No Single Region or Republic in Russia Will Be Able to Achieve Independence without the Cooperation of Others, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Not a single federal subject will be able to achieve independence  from the Russian Federation on its own, Vadim Shtepa says, because if any one region or republic seeks independence on its own, the center will be able to suppress it as it has done in Khabarovsk, Ingushetia, Bashkortostan and elsewhere.

            What is needed for success, the editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal Region.Expert says, is for cooperation among them. The Shiyes protests showed the way, with activists from many regions coming together to form “a kind of Maidan” within Russia that forced Moscow to back down (eastjournal.net/archives/137396 in Italian; reposted in Russian at region.expert/interregional).

            “This was a rare but instructive example of the victory of civil society over the empire,” Shtepa continues. And it is worth recalling that “the anti-imperial protests in Estonia at the end of the 1980s also began with ecological issues” that attracted attention and support far beyond the borders of that republic alone.

            Unfortunately, what is called “the Russian opposition” isn’t prepared to promote such cooperation because it sees that as a threat to the unity of the country and to its own plans to replace the bad tsar Putin with a good tsar drawn from within its own ranks, something that will do little to help the regions and republics escape from imperial rule.