By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
The Coming Russia Disintegration
Russia’s poor performance
on the Ukrainian battlefield, and the growing belief that Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat shouldn’t be taken at face value, have
emboldened Western analysts and Russian dissidents to call for the
“decolonization” of Russia itself publicly. They are referring to the vast
Russian Federation, the successor of the Soviet Union that consists of 83
federal entities, including 21 non-Slavic republics. Putin now faces a
punishing timeline. He cannot win the war quickly and may be incapable of
winning it. He may be able to maneuver toward an outcome he and his country can
accept, but that might be a
multiyear project. For ordinary Russians, that time will be marked by pain,
loss, and suffering. The war will
smother the pleasures of peace.
The Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with
members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and Departments of
Defense, state, and Commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and
strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled
politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European
Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this
month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41
different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is
ousted.
Western analysts are
increasingly pushing the theory that Russian
disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage
any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from
the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They
argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West was blindsided and
failed to fully capitalize on the significant opportunity. It must now
strategize to end the Russian threat instead of providing an off-ramp to
Putin.
But many others see a
rump Russia as a more severe threat to global peace and security and warn
against emasculating an enemy that, even when weaker than the West militarily
and economically, still possesses almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, armed
militias and vast resources trapped in a sparsely populated landscape bordering
China.
Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation,
recently wrote a book called Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture.
He argues that Western sanctions have squeezed the Russian
economy, and there is a “disquiet in numerous regions over their shrinking
budgets.” He advocates against providing security guarantees to
Putin.
Others who agree with
this thinking say Putin’s defeat in Ukraine will
destroy his strongman cult and expose him as a weak leader. Once the elites
in the non-Slavic republics sense Moscow is neither rich enough to fill their
pockets nor militarily strong enough to crush their dissent, they will
rise.
Sergej Sumlenny, director of the European
Resilience Initiative Center in Berlin and a former chief editor at Russian
business broadcaster RBC-TV, said that Putin had controlled the diverse nations
by corrupting their elite and instilling the dread of a Chechnya-style
conflict.
In 1991, after the
Soviet Union crumbled, 14 of Russia’s nations declared sovereignty. A few years
later, the bloody campaign in Chechnya was designed to discourage and dissipate
independence movements. At the same time, Putin’s heavily centralized policies
brought Moscow's supposedly autonomous republics under control.
But the war in Ukraine
has exposed Putin as a disillusioned, feeble man not worthy of the image he had
cultivated, Sumlenny argued.
He was seen [in
Russia] as a leader who could defeat anyone, and Ukraine was seen as so weak
that it would be defeated without any effort,” Sumlenny
told Foreign Policy over the phone from Berlin. “But now,
everyone, including the ruling elite in republics and regions, can see that
Moscow neither has the money nor a strong army.
“If you are a mafia
boss, the worst thing that can happen to you is that your subordinates suddenly
realize that you are not as strong as you claimed to be.”
There have been
murmurs of discontent and resentment in parts of the Russian Federation for
years. Five thousand miles away from Moscow, thousands in the Khabarovsk region
in Russia’s Far East protested for months on end in 2020 against the arrest of
their governor on spurious charges. They said the Kremlin stole their
vote when it ordered the apprehension of Sergei Furgal,
the man they elected to lead, and replaced him with a puppet.
The same year,
protesters in the Republic of Bashkortostan agitated against limestone mining
of what they deemed sacred hills. In 2018-19, people of the Arkhangelsk region,
700 miles north of Moscow, blocked roads and pitched tents to stop the Russian
government from using their territory as a dumping ground for Moscow’s
garbage.
In the Republic of
Tatarstan, a slow-burn nationalistic movement has been growing over the
imposition of the Russian language and being forbidden to switch to the Latin
alphabet from the Cyrillic script as Tatars fight for more cultural autonomy.
Bashkortostan has also protested to protect their local language and used slogans such as “No Language Means No Nation.”
Free Buryatia Foundation has been set up to help reservists avoid
recruitment in the Republic of Buryatia. At the same time, the Dagestan and Chechen republics, whose leader
Ramzan Kadyrov has pledged loyalty to Putin, have both said they have already
fulfilled their conscript quota. In the Sakha Republic, women came out in the
city of Yakutsk and chanted, “Let our children live!”
Experts cite protests
in the past to illustrate that tensions have long existed in the region. Some
believe the current anti-mobilization protests will unify and galvanize
independence movements across the Russian republics. That may be the case, but
thus far, the belief seems to rest more on hope than concrete intelligence or
evidence of solid underground movements.
There are more
counterarguments for every argument made by the proponents of imminent Russian
disintegration. The truth is that there is an information vacuum deliberately
maintained by Russia, and yet the absence of information doesn’t by itself
justify the theory.
Experts point out
that Russian citizens in the autonomous republics may fear Putin, but being
anti-Putin does not necessarily mean being anti-Russia. And even for those
states that genuinely desire to leave the Russian fold, there is no guarantee
what follows will be democratic or friendly to the West. Experts fear many
regions in the Russian Far East already lean toward China. Then there is the
concern of civil wars and regional dictators fighting over Russian nukes.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
the former CEO of Yukos Oil Company and then a political prisoner in Russia,
dismissed a peaceful disintegration of Russia and warned of regional wars.
“First, Russia is tied into a single transport and economic mechanism,”
Khodorkovsky said. He added that most of the resource-rich regions don’t have
access to the sea. “This creates a potential conflict between regions with
fewer people but vast resources and those with a large population and ways of
transporting resources.” These different regions will fight over borders and
try to take control of nuclear weapons—a nightmare for the West.
Khodorkovsky added
that another dictator would spring in Moscow instead of Putin to reclaim lost
territories. “Will the West cope with 15 to 20 new states that are at war with
each other and possess nuclear weapons and their means of delivery?” he asked.
“Will the West cope with the dictator who will unite the country again, at the
request of the army and the impoverished [Russian] population?”
Even though the
Kremlin accuses the West of fomenting trouble inside Russia routinely, talk of
Russian disintegration in Western capitals could raise nationalistic fervor and
make Russians rally behind Putin. It could also be exploited by far-right
supporters of Putin across Europe to strengthen anti-Americanism. Worse, it
could feed the disinformation machinery and be quoted by conspiracy theorists
online to build a parallel narrative.
Russia’s
disintegration is “highly improbable,” said Joana Deus Pereira, a senior
research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, Europe. Even such
insinuations in the West will increase “Putin’s appeal,” she added, giving some
perspective on how nationalist Russians might see them.
“After the Soviet
Union collapsed, Russians were told they were going to be closer to Europe,” she
said. “That didn’t happen, and it hurt Russian pride.
“In that context,
look at Putin’s first speech, where he said he would raise Russia from its
knees, from humiliation. There is a huge support for Putin from what we see and
follow. Any talk or efforts to split Russia will only help him,” Deus Pereira
said. Moreover, she said the non-Slavic republics and regions don’t want Russia
to disintegrate but only “recognition of their region, their flag and more
cultural independence within the Russian Federation.”
Those who believe a
Russian collapse is imminent and those who warn against it agree on one thing:
The Russian Federation has never indeed been a federation. Decentralization is
the key, Khodorkovsky said. Whenever the time comes for the West to lift
sanctions, it must negotiate with a government that has received legitimacy
from the regions.
“That will tip the
scales in the direction of federalization,” Khodorkovsky said.
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