Disintegration of Russian Federation after Loss in Ukraine ‘Defeat for Putin’s Empire’ but Not ‘End of Russia,’ Leya and Taskin Say

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 10 – Zbigniew Brzezinski’s observation that “Russia can be an empire or it can be a democracy but it can’t be both at the same time” remains true to this day and should be the basis for judging all plans to transform Putin’s Russian Federation into something better, Aaron Lea and Borukh Tashkin say.

    The two Russian commentators make that the starting point in their review of five recent articles about Russia’s future, articles containing arguments that in all except one case fail to recognize that reality (moscowtimes.ru/2025/05/10/rossiya-vmesto-putina-raspad-dezintegratsiya-protektorati-alyansi-konfederatsii-a163021).

    Lea and Tashkin say that almost all of the suggestions of how Russia should be transformed into a democracy at peace with the world lack one important feature: they do not say who will do the work of carrying out this task. It certainly won’t be the current elites who benefit from the existing empire, and it won’t be a population cowed by repression and propaganda.

`    “Consequently,” they continue, “all projects without an answer to the question ‘who’s going to do this?’ aren’t programs but drafts for the archives, architecture without builders and dreams without will and weapons.” That in turn means something else: “there are no hopes for reform within.”

    One option that some calling for reform suggest is the integration of Russia in its current borders into Russia, but there is no basis for that, the two analysts suggest. Russia is too large and too different for Europe to absorb, and Russia’s elites and masses aren’t prepared to join the West unless compelled to do so.

    Such proposals suffer from “one fatal shortcoming: they preserve the territorial unity of Russia” which ever more analysts are recognizing is “the root of its authoritarianism” because “the Russian Federation is not a country but a deception, a colonial empire masquerading as a state.”

    But according to Leya and Tashkin, “Moscow is no longer the center” of this Eurasian empire and its “disintegration has already begun,” a process that has been dramatically accelerated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an act that means Moscow no longer attracts those around it but “drives them away.”

    Russians have become “an ethnos without a center” and Russia is now an increasingly “broken structure,” they argue. There is no “people” in Russia, “there is no nation or idea or binding – except for fear.” And the Putin regime has made things far worse than they were in the USSR in the 1980s.

    “In Russia nationality policy is in ruins, the institutes of cultural equality have been eliminated, the lifts for small peoples destroyed from above,” they write; and then they observe that “the USSR for all its terrors established a certain national balance. Todays’ Russia is a dictatorship of the titular majority, trampling on tall the other ethnoses.”

    This leads t the conclusion that “all talk about ‘a united democratic Russia is an effort to apply makeup to a disintegrating territory and that it is much more honest to recognize that this construction will not longer work” while keeping in mind that there are no domestic forces available to transform the Russian Federation.

    Without outside efforts and the disintegration of the Russian Federation, it will remain what it is, an authoritarian regime that oppresses its own people and threatens the world beyond its borders.  Consequently, the world has a compelling interest in promoting the disintegration of Russia.

    Despite Putin’s words, “the disintegration of the USSR was not the end of the world, and the disintegration of the Russian Federation won’t be either.” Instead, it will represent yet another exit “from a colonial matrix.” Moreover, after the disintegration, a new and different kind of reintegration may be possible.

    As a result, they write, this process won’t be “a geopolitical catastrophe” but eliminate the threats the Russian Federation presents and give hope to its peoples.

    How can this happen? The first thing is to ensure that Putin loses in Ukraine and that the West recognizes that the demise of the empire will be messy and varied but far less dangerous than its continued existence. De-Nazifying and de-nuclearizing the remains of the Muscovite state will be difficult, but far less so than not addressing them now rather than later.