Putin’s Goal Now is to Do Away with Remaining ‘Remnants’ of Federalism, Prokhanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 6 – Doing away with “all the rubbish introduced into Russian statehood after the destruction of the Soviet Union” forms a core value of “late-Putin statehood,” Russian nationalist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov says; and the Kremlin will carry this principle to fulfillment regardless of how much resistance anyone shows.

            The Tatars will lose their presidency and many other things they acquired in the 1990s, but it is quite possible, the writer says, that “a very interesting trend will mature” among them which “perhaps will be adopted by Russian nationalist and Russian social consciousness” and work to the advantage of the Tatars (business-gazeta.ru/article/528221).

            This is what he has in mind, Prokhanov continues. “Russians ae considered the state-forming people although the start of Russian statehood was to a large extent connected with the escape of the Moscow principality from the yoke of the Tatars and the horde. But now, people are beginning to understand the Horde was a cementing factor in the rise of the Russian state.”

            “That is because precisely under the horde, Ivan Kalita was able to establish his Moscow patrimony -cand receive recognition of his rule,” the writer says. And what that means, of course, is that “not only Russians are the state-forming people but also the Tatars, a concept quite interesting for Tatar self-consciousness.”

            And such an awareness could mean that Kazan “also will be transformed into a capital city” of Russia, “the third capital between Petersburg and Moscow. And that sense,” Prokhanov suggests, will “compensate” the Tatars for anything they may think they are now losing in the course of Putin’s re-centralization drive.