel ones.”