Kazakhstan Portal Says Chinese Analysts have Concluded Russia Today Resembles the USSR in Its Final Years

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 9 – Analysts around the world have reported about the way in which Chinese scholars have studied the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggesting that Beijing hoped to learn from that event and thus being in a position to avoid something similar happening to China.

            But they have devoted less attention to Chinese commentaries suggesting that what is happening in Russia today resembles what happened three decades ago. An exception to that is a Kazakh commentary which suggests Chinese analysts now believe that the Russian Federation could follow the USSR into the dustbin of history unless it changes course.

            According to Kazakhstan’s Altyn-Orda portal, analysts in China believe that Russia once again suffers from the two key factors which brought down the USSR: an overreliance on earnings from the export of raw materials, the price of which it does not control; and deteriorating relations with foreign states that are stronger than Russia (altyn-orda.kz/kitajskie-analitiki-vsyo-chashhe-sravnivayut-rossiyu-s-pozdnim-sssr/).

            “If  Russia isn’t able to reduce the raw-materials dependence of its economy and at the same time continues its course of harsh confrontation with the West,” Chinese analysts believe in the Altyn-Orda account, “then the country may encounter still more serious consequences than even those which the Soviet Union suffered at the end of the 20^th century.”

            The Kazakhstan article says that Chinese analysts are not saying that Russia is on the brink of disintegration now but rather is behaving in ways that unless changed make that or some other disaster possible in the coming years unless Moscow makes progress in changing one or both of these policy lines.