By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
A Decentralized Russian Entity Can
Reform Itself
As Russian President
Vladimir Putin doubles down on his war in Ukraine, the
strength of his administration hangs in the balance. Some observers have
predicted that the Russian president could be overthrown; others even hope for
a breakup of the country. This raises the question: Could Russia splinter?
Russia’s geography
makes cohesiveness elusive. Spanning 11 time zones, it is the largest
nation in the world by landmass. Twenty percent of its population is not
ethnically Russian but belongs to local indigenous governments. While Moscow
was named the third most prosperous city in the world by
the UN-Habitat’s City Prosperity Index a few weeks before the war began in
February, a large part of the Siberian subcontinent is impoverished and
sparsely populated. In the
far north, declining extractive
industrial cities predominate. In the Far East, residents are economically more
connected to China, Japan, and South Korea than to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Under Putin’s leadership, power has been heavily centralized in
Moscow, and political and cultural autonomy in the provinces has been reduced.
Some Western observers
have been speculating about Russia’s collapse and agitating for one, seeing in
it a solution to Moscow’s international behavior. A
breakup, however, would not solve the West’s “Russia problem.” Any positive future for Russia and its neighbors, such as Ukraine and the rest of the world, will require the country to reinvent its
federalism from the inside rather than explode.
Ties That Do Not Always Bind
Russia has a
long history of leaders employing a mix of carrots and sticks to keep the
country’s far-flung regions united. Tsar granted cultural autonomy to some conquered nations
while violently forcing assimilation on others. The Soviet regime followed that
same playbook, sometimes celebrating national identities, sometimes deporting
and punishing peoples deemed unfaithful to the Soviet project.
A pendulum has also
swung between centralization and resistance to it in Russia. In the twentieth century, the country experienced only
two periods of relative decentralization: under
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, between 1953 and 1964, and between
perestroika and the end of Boris Yeltsin’s
presidency, from 1985 to 1999.
Once Putin took
over in 2000, he gradually reasserted Moscow’s control over Russian regions and
republics. Since then, growing socioeconomic disparities between residents in
rich metropolitan centers and provincial regions have generated tensions.
Moscow and its surrounding area consume more than their share of the state
budget. Siberian regions, in contrast, contribute more than they get
back. Moscow has amassed too much power, and distant areas have lost their
bureaucratic and financial autonomy, which has depressed regional
development. Even in the Krasnodar Krai, in Russia’s south—a place very
loyal to Putin—local leaders criticize Moscow-based bureaucrats for imposing
policies that are not in touch with on-the-ground realities.
Russia’s ethnic
mapping adds one more layer to this complexity. The country’s 21 autonomous ethnic republics do not
make for a unified whole. In some regions, ethnic Russians dominate (sometimes overwhelmingly;
for example, they make up two-thirds of the population in the
Siberian republic of Buryatia on Lake Baikal); in others, they are scarce
(around three percent in Dagestan, in Russia’s south). But with few
exceptions—such as in industrialized Tatarstan—they all not only face the
economic challenges that bedevil Russia’s remote provinces but
also harbor cultural
grievances. There is, for
example, growing frustration in these linguistically diverse regions about the
dominance of the Russian language. Local activists have called for history
textbooks to stop celebrating their nations’ supposed peaceful integration into
the Russian Empire. In the Arctic region, Indigenous leaders have clamored for
a voice in how extractive firms, such as oil companies, exploit what was once
their land.
The war in Ukraine
could increase calls for greater autonomy from Moscow. The
military mobilization in September has generated a backlash in areas
with large populations of ethnic minorities whose conscripts have already
suffered high casualty rates. Even the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan
Kadyrov, who presents himself as Putin’s loyal foot soldier, stopped the mobilization
in Chechnya earlier than leaders in other regions, announcing that his republic
had already fulfilled its quota. In September, the wife of Dagestan’s chief
mufti made a similar declaration.
More profound demographic
changes could also increase calls for decentralization. Of the 20 Russian
regions with positive population growth, 19 have relatively high percentages of
nonethnic Russians. This is especially the case for Dagestan and Chechnya in
the North Caucasus and Tuva in Siberia. In Sakha, the most northern republic of
Russia, the regional capital Yakutsk has seen its population double over 30
years, thanks to the exodus of young Yakuts from rural areas to the
city, making the city Russia’s most vibrant urban scene for
Indigenous culture.
