The end of Russia as we know it
Russia's neighbors - and many nations still part of Russia itself - will not forget and may never forgive.
It recently occurred to me that if Vladmir Putin had dropped dead of a heart attack in 2007, he’d likely go down as the greatest leader in Russian history. Since the one who freed the serfs (and even that accomplishment had an asterisk next to it), at least.
Don’t get me wrong: his authoritarian instincts were there from the beginning. But after the stagnation of the seventies, decline of the eighties and chaos of the nineties, Russia under Putin’s leadership had become something resembling a functioning state by the late 2000s. (High oil prices certainly helped, with at least a little bit of the wealth trickling down to the masses after the yachts and Premier League clubs had been purchased.)
Even for a few years after the 2008 war in Georgia and Ukraine invasion 1.0 in 2014, Putin might still have gone down as one of better Russian rulers in recent memory. It’s an extremely low bar to clear, of course.
Gorbachev’s Glasnost inadvertently imploded the Soviet Union. Lenin and Stalin (who was Georgian, not Russian) founded the USSR and led it to superpower status, but at unspeakable cost. Khruschchev opened the books on Stalin’s crimes and oversaw early triumphs in the space race, but went back and forth on reform and was deposed by his own comrades. Brezhnev (a Ukrainian) was a combination of Grandpa Simpson and Psyduck, Yeltsin went from hero to embarrassment faster than Elon Musk, Andropov died shortly after taking office, and Chernenko (another Ukrainian) might have been legally dead before taking office.
Oh, Russia. So many great achievements in art, literature, music, the sciences…and forever cursed by deeply flawed if not disastrous leadership.
And here we are, as 2022 draws to a close, and the country’s reputation - especially among its neighboring countries, even the ones it hasn’t yet invaded - is worse than ever, writes Timothy Garton-Ash in The Guardian:
The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the “Russian world” as the Russian leader himself has.
This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin’s war. “I was a Russian speaker until 24 February,” said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find “the spirit of freedom” in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.
Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mariupol, had suffered without heat, light or water in a cellar under constant bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not merely speaks much better Russian than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.
Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”
This may be unsurprising in Ukraine, a country suffering from a Russian war that is now primarily directed against the civilian population. But the same thing is happening across much of the territory of the former Russian (and subsequently Soviet) empire – which, since the early 2000s, Moscow has tried to reimagine as the russkiy mir, or Russian world.
In Georgia, a strong resentment of neoimperial Russia is more than understandable, since Russia has occupied roughly – a fifth of the country’s sovereign territory (in Abkhazia and South Ossetia) since 2008. But following the invasion of Ukraine, that hostility has enveloped almost all Russians. Ironically enough, this impacts the many tens of thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia precisely to avoid being conscripted into fighting in Putin’s war against Ukraine. Georgians ask: why don’t you protest back home? Or as one banner put it, “Putin is killing people in Ukraine while Russians eat khachapuri in Georgia.” (Khachapuri is the distinctive Georgian cheese bread.)
[…]
In the end, Vladimir Putin will go down in history not merely as the man who failed to restore the Russian empire, but as the destroyer of the Russian world.
Spend enough time browsing Eastern European social media circles, and you’ll get some serious “former Yugoslavia” vibes. Admittedly I can’t say their Twitter is any more representative of the general population than our own, but the openly stated rage is deeply unnerving.
(That’s just the stuff in English. I can’t imagine what they’re posting in their native languages.)
Even knowing what we know about Russia’s invasion and war crimes, I still find it upsetting and sometimes (when it’s Russian opponents of Putin being targeted, based on ignorance, nitpicking and ever-shifting goal posts) anger-inducing.
And yet, what did Putin and his cronies expect to happen, especially after Russia’s long history of invading, occupying, annexing, provoking and propagandizing these countries? If he really believed Ukrainians would willingly lay down their arms and give up their hard-won independence, and that Poles and Estonians and Georgians wouldn’t be at all bothered by it, he’s delusional.
