For Five Reasons, the Russian Empire Won’t Revive This Time Around, Independent Ukrainian Blogger Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 16 – For much of the last millenium, Russia has experienced cycles of imperial decay followed by imperial rebuilding so frequently that many both there and elsewhere assume the collapse of the empire in 1991 is currently on the path to the restoration of a new empire, Warden Null says.

            But there are five reasons why that won’t happen this time around, the independent Ukrainian blogger writing under this pen name says; and so Russia faces the prospect of either creating a genuine federation based on democratic values or a slow decay into a situation like the one on view in Somalia (region.expert/track/).

            The five reasons that the empire won’t come back again, Null says, are as follows:

·       First, over the last quarter century, “Russia hasn’t been building a new empire,” despite all the rhetoric coming out of Moscow and the fears expressed elsewhere. Instead, “it has been living off the corpse of the previous one” – and across the board, that resource is rapidly running out and can’t be easily replenished.

·       Second, Russia today doesn’t have the people it needs for the restoration of the empire. “Any aggressive autocracy capable of mobilization relies on surplus biological energy: it needs young, cheap and passionate ‘meat.’ In 1917, Russia was a young country and had such people. Now, it is “an aging, urbanized country” and doesn’t.

·       Third, Stalinist mobilizational methods – the use of terror and force – won’t work anymore. Stalin could get people to dig canals and fell trees by pointing guns at them; his successors can’t get computer engineers to come up with new programs or chips by doing the same thing. That won’t work, Null argues.

·       Fourth, to build a new empire, Russia would need to be a sovereign “power center.” The Soviet Union was, but Russia today “is sovereign only on television.” In reality as ever more people can see, It is absolutely, totally and humiliatingly dependent on China” and even on North Korea. That isn’t a recipe for empire building.

·       And fifth, any such imperial project needs an idea people feel is worth dying for. The Russian Empire had one as did the Soviet Union; but what the Kremlin offers now is “a schizophrenic mix of Ilyin, Soviet flags, priests at cosmodromes and hatred of gays. “That’s not an ideiology.” Instead,  it is cynicism and “a new imperial cycle” can’t be built on that.

According to Null, there are only two paths for Russia in the future, the difficult one of building a democratic and federal system or the continuing slow but increasing degradation of the system as it devours resources rather than creating new ones with no prospects for anything better. The second path unfortunately is far more likely.