Paul Goble
Staunton, June 18 – What has happened in Tatarstan since the invasion of Ukraine not only confirms Natalya Zubarevich’s observation that the better a region was doing before that date, the worse it has been doing since, Ruslan Aysin says. But it suggests something else even more dire.
According to the Idel.Real commentator, not long ago, Nikolay Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, came to Kazan where he outlined his plans for the transit in Russia. Those include making his son, Dmitry Patrushev, the current agricultural minister, the successor to Vladimir Putin as president (idelreal.org/a/31905242.html).
Putin would ten be elevated to the head of the State Council from which he would rule without challenge to the end of his days. But installing Patrushev junior in the office of president would signal that Moscow wants the country to develop in the direction of an agrarian empire without the regions and republics having the chance to industrialize and modernize, Aysin says.
Such a move, the commentator says, would mean that the Putin regime is placing its bets on “the deep patriarchal rural people. Not for nothing, Patrushev junior has been put in charge of the agricultural ministry,” and that signals a return to Uvarov’s trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood, that is, agrarian nature.”
That may keep the current leadership in power until their deaths and give them hope that they can hand over power to their children, but it will mean the degradation of Russia, first and foremost among republics like Tatarstan which have tried to pursue a modernizing course but then for the country as a whole.
Because this plan will hit places like Tatarstan first as Zubarevich has pointed out, they may very well become the first to protest over this new wind from the Kremlin. (For an analysis of Zubarevich’s observations, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-better-region-was-doing-before.html.)
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