Or he never believed it at all and just decided Russia is entitled to have its empire back. Or maybe some combination of both.
The thing is, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is still kind of an empire.
We all have an idea in our head of what a “Russian” looks like, but the Russian Federation is actually a remarkably diverse country, as you should expect from a state which borders both Norway and North Korea. The Russian federal arrangement is more complicated than the NASCAR playoff points system, so I’m not completely sure how it works, but I know it includes many sub-national “republics” based on different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. There’s even a Jewish Autonomous Oblast, originally established by Stalin.
It’s in Siberia, of course. What were you expecting?
As much as Putin may believe (or is indifferent to) these subject peoples are perfectly happy and grateful to be part of Mother Russia, many of them are no happier about it than were Ukrainians and Estonians before 1991. The Chechnya conflicts are well known even in the West - and have resulted in both sides in the Ukraine war having many Chechens in their ranks - but there are many other powder kegs ready to go off:
Now, as Russia barrels toward defeat, questions and conversations have begun circling about Russia’s future, in a way we haven’t seen since the Soviet collapse. Legacies of Russian colonialism have resurged to relevance—and not just in former Soviet republics. Over the past few months, those non-Russian populations still considered part of Russia have begun having far more pointed, and far more pronounced, conversations about their roles in the Russian Federation—and what future, if any, they should have with Moscow. The viability of the Russian Federation is, suddenly, very much up in the air.
[…]
…as conversations about the disintegration of the Russian Federation pick up pace, prominent Western voices apparently can’t help but swoop in to tell these populations still colonized by Moscow that they shouldn’t dream of any kind of independence—that their states would, much as Bush told Ukrainians decades ago, never be viable.
In August, George Washington University professor Marlene Laruelle said that the “idea that ethnic minorities will create stable, prosperous and happy states is more than naive.” More recently, and more specifically, British scholar Mark Galeotti shared his thoughts on potential Russian fracture on his popular podcast over the weekend. In the North Caucasus—scene of Russia’s first neo-imperial wars in the 1990s, when Moscow resorted to torture and despotism to smother Chechnya’s push for independence—Galeotti said that any constellation of newly independent nations “would not on the whole be at all viable states.”
Galeotti then turned eastward, to the Sakha Republic, a sprawling Siberian polity that exists as the traditional home of the Sakha nation. “Physically, it is the biggest republic within the Russian Federation,” Galeotti said, outlining the scope and scale of Sakha, which runs nearly one-third of the size of the U.S. But with a population of only one million citizens, an independent Sakha “is not in any way a viable state,” Galeotti claimed.
Neither Laruelle nor Galeotti outlined their reasons why any new states in the North Caucasus or Sakha would not be “viable.” But the subtext is impossible to miss. Much as Bush chided Ukrainians in 1991, Western voices have now begun explaining to the ethnic minorities colonized by Russia many centuries ago that a future with Moscow is their only option. Any restructuring of Russia’s territorial integrity, these voices claim, will result in failed states—and potentially worse.
Casey Michel, in The New Republic (which I was surprised to see is still around, and even more surprised to see posting some actually good articles) chides “Westsplainers” who try to talk down talk of dissolution and independence:
But the entire framing behind this kind of “Westsplaining” is analytically stunted. Not only is it ironic—it’s the Russian Federation, not Moscow’s colonies, that grows less and less viable by the day—but it also forces Western policymakers to miss the opportunities that present themselves. For instance, instead of building early, deep links with Ukraine, the U.S. routed much of its post-Soviet policy through Moscow, not least out of a concern for the “viability” of the newly independent states. Likewise, the emphasis on downplaying these colonies’ “viability” has also led Western policymakers to miss a bigger story: Russia’s inherent fragility. As Mikhail Khodarkovsky, one of the leading scholars on Russian colonialism, recently wrote, “Centuries of pent-up bitterness and frustration over rule by Moscow may spill into a military confrontation and civil war.… If and when that happens, Russia will fall apart as the empire of the czars and Soviet Union did.”
