Will Russia Fall Apart?

Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Will Russia Fall Apart?

Will Russia Fall Apart?
By Sergei Roy [former Editor-in-Chief, Moscow News]

1. In his book The Grand Chessboard Zbigniew Brzezinski replies to the question in the title of this article unequivocally ­ yes, it certainly will, quite inevitably. In fact, he drew a sort of road map for such disintegration or Balkanization: the Russian Federation should ­ and would ­ become a “free confederation” consisting of the European part, the Siberian Republic and the Far Eastern Republic.[i]

It has to be said that in the late 1990s, at the time of Brzezinski’s book publication, there were indeed some grounds for such forecasts. The momentum of historical Russia breaking up started by Gorbachev and Yeltsin[ii] was still at work. Yeltsin’s immortal phrase ­ “Grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow” — was still the guiding principle for the Russian Federation’s ethnic and regional political elites.

Human nature being what it is, these elites gobbled up far more sovereignty than they could hope to digest without bringing disaster upon their own heads and especially on the people they were supposed to lead. Chechnya was merely an extreme, bandit instance of such swallowing. There was also talk of an independent Ural Republic, a Far Eastern Republic, and an independent Tatarstan. All over the country regional legislative assemblies routinely passed local laws contravening federal ones.

This incipient parceling of Russia was backed by a sort of pseudo-theory based on simplistic historical analogy. All empires ultimately broke up (the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungary, the British Empire were most often cited); so had the Soviet Union; Russia, in the shape it emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse, was also an empire and so would inevitably break up too. Q.e.d.

That sort of reasoning is entirely unconvincing. Any analogy limps, as the saying has it; or, more bluntly, comparaison n’est pas raison. Not all empires disintegrate these days. For instance, such deduction by analogy certainly does not apply to the United States. The world’s one remaining superpower, the great empire that openly strives for global supremacy displays no visible signs of imminent disintegration, although predictions to this effect (mostly of sensationalist nature[iii]) are being made, while petitions, signed by thousands, from this or that state (mostly Texas) demanding instant cessation are regularly sent to Congress. Similarly communist China; from time to time this vast empire has difficulties with Tibet or Eastern Turkistan, but to await its imminent breakup would be less than intelligent.

The situation in Russia in the late nineties was quite different. Things were definitely shifting towards a rather sad ending ­ until the regional elites, faced with harsh economic realities and the threat of bloody conflicts, sobered up somewhat. That stage is linked with the name and activities of Vladimir Putin[iv].

It should be stressed here that neither Putin nor anyone else would have been able to prevent the country’s further breakup if it had not been for the operation of objective, above all economic, factors.

Despairing to cope with the harsh realities of life, the local elites accepted the obvious: sovereignty was fine, flattering and prestigious, but subsidies from the federal budget redistributing revenues from the few donor regions to the many recipient ones were much, much better, for without them it was hard to scrape up even bare subsistence.

Independence and sovereignty come pretty high in terms of financial outlay. They call for such attributes and institutions as an army, police, a customs service, a diplomatic department, a treasury, an internal revenue service, an education system, health services, and other financially burdensome structures.

Independence would disrupt long established economic links with other regions, new industries would have to be built up and markets for their products found. Without federal subsidies and other aid from the federal Center the cost of all that would be crippling. Not to be dreamed of.

There were other considerations, too, probably even more cogent ones. What happened in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldavia and elsewhere showed that acquiring independence was fraught with bloodshed ­ not only because of resistance on the part of the Center, as in Chechnya, but also, and primarily, because of conflicts within entities aspiring to independence and with their neighbors. Division of property is an everlasting cause of conflict, and no one enjoyed that prospect, for normal, ordinary human beings are ever loath to shed their own and other folks’ blood.

It so came about, then, that some of the sovereignty, so ill-advisedly swallowed by the Federation’s regions, had to be disgorged. The federal and the regional elites came to an accommodation of sorts, and a modus vivendi was established that more or less suited either side. In Chechnya the efforts of Putin’s team restored peace and constitutional ­ well, let’s say more or less constitutional ­ order.

