Putin’s Russia Now ‘an Empire on Autopilot’ whose Fragmentation Must Be Overcome or whose Disintegration is Inevitable, Siberian Activist Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 10 – Russia today is a country deeply split between a capital “getting rich as an offshore jurisdiction” and the rest which is “getting poor as a forgotten province” and one being run as “an empire on autopilot” rather than the center making any effort to “defragment” things, a Siberian activist says. Unless that changes, Russia’s disintegration is inevitable.

    In an anonymous article for the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal, a writer who describes herself as “a Pomor Siberian Woman” says that the two Russias, one in Moscow and the rest beyond the ring road, now are at “a socio-political divide” with neither seeking to unite with the other (region.expert/autopilot/).

    Moscow is running the country as if on “autopilot,” talking about stability rather than development; and the Russia outside its limits takes payments and orders from the center but tries to go about its own life on its own, she continues. These two “’states’ cooperate ever less often.”

    The Siberian activist points out that pPoor regions are fed by budget injections, military orders and promises of development. But these are not investments – they are rations and a form of pacification. And temporary one at that” as they are not about growth but only “a delay in decay.”

    Indeed, “when economic policy is based on emissions and forced patriotism rather than on increasing productivity and modernization, the result is always the same: degradation. And Russia has already entered it that stage. Only it does not look like a collapse, but like disintegration.”

    As a result, Putin’s much-ballyhooed “power vertical” is “still alive; but it increasingly resembles a steel cable stretched to the limit, one that still holds but dos not integrate,” one that continues to “connect but does not unite.” As for the population outside of Moscow, it doesn’t protest massively but rather seeks to live “in personal isolation” taking and doing what it can.

    The center could move to end this fragmentation and unite the country by promoting development, but that would represent a break with its past practice and seems unlikely. And by remaining on “autopilot,” it is reducing federalism to “a decoration” and making it ever more likely that the regions will ignore the center as best they can.

    As for the regions, they now “live in a regime of colonial dependence: political, financial and linguistic. It is not surprising that it is from there, from the periphery, that timid voices about political subjectivity are increasingly being heard. We are not talking about revolutions yet but rather about the gradual peeling off of one’s own meanings from loyalty to the former whole.”

    One might hope that this system would one day “transform itself from within, democratically and painlessly” were it not for the fact that over the last century, that system has “refuted this assumption with enviable regularity” with Moscow responding to calls for unity “not with dialogue but with mobilization,” like an empire rather than a modern state.

    The real question, the Siberian writer says, is whether this disintegration will be managed or not. Given Moscow’s track record, the likelihood is that it will not; but the regions have an interest in having it managed lest they end up in a situation as bad or even worse than the one they find themselves in today.