It is also the case that these claims against the viability of new states are wrong. Take Sakha, for example: Russians first began slaughtering the Sakha in the 1630s, with Russian forces requiring over a half-century to finally subdue them and begin seizing their land, installing slavery, torture regimes, and routine hostage-taking as matters of course. “To the Sakha, Russian rule brought all the usual ills,” Anna Reid wrote. During that half-century of initial Russian conquest, the Sakha population fell by as much as 70 percent.
And yet, despite the decimation, the Sakha survived, rebuilding their population base. They also fought. Century after century, Sakha launched revolt after revolt against Moscow and St. Petersburg, first against tsarist officials and then against the Bolsheviks. During the late Soviet period, things were hardly better: “Frequent ethnic brawling” was routine, with “no-go areas for Slavs” in many Sakha towns. Things were so bad that Soviet troops were forced to intervene in 1979, with ethnic riots rocking the region a few years later. All of it culminated in the early 1990s, when Sakha leadership affirmed Sakha’s right to secede, to form its own army, and to declare that all Sakha natural resources belonged “to the Sakha population.”
And what natural resources they are: billions of dollars in diamond mines, deep deposits of gold, a hydrocarbon industry that is “of great importance … for all of Russia.” Toss in sea access—which will only improve as the Arctic Sea, unfortunately, warms—and the Sakha Republic suddenly begins looking far more “viable” than many of the former Soviet republics, all of which have now enjoyed decades of independence. But thanks to the Kremlin’s neo-imperialism, much of Sakha remains impoverished and underdeveloped—and Sakha residents have now become cannon fodder for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
None of this is to say Sakha independence is, or even necessarily should be, forthcoming. That is a decision for Sakha residents, and especially those among the Sakha nation butchered and bludgeoned by Russian forces for centuries. But the Westsplainers have it all wrong: The Sakha Republic has more than enough cohesion, resource base, and historical identity to emerge as the first fully independent Siberian nation. These notions that Sakha—or any of the other extant Russian colonies—would not be “viable” are founded on farce, not facts.
Vast resource wealth won’t necessarily make a country prosperous, as illustrated by [insert African country here], but the point is well taken. If Iceland can be a country, there’s no reason Sakha, with three times the popular and much more territory, cannot.
But there is one major sticking point, and it comes back to the “former Yugoslavia” thing I mentioned above:
In 1926, about 10% of the population in that region was Russian. This percentage gradually increased over the decades, as Russians moved (or were moved) throughout the vast country. And it wasn’t just in Sakha.
That’s why the most of the former Soviet Republics have large Russian minorities. In some regions and cities, like Narva on the Estonia-Russia border, Russian-speakers make up the majority.
In the wealthy and free Baltic states, their presence has been a source of controversy since independence, even affecting the citizenship process. The tension really flares up when they decide to dismantle or move monuments which, depending on your perspective, serve as painful reminders of Soviet occupation or which celebrate the heroes who freed the countries from Nazi occupation.
Outside of some anonymous keyboard warriors there’s no appetite for sending the Russians “home,” but it has long been the elephant in the room, made even worse by the invasion of Ukraine (and regular Russian threats and provocations). And now Lativa, for example, is taking steps to phase out teaching the Russian language in schools.
In relatively poor and isolated regions which are still forced to answer to Moscow - and which are disproportionately sending young men to die for Putin’s ego - the enmity might be much worse. If independence was achieved, would the Russian population just go along with it? If enough of them didn’t, what happens then?
And what about territorial disputes between these newly independent states? Many which arose after the collapse of the USSR haven’t been resolved, and sometimes - especially between Armenia and Azerbaijan - erupt into actual shooting.
The breakup of a country can happen peacefully, as with what used to be Czechoslovakia. Or it can descend into chaos, as with [waves hands around generally.]
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support Russian subjects who want independence. On the contrary, the Russian Federation arguably needs to cut down to size if there’s any hope of it playing nice with its neighbours. But it’s not “Westsplaining” to look at recent history and bring up the many ways it can go wrong.