As the chaos in the wake of the Soviet Union’s breakup was gradually but inexorably overcome, the problem of Russia’s disintegration shifted from the plane of practical realization to the sphere of theoretical debate, forecasts, and plain wishful thinking. These studies and forecasts come in a wide spectrum in which two extremes stand out. As per physical law, these extremes meet at a point where their final conclusions practically coincide.

2. At one end, various nationalistic theories and political trends abound. Nationalism as such and all of its variations would be far too vast a subject for me to tackle. I can only dwell here on Russian nationalism, Russians being this country’s most numerous ethnic group. Furthermore, I can’t do justice to all or even most of its varieties (of which there are almost as many as there are authors discoursing on Russianness, the Russian idea, Russia’s mission, the Russian national character, and suchlike). I will merely focus on groups whose political end goal is a purely Russian national state, a territory populated exclusively or almost exclusively by ethnic Russians.

Their main argument runs like this: the Federation’s non-Russian ethnic republics have now nurtured their own elites; these are certain to secure eventually political independence for their territories. Having got rid of them, the Russian national state will attain ethnic homogeneity and thus become much stronger.

This trend apparently reflects, in “theoretical” terms, the resentment (incidentally, not only on the part of ethnic Russians) against the expansion by the RF’s ethnic minorities that has been on the up for the last dozen years or so. It is chiefly Muslims who migrate from their traditional habitat to Russia’s central areas. A similar reaction is provoked by the influx of migrants, mostly illegal, from ex-Soviet republics and the problems they bring with them ­ a rise in ethnic crime, extra-cheap labor squeezing ethnic Russians (and others) from their jobs, conflicts among neighbors sometimes ending in bloodshed and rioting, and so on.

Problems caused by ethnic expansion and its attendant conflicts, often latent, are real enough.[v] However, solving them through creating an ethnically homogeneous Russian state is utterly chimerical contravening as it does perfectly obvious, inescapable realities ­ historical, economic, cultural, ethnic and demographic.

Without going into a discussion of these critically important factors, this point can be argued from the position of plain common sense. So they have all left the Soviet Union ­ Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kirgizia, the lot. So what? Millions of those republics’ nationals are now earning their living, and that of their families back home, all over Russia. Even the Baltics, so proud of their EU membership, all but worship Russian tourists as a source of their income. Why think, then, that, having achieved the coveted ethnic homogeneity, the would-be Russian state can hope to fence off its one-time autonomies? No reason at all; that new state would still be as polyethnic as ever. Then why bother to build such a state, especially bearing in mind what I have said above ­ drawing lines of separation between ethnic groups practically inevitably results in conflict and bloodshed over territory, something we saw plenty of in recent history as the Soviet Union collapsed. This alone ought to be enough to give pause to proponents of an ethnically pure Russian state.

One more point probably worth mentioning here is the project for a new Russian state based on the idea that Russians are a “supra-ethnos” comprising Great Russians, Lesser Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belorussians).[vi] Advocates of this theory maintain that the Russian nation, and thus the Russian national state, will only emerge through the reunification of the three constituent elements of the supra-ethnos in question. To quote one author of this project almost verbatim, recreating Russia within the borders of the supra-ethnos is precisely what the national idea for a new Russia is about. At present, the Russian nation as such is said to be nonexistent; the people known as Rossiyane[vii], meaning all of Russia’s citizens, is not a nation; the idea of Rossiyane forming a nation is bunk, a myth, as was “the new historical community, the Soviet people,” in Communist times.

What can and what cannot be termed a nation, what is a myth and what is given as harsh political, economic, etc. realities, I intend to discuss a while later. Let me merely point out here that the idea of recreating Russia within the borders of the “Russian supra-ethnos” is every bit as chimerical and dangerous as the ventures examined above, for it is just as much fraught with bloodshed as other ethno-centric projects for shaping Russian statehood. Neither the Belorussian (Belarusian?) nor especially the Lesser Russian (Ukrainian) elites will give up any significant part of the sovereignty acquired at the time of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, that’s for sure. Any moves in that direction will encounter fierce opposition that is quite unlikely to end up peacefully.

