Even a Future Russian Republic without the North Caucasus, the Middle Volga, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East would be Far Too Big for Many Regional and Ethnic Activists

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 11 – At a Warsaw meeting of former Russian legislators now living in emigration, Andrey Moyseyev from Nizhny Novgorod, proposed that a future Russian nation state should include only the predominantly ethnic Russian regions of the European portion of the existing Russian Federation.

            It should allow the republics of the North Caucasus, the Middle Volga, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East to become independent countries, one of the most radical proposals ever for how the map of a post-RF future should be drawn (wschody.net/delit-po-russki-politemigranty-v-varshave-razoshlis-vo-vzglyadah-na-prekrasnye-graniczy-budushhego/).

            But instead of criticizing Moyseyev’s proposal for failing to include many of the regions and republics he suggested should be allowed to go their own way, some of the other former deputies argued that he was including too many and that a Russian national state should be much smaller than the one he outlined.

            That is because, they said, many of the nominally predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays he would include within a Russian nation state in fact had been conquered by central Russian governments and turned into colonies and their peoples too want to have an independent existence. Unless they are allowed to go, these speakers said, a Moscow-centric state will remain imperial in its nature and impulses.

            Not only do such statements highlight the fissiparousness of what are nominally ethnic Russian territories, but they demonstrate just how radically these émigré deputies now differ from the image of Russia from Kaliningrad to Chukhotka that Vladimir Putin currently promotes as part of his Russian world.