Gas Crisis in Russia Triggering Beginnings of a ‘New Parade of Sovereignties’ There, Kazakh Portal Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 4 – Voronezh Oblast is restricting the sale of gasoline in large containers to prevent its export to other regions, Kazakhstan’s Altyn Orda portal says, a sign that Russia’s regions “are beginning to defend their resources from each other” and one that may lead to an updated version of “the parade of sovereignties” which weakened Russia decades ago.

            “As long as there were enough resources,” the portal continues, “the regions can and do live within a common system; but when there is a threat of a shortage, everyone begins to ask a simple question: why should we give up our own to others if tomorrow there may not be enough left for us?” (altyn-orda.kz/novyj-parad-suverenitetov-nachinaetsya-s-benzina/).

            Limiting the sale of gasoline in large quantities can lead to limiting the sale of all kinds of other things that may be in short supply; and “that ishow an economic crisis gradually turns into a political one” and thus recalls what happened at the end of Soviet times and the beginning of post-Soviet ones in Russia.

            Forty years ago, Altyn Orda points out, “the parade of sovereignties began not with the one-time collapse of a huge country. At first, the republics and autonomy began to speak of the priority of their laws, their resources and their interests with each wanting to dispose of what was on its territory.”

            But as that pattern spread, what “at first looked like a struggle for economic rights gradually became a political distancing from the center” and thus marked “the beginning of the end of the Soviet vertical” and a threat to the Russian successor state that Putin has worked so hard to reverse.

            Voronezh Oblast has “not declared sovereignty,” of course; but its actions point to something that must be of concern to Moscow, the desire of each region, at a time of economic crisis to “keep what resources it has for itself.” Today, this resource is gasoline; tomorrow, it may be many others.

            Consequently, what is happening in Voronezh is “not necessarily the disintegration of the state; but it is how the loss of trust in a single system begins,” something that Putin and others in the Kremlin certainly have not forgotten and that they will necessarily see as a dangerous development they must counter before it is too late.