Piontkovsky Asks ‘Will the Russian Federation Survive until 2028?’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 16 – Twenty-one years before the USSR disintegrated, Russian dissident Andrey Amalrik asked in a provocative essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” Now, émigré commentator Andrey Piontkovsky has asked an analogous question about Russia and suggested its demise may come in the next few years.

            Piontkovsky, who is always provocative and more often than not right, says that there are compelling reasons to think that the Russian Federation may not last until 2028, a date he appears to have selected less because of a Russian calendar than because that is when the next US presidential election is (charter97.org/ru/news/2026/9/16/698655/).

            In that way too, his new essay echoes Amalrik who selected 1984 for the demise of the USSR less because of events in the Soviet Union than because that was the title of George Orwell’s 1949 novel with that title on a dystopian totalitarian state and the discontents that kind of regime inevitably produces.

            But the parallels between Amalrik’s analysis and Piontkovsky’s are deeper than that. Both see the demise of the country they are talking about as the result of the conjunction of the actions of foreign powers and the bad policy choices the Kremlin leadership has made about how to deal with the world around it.

            And the reason that Piontkovsky times the demise of the Russian Federation as being so imminent is not just in his words that “the Russian Federation is already dead” but that the two most important foreign powers are coming together in their response with the consequences of Kremlin policies beyond its capacity to sustain and are thus destroying that state from within.