Such a prospect does not find favor with anyone in Russia’s politically active circles except for originators of these ideas and their followers who by and large do not realize the unpleasant consequences of the implementation of ethno-centric projects. That is why nationalist theories of this sort are confined to the fringe of the Russian political community and pose little danger. Naturally, heated debates on the subject rage on in journals, beer joints and internet blogs, but they hardly ever reach the level of practical politics.

Political symptoms of this fringe status of such ideas manifest themselves in the disappearance from the political arena of the once very prominent Pamyat (Memory), RNE (Russian National Unity), and other xenophobic organizations, or the Rodina (Motherland) Party dissolving within the social-democratic Fair Russia devoid of any nationalistic coloration. As for the ostensibly nationalist LDPR (Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), its nationalism is largely rhetorical; in real politics this party acts in faithful unison with the ruling United Russia, and that’s a well-attested fact.

3. Now we come to predictions about Russia’s disintegration issuing from the opposite, anti-nationalist pole. At this end, theorists of Russia’s inevitable breakup are associated with the fundamentalist liberal, globalist, West-oriented section of the Russian politicum. They are well represented in the ruling class, including its upper echelons. Not infrequently these augurs of the RF’s impending dissolution enjoy official status and generous financial backing, including from abroad. They can in no way be viewed therefore as harmless pipe-dreamers.

They should hardly be feared as representing a force capable of endangering Russia’s very existence as a united, sovereign, independent state. That bifurcation point is history; the chaos of the accursed 1990s is definitely a thing of the past and will stay so. Still, such theories and projects may engender and intellectually justify certain absurd hopes in some of Russia’s ethnic elites, as well as in Western geostrategy gurus who are still under the spell of Brzezinski’s speculations and formulate geopolitical solutions for their governments on that basis. That such hopes are widely current in the West is suggested, for instance, by the enthusiasm with which these circles predicted the spreading to Russia of events known as the Arab spring.

4. A fairly comprehensive and explicit scenario for an inevitable, and highly desirable, disintegration of the Russian Federation was formulated in “From the Russian Empire to a Russian Democratic State,” a paper printed by the Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Review) publishers and available on the Internet.[viii] The paper was written by Professor Dmitry Furman, at the time chief research fellow at the Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences; the publisher that printed it is financed by Mikhail Prokhorov, a  billionaire with great political ambitions ­ he even ran for president a while ago. Thus the author’s status and the socio-political context of the paper speak for themselves, as it were. It is this paper I will mostly refer to below, formulating my own views in juxtaposition to Furman’s as I go along.

5. The point of departure in Prof. Furman’s reasoning is this: “A national state is the normal form of existence for states and nations, at least for Europe of the Modern Times.” The author constructs a concatenation of entelechies, something like a universal law of development for nations/states: empires ­ nations struggling for self-determination ­ national democratic states ­ supra-national agglomerations like the European Union. In this scheme of things Russia is seen as stuck at the empire stage and is, according to Furman, an empire’s left-over, or a mini-empire.[ix]

In its present state Russia is, according to Prof. Furman, a country of the “catching-up” type of development; to catch up with Europe it will first have to fall apart into numerous national democratic states ­ the end result of its various ethnic groups’ struggle for national self-determination. Eventually Russia as a national democratic state (‘Russia for Russians”) will join the supra-national community of the European Union (Russia’s status apparently to be the same as Estonia’s or Lichtenstein’s). What community or union the other national democratic states (some 182 of them, one should imagine ­ Komiland for the Komi, Chukchiland for the Chukchi, etc.) are going to join, and generally what is going to happen to them, the author omits to say. The main thing is that Russia must disintegrate; it simply cannot but do so if it is to become a democracy some day. At present it cannot of course aspire to that exalted title, being a mere autocracy imitating a democracy.

