Émigré Politicians, Russian and Non-Russian, Mired in Wishful Thinking, Vintsevskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 14 – Many émigré politicians, Russian and non-Russian, talk about the looming collapse of Russia, a position that is understandable but fundamentally defective because it is a classic example of wishful thinking, of believing that what one wants to happen is what will, Tatyana Vintsevskaya says.

            The Siberian activist, who herself lives abroad but hopes to return to a free country in the future, says that those engaged in such thinking need to ask themselves some hard questions: “What exactly will cause the collapse? Do you really believe that the current Kremlin governors will suddenly rise up against the empire?” (region.expert/raspad-na-chto/).

            “This is completely out of the question,” Vintsevskaya says. The governors aren’t elected by and thus beholden to the population but appointed by Moscow and interested not in winning the favor of the people under them but ensuring that those who appointed them are happy with what they do.

            Some experts like Irina Busygina have pointed this out and stressed how different the situation is from what it was at the end of the 1980s and even into the 1990s. (On Busygina, see region.expert/no-changes/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/01/neither-pandemic-nor-war-in-ukraine-has.html.)

            If one wants to get practical in pursuing the end of the empire, then one must see the restoration of “genuinely free elections” of local and regional officials. Such elections, the Siberian activist argues, “should become the main demand of regional communities” and stand at the center of the programs of those who seek the disintegration of the Russian Federation.

            Only such elections, she says, “will make it possible for the post-Russian situation to avoid following the course of the post-Soviet one where paternalistic dictatorships were established in many places.” Encourage competition and the rotation of elites, and call for the creation of regionalist parties, something Putin banned early on.

            Vintsevskaya says that she sees “the future United States of Siberia exactly as a parliamentary confederation.” And if that is achieved by elections, then there is a chance that Siberia will “put an end to the Moscow colonial empire forever.”