Regionalism in Russia Need Not Be Ethnically Based or Secessionist, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 5 – Two notions, both inherited from late Soviet times, dominate the way in which many in Russia’s capitals and abroad view regionalism, Vadim Shtepa says. On the one hand, they assume it must be ethnically based; and on the other, they think that its raison d’etre is to promote and pursue separatism. 

            But neither of these notions is true, the editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal which focuses on regionalism in Russia today. Instead, many regional movements are not based on ethnicity; and many of them are not pursuing independence but rather genuine federalism and autonomy (region.expert/regionalist/).

            A classic example of such misconceptions is a recent essay by Valery Panyushkin who insists he is not a regionalist because his desire for his home city of St. Petersburg to have more authority is neither ethnically based nor based on the conviction that the only way to achieve that is by pursuing independence (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/03/25/sto-yazikov-ili-ugrozhaet-li-rossii-raspad-a190800).

            “Residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg habitually view themselves as ‘more progressive’ than the inhabitants of Russia’s other regions,” Shtepa says; but as Panyushkin’s article shows, many of their residents “remain stuck in the categories of the Soviet era,” including the idea that all regionalism is ethnically based and focused on separatism.

            That was not true even in the waning days of the USSR; and because of the departure of the former non-Russian republics, most of whose movements toward independence were rooted in ethnicity, the relationship between regionalism, on the one hand, and ethnicity and separatism, on the other, has been much reduced.

            In the three decades since the USSR disintegrated, there have been many cases which show that “Russian regionalism is by no means ethnic in nature” or always about secession Among the most prominent are the case of the Urals Republic, the Shiyes protests against a trash dump, and Khabarovsk protests in support of their governor who had been arrested by the FSB.

            To understand what is going on in Russian regions, Shtepa argues, one needs to remember that and not just over-remember the past and assume that nothing has changed from a time when the USSR was only 50 percent ethnic Russian to one where it is now closes to 80 percent. 

            Russian regions do want a very different relationship with Moscow than the one they have now, but they do so not because of ethnicity or out of a conviction that only independence will give them the chance to achieve that. Instead, they want a new deal between the center and the federal subjects, some of which may want to leave but many of which seek only genuine federal arrangements.