6. This historiosophic schema appears to me to be defective conceptually and totally inadequate as description of the actual historical processes and situations. On closer examination Russia is not all that different, in principle, from other states in Europe or elsewhere, those that Furman sees as “normal.” If it is, the difference certainly does not lie in Russia’s backwardness in interethnic relations, in its being doomed to the “catching-up type of development,” or some such.

It is natural to view Russia’s history in the same light as that of other great (or formerly great) powers like Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the USA, or China. They all evolved as empires after the same pattern. First a certain ethnic or some other social group inhabiting the core of the future supra-ethnic state gathered strength and prominence. Eventually this nucleus united a certain periphery around itself in one way or another, mostly by force of arms, but occasionally also by common consent.

Not to go too far back into antiquity, staying in the Modern Times only, in Russia’s case the core happened to be Muscovy, or the Great Muscovite Principality; in the United Kingdom, the area originally captured by Anglo-Saxons as distinct from regions populated by Celts; in France, it was Ile-de-France; in Spain, Castile and Aragon; in Germany, Prussia; in the United States, the area colonized by WASPs ­ White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The list may easily be extended, of course.

The political entities thus formed were already empires in effect, as the relations between the core and the periphery rested on the power (Lat. Imperium) of the nucleus. The term mini-empire, if one chooses to use it at all, suits those states well enough.[x]

Next came the phase of colonial expansion by these mini-empires, which made them empires in the proper, generally accepted sense. Most of these states seized colonies overseas; Russia, China and the United States mainly grew by spreading their imperium to contiguous territories, except for Russia’s expansion to Alaska and California, and America’s to Hawaii, Puerto-Rico, and the Philippines.
The 20th century, its second half especially, was marked by empires losing their colonial possessions. Even the United States had to give up the Philippines. In the very recent past, historical Russia (the country that the world still called Russia even at the time when its official name was the Soviet Union, or the USSR) lost its Trans-Caucasian and Trans-Caspian periphery (though many people in Russia would prefer to say that it got rid of them rather than lost them, and even the getting rid process has only been partly successful). The same period witnessed the secession, with Russia’s blessing, of the Baltic republics, Belorussia, Ukraine and Moldavia, though none of these have ever been colonies in the proper sense of the word, that is, acquisitions of civilizationally backward territories.

7. Here we come to a most interesting point. What is the status, or rather stature, of empires shorn of their colonies? The obvious answer is, they reverted to the shape they had been in before colonial expansion, that is to say, to the position of mini-empires with the same nucleus­periphery structure as before the expansion and the same ­ mutatis mutandis ­ relations within these structures.

Of course, relations between the elements of these structures have undergone certain changes in the hundreds of years since their emergence: they became to some extent cemented simply through the long process of osmosis, interfusion, and unification as peripheries lost their “selfness,” becoming objects rather than active agents of historical processes.

Thus Gascony no longer aspires to existence outside France; Wales, outside England; Westphalia, outside Germany; Sicily, outside Italy, and so on.

The degree of nucleus­periphery cohesion varies. In cases of weaker unity the nucleus sometimes has to take steps (including the use of military force) to retain the periphery, which quite clearly reveals the (mini-)imperial character of such states.

Familiar areas of peripheral unrest of varying intensity are, e.g., Northern Ireland in the UK; Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain; Corsica in France;  Kurdistan in Turkey; Lombardy in Italy; Eastern Turkistan and Tibet in China, etc. In Russia, Chechnya was (perhaps still is) an illustration of the same kind of regional disquiet.

It thus appears that in terms of historical processes as outlined above Russia is no different, basically, from the other states I have mentioned. All of them have gone through similar stages of formation, expansion and contraction, or resuming the shape in which they originally emerged as mini-empires or proto-empires.

Terminology is of course a matter of personal taste, and Russia could be called a mini-empire, its size, military might and other features notwithstanding. But then the same appellation would have to be applied to the United States and China, and that would be somewhat embarrassing. The planet’s three biggest countries are just empires in contrast to Europe’s mini-empire states. To regard only the latter as “normal” national states is hardly justifiable: the USA, Russia and China are in no way less normal than the others. They are just somewhat different.

