Regions and Republics will Turn on Moscow if They Sense the Center is Weakening even More Rapidly Now than They Did in 1991 to Get More Autonomy or Even Independence, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 2 – As Putin’s popularity has declined, the Kremlin leader has increasingly turned to repression to keep himself in power and deployed propaganda to obscure this change in order to prevent the population of the Russian Federation from concluding that the power of the center, now based on repression alone, is weakening and decide to take action, Abbas Gallyamov says.

            If people in the federal subjects draw that conclusion, the former Kremlin speechwriter now classified as a foreign agent says, they will seek to gain more power for themselves, with some even pressing for independence (idelreal.org/a/habirov-vytaschit-kuchu-pretenziy-k-moskve-na-raz-abbas-gallyamov-o-regionalnyh-elitah-i-rossii-posle-putina/33688921.html).

            And as was the case in 1991, such a shift could happen very quickly. Then in a matter of months Ukrainians went from saying they supported the continued existence of the USSR to demanding independence for their republic. Today, Gallyamov says, there are reasons to think such a process would occur even more rapidly than it did in Gorbachev’s time.

            On the one hand, he says as he argued four years ago, the war in Ukraine is likely to have had the effect of weakening ethnic Russian national identity, even though he concedes that this has been obscured by patriotic propaganda and that it can’t currently be measured given the ways in which repression makes sociological studies extremely problematic.

            And on the other, in the regions and republics, anti-Moscow anger is growing, with ethnic Russians almost as likely to share it as non-Russians both in predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays and in non-Russian republics where many ethnic Russians share the anti-Moscow feelings of the non-Russians they live amongst.

            Such anti-Moscow are feelings thus different and more powerful than what is usually described as nationalism, even though they typically receive less attention. Indeed, Gallyamov says, he prefers not to speak about nationalism at all because it conceals the hostility to the center which is broader and deeper than ethnic agendas of various national intelligentsias.

            According to him, anti-Moscow feelings may feed off and/or grow into nationalism, but in the initial stages, such concerns are likely to lead local elites who back Moscow lest they lose their jobs to change sides and thus speed up the devolution of power and even efforts to disintegrate the Russian Federation.

            In many ways, he concludes, the longer elites in the federal subjects remain dominated by anti-Moscow feelings rather than narrower ethno-nationalisms, the more success they are likely to have in gaining more autonomy or even independence because such a stance will make it harder for the Kremlin to mobilize against them.