Russians who have Fled Putinism Should Buy an Island and Create a New Russian-Speaking Nation, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 8 -- All too many of the million Russians who have fled Putin’s regime believe that it will soon collapse and that they will be able to return to a beautiful new Russia. Such optimism is likely “premature,” Vadim Shtepa says; and they need to consider alternatives rather than fall into despair.

            One of those options is to purchase an island somewhere in the world, one in which they could create a genuine alternative to the Russia Putin rules, the editor of the Tallinn-based regionalist portal, Region.Expert says (svoboda.org/a/russkiy-tayvanj-vadim-shtepa-o-postrossiyskoy-pragmatike/33021658.html, reposted at  region.expert/ru-island/).

            Before such a possibility is dismissed out of hand, he continues, those who have left Putin’s Russia need to remember that such an island could really be created much as English speakers did when they broke away from the United Kingdom and Spanish speakers did when they broke from Spain.

            Such an island state could become “a new small Russian-language country which would correspond to all the norms of international law and be a democratic parliamentary republic,” Shtepa says. It would likely be admitted to the EU and “by the very fact of its existence would demolish the Kremlin’s doctrine of ‘a Russian world.’”

            While such an island state would speak the same language as the country centered on Moscow, it would be significantly different as far as politics, economics and “the main thing psychology” are concerned. If it remained committed to imperial great-power chauvinism, “there would be no sense” for it to exist and it would be absorbed by the Muscovite state.

            Some will object that “we don’t need another country while Russia exists,” but that challenge can be dispensed with by recalling the multitude of English- and Spanish-speaking countries far from their ‘historical motherlands” and by pointing out that those who form such a Russian island state, one like Taiwan or Singapore, must pass an important psychological test.

            They must recognize and act on the proposition that, although they are Russian speakers, “the Muscovite kingdom and the Petersburg empire are not ‘our country’” and that those willing to take this step will be engaged in creating “an entirely different civilization,” just as the Americans have done.