All empires, whether large or small, handle roughly the same tasks ­ with obvious exceptions ­ as did the empires of antiquity. Their concerns include the security of their citizens; protecting them against external aggression; maintaining peace between provinces, ethnic communities, races and classes; consolidating relations between the center and the provinces, and between the latter; preserving a balance between legal and cultural differences of the provinces, on the one hand, and the empire’s uniformity and cohesion in these and other respects.

I am going over these platitudes with just one purpose in mind: to define the exact sense in which Russia can be said to be an empire, as distinct from completely unjustifiable imperialist characteristics ascribed to it.

8. In its present state Russia differs from other empires, both large and small, in one important respect. While similar to other imperial entities (only in the sense of the word imperial defined above), it is in no way imperialist; that is to say, it does not practice armed violence or threat of same against other sovereign states.

Meanwhile, within just the last fifteen years or so the nation states calling themselves normal and democratic, allied with and led by the world’s biggest empire, the United States, committed acts of aggression against a number of independent sovereign states such as Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Former colonial empires made up for the loss of their erstwhile might by forming a new imperial entity, the European Union, and by joining the imperialist military bloc of NATO.

During the same period Russia used its armed forces only once, compelled to do so by the assault of the Saakashvili regime’s troops against its peacekeeping contingent, then stationed in South Ossetia under the UN mandate ­ an open and shut casus belli.

Today’s Russia thus constitutes an unusual instance of a non-imperialist empire. In all the other respects (the historical functions of uniting ethnic groups, lands, etc., ensuring internal peace and security, and so on) it is hardly different from other empires and mini-empires.

In other senses the term is used about Russia as a scare word for propaganda purposes, as in talk about Russia entertaining “imperial ambitions” toward its independent neighbors. This propagandist mantra sounds convincing to those already infected with the Russophobia virus. One cannot possibly discuss this sort of thing seriously.[xi]

9. Having defined our understanding of the term empire, let us discuss the word nation. Just as in the previous instance, it is not merely a matter of terminological consistency but also of the manner in which the corresponding referents are understood.

The word nation obviously forms a nest of homonyms: (1) nation equals ethnos, and (2) nation equals the population of a state, or the population together with the state as the mechanism governing that populace.

As mentioned above, adherents of ethnocentric projects for shaping Russia’s statehood reject the view that the population of present-day Russia forms a single whole and in this sense an indivisible nation.

Cf. the following argument: “As a self-appellation the word Rossiyanin is not used at all, it does not strike root. It is a heretofore unknown phenomenon of which no one had heard prior to 1991 and which no one had encountered… Rossiyanin ­ let us underscore this once again ­ is the product of a groundless myth.”[xii]
What strikes one first of all about this statement about a “heretofore unknown phenomenon” is its factual inaccuracy. One could cite any number of uses of the word Rossiyanin in the 19th century (as in Alexander Pushkin) and even in the 18th (as in Feofan Prokopovich). There are in fact even earlier instances of the use of that word. Now, it is worth mentioning that even in those far-off times not only “the proud grandson of Slavs” was a Rossiyanin but also the Finn, the Tungus, the Kalmyk,  to mention only the “tongues” that fitted the meter of Pushkin’s “Exegi monumentum.”

Since those times the Rossiyane (commonly known outside Russia as Russians, regardless of ethnicity) have not vanished into thin air or died out or turned into a myth.  Rossiyane, the people of Russia, are just as real as were the Soviet people. According to Kortunov, that body, the Soviet people, is also a myth ­ which is somewhat puzzling. If it was not the Soviet people who won in the Second World War, then who did? I’d say there’s no need to introduce a mystery where there is none.

Turning to the present, it’s the Russian people, the Rossiyame, who regularly go to the polls; we think of democracy as power of the people; in the army we give an oath of allegiance to the people; and so on. All these, and much else, would have to be declared mythical events, if the people itself is a myth… It would be devilish uncomfortable to live in this sort of world, nor do the Russians of flesh and blood live in one.

