Paul Goble
Staunton, May 24 – More than 40 years ago, the late Vasily Aksyonov published his classic Island of Crimea, a novel in which he talked about what would have happened had the anti-Bolshevik White Russians been able to hold on to Crimea and represent an alternative to the Soviet Union.
Today, Prague-based Russian commentator Vadim Sidorov says, émigré Russian leader Gary Kasparov is calling for something similar, the formation of “an extraterritorial Russian Taiwan” that would unite the diaspora and make it an obvious alternative to Putin’s authoritarian regime (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=628DAB20214F9).
(The builds on the proposal, also by the Free Russia Forum, to adopt something like the Nansen passports that were given out to members of the first Russian emigration after the Bolshevik revolution and Russian Civil War to regularize their status abroad (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/06/new-russian-emigres-seek-revival-of-two.html).
In commenting on this development, Sidorov says he is encouraged by the fact that the Forum has created a Russian Action Committee, an indication that this effort will be about actual steps rather than a continuation of discussions about what is to be done and that there is growing regulation that today “Free Russia” is in fact “Russia abroad.”
Free Russians now recognize, he says, that since February 24 when Putin launched his massive military invasion of Ukraine, “we have landed in a new reality,” one that is not just about a war between Russia and Ukraine “but in fact is ‘a hot cold war’” between Moscow and those, including Free Russians, opposed to its aggression.
To take part in this struggle effectively, Sidorov says, the Action Committee must recruit and prepare entirely different kinds of cadres than the Forum has and be ready to play a political role in future liberated Russian territory so as to create what is now an extra-territorial movement into one in control of land.
The Prague-based commentator notes that “practically at the same time as the Russian Action Committee appeared, another organization did as well, the League of Free Nations” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/06/new-league-of-free-nations-seeks.html). The two must cooperate and there is a clear basis for tha
Kasparov and other advocates of a Russian Taiwan have made clear that “a future Free Russia will not hold by force those peoples who do not want to live within it” and that calls for the creation of an extraterritorial Free Russia in no way compromises that promise or threatens t future of a free Tatarstan or a free Chechnya.
It is long past time, Sidorov continues, “to recognize that today there is no Free Russia, no Free Tatarstan, no free Ichkeria, and so on. And whether they appear or not depends frist of all on the outcome of the world war which is now going on and second on how and in which form the corresponding projects are able to participate in the camp of the victor.”
Those backing a Free Russia and the League of Free Nations must not be in conflict with one another but rather work together “on various parts of the front” and thus ensure the kind of victory “without which there will not be a Free Russia, a Free Bashkortostan, a Free Tatarstan or any freedom for others as well.”
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