Independence of Non-Russian Republics Won’t By Itself End Moscow’s Imperialism or Repression of One Nation by Another, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 2 – The events that have followed the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 show that independence for non-Russian union republics then and independence for non-Russian autonomies now won’t by itself end the imperial nature of the state centered on Moscow, Vadim Shtepa says.

            The Russian state that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union was in many ways the Soviet Union in miniature and its leaders have behaved accordingly, repressing peoples at home and being aggressive abroad, the Russian regionalist says (svoboda.org/a/respubliki-ili-rezervatsii-vadim-shtepa---o-natsionaljnoy-dialektike/32148952.html).

            Consequently, the departure of some or even all of the non-Russian autonomies from Moscow’s control in the future, a step that would remove only about a fifth of the population, could not by itself to have any greater impact on that state’s behavior. Indeed, it is entirely possible that it might have less.

            That is something that both those who live within the current borders of the Russian Federation and those who live outside them need to remember. Only a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and society will make it possible to escape the imperial past and usher in a democratic and peaceful one.

            But there is another aspect to this problem as well, Shtepa says, and that is the fact that some in the non-Russian republics are acting in ways that will produce in place of the dragon of Russian imperialism they hope to slay another kind of imperialism in which one nation will dominate another but on a smaller scale.

            Unfortunately, if that happens – and it could easily happen not just in a post-Russian Federation but in post-RF non-Russian states – then all the dangers that currently are on view because the Russian Federation of today remains an empire like the USSR used to be will continue rather than be overcome.

            The Russian regionalist argues that the best and perhaps the only feasible way forward is the promotion of federalism, a system in which each component part respects the others and its populations rather than one in which one part seeks to dominate some or all of the others be they states, republics, or nations.

            Such an approach does not mean that all the non-Russian republics would remain within a post-RF Russia; it only means that those who left wouldn’t become “mini-imperial states” and the country that was left would not repeat the sad experience of the Putin system domestically and internationally.