But I have digressed somewhat. What I really would like to show is the reason why the Russian word for nation can and should be used in the European or American sense ­ to refer to the entire populace of the state of Russia. There is one snag here that we have inherited from the Soviet times: the usage of the word natsiya “nation” to mean nationality, i.e. ethnicity (as in the RF Constitution that speaks of Russia as a “multinational state” where the proper word should be polyethnic, if ethnicity is worth mentioning at all ­ which it isn’t).

In my view, the use of the word natsiya for ethnos merely creates unnecessary and harmful confusion in political discourse and in everyday life. There are certain fundamental notions, such as national interests, national security, a national currency, national resources, etc. (all the way down to national parks), that simply hang in the air if there is no natsiya whose attributes they are. To employ the phrase natsional’nye interesy “national interests” and reject the term natsiya “nation” to designate the state as a whole is to create a nonsensical and even ludicrous confusion that is not merely linguistic.

Linguistic clarity aside, there are also substantive grounds for designating the people of Russia as a single nation in the European or American, non-ethnic sense[xiii]. I have commented above on the cementing and mixing (osmosis) of nuclear and peripheral ethnic groups in Europe’s mini-empires and in the United States empire. In this sense Russia is no different from these. Over the centuries of co-existence of a multitude of ethnic groups it also went through various integration processes as close economic, cultural and family ties were formed; a single language of inter-ethnic communication became universally used; and different religions learned the art of peacefully living side by side in a neighborly fashion. These processes, which went on for centuries ­ far longer than, say, in the United States ­ eventually produced an integral polyethnic nation of Russians (Rossiyane) living within a single whole ­ the supra-ethnic state now called the Russian Federation.

What used to be autonomies in the Soviet times and are now ethnic republics within the RF (national republics, in the established yet unsuitable parlance),  like Chuvashia, Udmurtia, Khakasia, Mordovia, and a dozen others, are so tightly integrated in the Federation that their independent existence is now no more feasible than the independent existence of any province in France, Britain or Italy.

10. All of this is perfectly self-evident, and still Russia’s disintegration is predicted by various sources abroad and some Russian nationals with a good deal of confidence, one might say categorically and insistently. Why, for what conceivable reasons?

Earlier, quoting D. Furman’s paper, I referred to the main, if not indeed the only, argument in favor of this prediction that sounds more like a demand: Russia is no democracy, it is an autocracy imitating democratic institutions.

From this standpoint, Russia may become a national democracy on one condition only: if ethnic Russians overcome a certain imperial warp in their mindset and, thus cleansed, build themselves a national (meaning ethnically uniform) home. Having cured this imperial flaw in their minds, Russians will permit the holding of genuinely democratic elections in ethnic republics, where the idea of self-determination is sure to triumph, unavoidably entailing independence and secession from the Russians’ home. The new homes resulting from these processes will presumably be exceedingly numerous: Russia for Russians, Chivashia for Chuvashi, Tataria for Tatars, Bashkiria for Bashkirs, Tuva for Tuvinians, and so on to the end of the list.

How many such homes will emerge on the ruins of the Russian Federation? Will they all be democratic or otherwise? If democratic, why exactly, what are the grounds for such a prognosis? How does such optimism accord with the actually observed social and political regress in former Soviet republics, to the point of new ruling dynasties becoming established in some of them? Prof. Furman just does not bother to consider any of these issues.

Nor does he explain why the process of home building will have to stop at the level of today’s ethnic republics of the Russian Federation. After all, there are also national okrugs (districts), as well as ethnic groups that have no political-administrative autonomy at all. In Dagestan alone, where nearly every gorge boasts a language of its own, some three dozen such groups are to be found: Avars, Darghins, Laks, Kumyk, Tabasaran, Agul, Rutul, to name just a few. In the north, in the oil- and gas-rich Khanty-Mansi National Okrug, there are both the Khanty and the Mansi. After all, every such group possesses a distinct notion of their ethnic identity; even the Even’s sense of identity is different from that of the Evenk. And all of them are entitled to their own home, if their self-awareness is the one thing to go by ­ and that is the only factor, as I have said before, Prof. Furman takes into account while ignoring all others.