Although their
grievances are genuine, Russia’s ethnic minorities are not clamoring for
secession. Surveys show Russian solid state patriotism in ethnic republics. It
could be argued that these populations would rally for independence if the
process were implemented. But it is more probable that a majority would
continue to see Russia as their homeland and would be content with being given
more cultural and political autonomy.
Don’t Hope For A Crack-Up
Despite the lack of
evidence supporting a breakup from within Russia, some Western policymakers and
observers have warmed to the possibility. The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a
government organization, known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which
counts senators, congressional representatives, and executive officials among
its members, declared decolonizing
Russia to be a “moral and strategic imperative.” In May, the anti-kleptocracy
journalist Casey Michel made a similar argument in The Atlantic: “The
West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to
decolonize Russia fully.” Sergej Sumlenny, writing for the pro-NATO think tank Center for
European Policy Analysis, asked this question: “Russia’s
Collapse? Good News for Everyone.”
Similar sentiments
have emanated from Poland and Ukraine. The Nobel Prize winner and former Polish
President Lech Walesa have advocated for the “60 peoples who got
colonized by Russia” to break away so that Russia would be reduced
to a country of about 50 million people (as opposed to one of 140 million). A
League of Free Nations as well as a Forum of the Free Peoples of Russia had
staged meetings in central Europe and called for “freeing imprisoned nations”—a
formulation that harks back to the tsarist period when dissidents derided
Russia as a “prison for nations,” and from the CIA-sponsored Anti-Bolshevik
Bloc of Nations during the Cold War.
Exiles from Russia’s
ethnic minority groups and Russian opposition figures composed the majority of
individuals who participated in these congresses. Meeting in Prague in July,
the Forum of the Free Peoples of Russia has, for example,
published a “Declaration on the Decolonization of Russia,” accompanied by
a map of a dismembered Russia with about 30 new republics.
But Western
policymakers should not fall into the trap of conflating political
exiles’ radical statements with the views of Russian citizens, which
are much more nuanced. It would also be wrong to assume that empowered
minorities would automatically help create a Russia more in sync with
Western norms. Ethnic minorities are less inclined toward democracy, human
rights, good governance, and pro-Western liberalism than the Russian ethnic
majority.
Russia’s leading
cultural divide is not between ethnic Russians and minorities but between
extensive urban areas and the rest of the country: industrially depressed
regions, rural provinces, and ethnic republics. Russia’s big cities have
shown growing signs of civil society engagement and grassroots pluralism
over the past decade—even if this trend has been repressed, especially since
the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Rural residents and minorities,
in contrast, tend to be more conservative in terms of cultural mores and more supportive of an authoritarian and
paternalistic regime. Muslim minorities are more likely to oppose abortion
rights, liberal divorce laws, and equality in the workplace. They are also more
likely to condemn NATO and the United States for their policies in the
Middle East.
Advocating for
Russia’s collapse is an erroneous strategy founded on a lack of knowledge of
what ties together Russian society in all its diversity. More important, such a
strategy also fails to consider that a Russian breakup would be disastrous for
international security. A
collapse would generate several civil wars. New statelets would fight with one
another over borders and economic assets. Moscow
elites, who control a vast nuclear arsenal, would react violently to
secessionism. The security services and law enforcement agencies would crush
any attempts at democratizing if that meant repeating the Soviet Union’s
dismemberment. Although decolonization sounds
like liberation, it would likely push the whole of Russia and ethnic minority
regions further backward.
To be sure, Russia’s
breakup is unlikely. In the aftermath of Putin’s disastrous war, however, the
regime will face growing pressures to decentralize. The best outcome would be for local
self-government—inscribed in the Russian constitution but scrapped by Putin—to
become a reality. This federalization of Russia would be possible only if
accompanied by a national reckoning on the legacy of Russia’s colonialism. This
reappraisal would be necessary for ethnic Russians as well as for minorities.
But as in the United States and Europe, that societal transformation will take
decades. It is worth pursuing, however. Only a Russia that decentralizes
politically and culturally can reform itself from the inside out.
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