Kremlin Foolishly and Unnecessarily Creating Grounds for Separatism in Russia, El Murid Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 14 – The Putin regime is busily fighting the manifestations of separatism like the display of regional flags even as it foolishly and unnecessarily creates the grounds for separatism by its own policies, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid.
    “Separatism arises as an extreme reaction to the actions of a government which oppresses its regions, deprives them of the chance for independent development, and sucks the resources out of them  -- that is, when it acts as a metropolis to colonies,” El Murid argues (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/22918 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=678760380E05F).
    In almost every country, there are some people in the regions who call for separatism, he continues; “but in a normal country, they are always marginal and do not have any serious support so there is no particular point in banning them because the absence of such support means that they are no threat.”
    However, “if ‘the central government’ creates the conditions for separatism, then it will arise regardless of prohibitions” about its superficial manifestations. Indeed, “at some point, it and no other position “will become the defining idea” and that state as an integral whole will come to an end.
    Under Putin, El Murid suggests, “the Russian government has lost the ability to govern. Moscow can still control through prohibitions, terror and repression, but it can no longer manage. Control achieved by these means will work for a time; but as soon as it weakens, the situation will change quickly and dramatically.”
    Russia should be “a natural federation, a natural union of regions,” the commentator argues; and “attempts to create a centralized administration on its territory” have made sense only when Russia was growing territorially or when it was undergoing a radical shift from one kind of socio-economic-political order to another.
    The Kremlin may imagine that it is doing both, but its military expansion is costing it more than it can afford to pay and it has no development project for the country’s transformation. Hence, its hyper-centralization is an increasingly dangerous mistake in a country that should be by its diverse nature a federation.
    Russia’s problems, despite what the Kremlin seems to think, are not with the flag of the Urals Republic which it has now banned but with Moscow policies that are forcing ever more people in the regions to think about separatism if genuine federalism remains an impossible goal under the current ruler, El Murid says.
    And he reminds his readers of something most of them have forgotten: “Today’s Russia arose precisely because of the actions of separatists led by Yeltsin who was behind the declaration of Russian sovereignty. That day is now a national holiday” not only of Russia but of the power of separatism if the center misuses its powers.