Excessive centralization has not helped Russia become a peaceful and prosperous country.
Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine , showed the world that “revived” Russia is necessarily imperialist Russia. This breathed new life into the debate over whether to “decolonize” or “defederalize” Russia in order to bury its imperial ambitions and reduce the military threat.
The collapse of modern Russia, following the example of the USSR, is considered a possible or even desirable result of the failed invasion of Ukraine, – writes Leonid Bershidsky on the pages of Bloomberg. Some regret that the United States did not set that goal in the 1990s, when post-Soviet Russia was in ruins and unable to cope with the tiny region that wanted to become independent, Chechnya. Bershidsky writes that these discussions cause him deja vu. After all, it is very easy to imagine the division of Russia into a number of new state formations, especially after the Soviet Union, it would seem, disintegrated with such ease.
In 2013, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, who most accurately predicted the rise of fascism in Russia, wrote about the Russian Empire in his novel Telluria as follows: In 1917, and collapsed into several states of normal size, everything would be entirely in the spirit of modern history, and the peoples held by the tsarist government would finally gain their post-imperial national identity and live freely. But everything went differently. ” In Telluria, Russia was eventually divided into mostly autocratic “managed-sized” principalities after a series of internal upheavals. But even Sorokin did not see the lost invasion as a trigger for the process of disintegration of the Russian Federation. However, defeat in Ukraine, combined with economic pressure from the West, can realistically provoke an economic catastrophe like the one that triggered the fall of the USSR. It could spur centrifugal tendencies that Putin was so proud to stifle by building his “power vertical.”There are many reasons why the disintegration of the federation is good even for the Russian people, especially for those who do not live in Central Russia. In a sense, Putin has not simply launched a debate on the division of the country by his reckless attack. He also made this process possible from an intellectual point of view, when he began to make statements about “historical Russia”, which, in his opinion, includes a large part of modern Ukraine. If we can discuss the core of the Russian state instead of the country within its modern borders, then we can say that this core is much smaller than modern Russia. Especially if we reject all the imperial conquests, including those that were won before 1721, when Russia officially became an empire. Much of Siberia falls into this category.
The incorporation of some territories into the RSFSR, which became the Russian Federation after the death of the USSR, was as much a “catastrophe” of Soviet times as the high-level statehood of the former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Uzbekistan or Moldova. Tatarstan is just such a case. Last year, 55% of schoolchildren in Kazan indicated Tatar as their mother tongue. So does the region conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 really belong to the core of Russia? Is he somehow more attached to the country than, say, Kazakhstan? Many locals will say no. The Republic of Tuva, which joined the USSR only in 1944, experienced a series of separatist riots in the 1990s. Does it definitely belong to the historical core of Russia? And Dagestan, conquered in the early 19th century, where less than 4% of students study Russian as their mother tongue? Would all these republics be independent states if the communist authorities of the USSR appointed them “union republics” and not “autonomies” within Russia?
All these issues feed politicians in countries that Russia considers geopolitical enemies. Incitement to nationalist or anti-colonial sentiment in a Russia weakened by a failed war makes sense on several levels and even more than in the 1990s. The coming to power of an aggressive, irrational leader in Moscow is no longer a theoretical threat. It is very easy to imagine a repetition of such a scenario. The best way to defend against this possibility is to defeat Putin militarily and ideologically. Using the same historical arguments with which the Russian autocrat justifies his imperialist ambitions will turn his own ideological weapons against him. The war against Ukraine has shown that the Russian army cannot provide troops and fight effectively on vast Ukrainian territory. What will Putin do if a number of countries inside an even bigger Russia suddenly emerge?
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It can be argued that the partition of Russia will not really deprive it of revanchist opportunities to start rebuilding all the lost republics again. The threat will not go away. This is exactly what she did after the Bolshevik coup and the Brest-Litovsk peace. And now she is trying again to regain control of neighboring countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A reduced Russia will not necessarily remain in this state. Radical nationalists and populists will gain even more power after the humiliating fall of the country. In addition, Russia will still have its nuclear arsenal. But those who consider “decolonization” of Russia do not think for centuries to come. A few decades will be enough to integrate Russia's neighbors into the Western world and build a strong defense against new imperialist attacks.
“As a Russian, I have a strong feeling about talking about the dismemberment of my country, as if Russia is a cancer patient lying unconscious on the operating table. And only a few amputations can stop the growth of the tumor even more. I don't like the idea that the only way for us to stop being a threat to our neighbors is to fall apart. And I hope that this is not the imperialist in me protesting against this view. Russia's vastness and diversity is the basis of our statehood in the modern sense. “Understandable dimensions” are not about us. But at the same time, on an intellectual level, I understand that the disintegration of the Russian Federation could benefit many Russian people, “the author writes.
Boris Yeltsin offered Russia's regions “as much sovereignty as they can swallow.” Putin, on the other hand, strengthened his “vertical” by rebuilding the centralization that sucked all the blood out of Russia's periphery. Only 23 of Russia's 85 regions have not received federal subsidies this year. And most of them are inhabited by ethnic Russians (Tatarstan is an exception). This gives the impression that most provinces, especially those with distinct national identities, will be helpless if they are separated from the center. But this is only the essence of Putin's system, which sucks money out of the periphery and then “generously” returns some.
Viktor Suslov, an economist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has done a great job of finding out why this is happening. In 2018, he and his colleagues claimed that Russia's Central Federal Region, which includes Moscow, operates like a black hole, absorbing 35% more resources from other regions than it returns. Siberia, the Urals, the Far East and the Northwest (which includes St. Petersburg) – each of these regions gives 10-13% more than it receives. Not surprisingly, Suslov works in Novosibirsk – the center of one of the regions from which the “big Moscow pump” pumps all the juices of life.
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It is not known whether a fairer distribution of resources can be achieved, as well as stopping the mass migration of people who go to Moscow for money, without radical decentralization, and perhaps even the complete disintegration of Russia. Some Russian regions may even build smarter political systems instead of Moscow's quasi-monarchy. Or they may not succeed, as the experience of the 1990s showed, when regional “tsars” became more authoritarian than the Kremlin.
In the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, the rebellious spirit of the discoverers and former convicts is still alive. Omsk artist Damir Muratov created the flag of the United States of Siberia: white snowflakes on a blue background, as well as green and white stripes. And that's more than a reference to the work of Jasper Jones. One can really imagine a country over which such a flag would be raised.
“I still hope without hope that democracy, the end of aggressive imperialism, equal territorial development and true equality between all ethnic groups are possible on today's Russian borders. However, this hope can be nothing more than an atavism. Russia does not tolerate its size. She may never learn that way, “the author admits.
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