That author’s refusal to consider these entirely predictable consequences of his scenario suggests clearly that his only purpose is to convince the audience of the inevitability and desirability of Russia’s breakup; nothing else is of any concern to him. Where this process will end, whether it will end at all or whether it will be chaos without end ­ neither the author quoted here nor others favoring the disintegration of “imperial Russia” deign to consider.  Their job is simple: to set the rock rolling downhill.

11. What strikes one about that program at first glance even is the way it echoes Congress resolution on “captive nations” in the Soviet Union signed into law (Public Law 86-90) by President Eisenhower in 1959, that is, at the height of the Cold War.

That resolution did not mention Russians as a nation “captured” by the communists; on the contrary, it declared “Russian communists” to be the evil foes that subjugated all of the Soviet Union’s other nations. The free world led by the USA aimed to liberate those “captive nations.”[xiv]

The resolution put forward the demand (later mentioned by Brzezinski in his The Grand Chessboard) that Russians grant independence to 22 nations they had “captured.”

In a similar fashion Dmitry Furman insist that Russians ­ if they wish to become a democratic nation and enter the free world of the European Union ­ must release from captivity all the other “nations” of the Russian Federation (which is not a federation at all, according to Furman).

Otherwise they will go on dragging out a miserable existence in a non-free, autocratic state.

That’s the sort of unexpected parallel that heaves into view as one considers the roots of projects for the dismemberment of Russia. They reek of the spirit of the Cold War and of even more distant, and more sickening, times. It appears generally desirable for that spirit to go away at last, and to be replaced by a more acceptable atmosphere reflecting present-day realities rather than the ill will of the past.

12. The prospect of splitting the Russian Federation into numerous “homes” outlined in Furman’s article raises objections, among other things, on the purely conceptual plane. As mentioned above, Furman postulates as a universal the movement of states from one realized goal ­ an entelechy ­ to the next, from empire to national democratic state.

What is simply astounding about this schema is its absurdly Hegelian touch: spontaneous development comes about entirely through the self-movement of ideas, through changes in the consciousness (self-awareness) of human communities.

For instance, if the “great idea” of self-determination of nations springs up from somewhere, it becomes a force that will determine the entire development of a given society; it will inevitably lead to every nation (=ethnos) falling away from the empire it was a part of ­ with “rivers of blood” being shed in the process, if so destined.

The author is obviously guided here by the Marxist belief that “an idea that takes possession of the masses becomes a material force.” However, in each specific episode in history a cardinal issue arises that is vital both to the Marxist and to the normal human being: Has the given idea really taken possession of the masses? Has it really become a sort of mass monomania whose carriers will not stop at shedding those “rivers of blood”?

Furman writes of national consciousness or self-awareness as if it contained nothing but the antithesis of the imperial (antidemocratic, authoritarian) and national (for some obscure reason believed to be necessarily democratic). If we consider, however, the priorities of a real typical individual, national pride and the drive toward national self-determination “even unto secession” will not normally be at the top of the list of his or her priorities. Quite ordinary priorities dominate the consciousness of both an individual and an ethnic group:  job, family, children, provision for the old age of parents and of oneself, and others such.

Furthermore, that consciousness is also dominated by something even stronger than all the other factors taken together. Inherent in man is a certain thanatophobia, an aversion to death, an unwillingness to kill and be killed for any reason whatsoever, especially for abstract ideas; the desire to live in peaceful surroundings and avoid war ­ even if some part of his consciousness is infected with the virus of nationalism (ethnicism). This applies not only to Tatars, Bashkirs or, say, Ghilyaks (for whom phrases about self-determination within the framework of a national democratic Ghilyak state would presumably sound as so much senseless noise). This is also true of Russians, people that have a clear awareness of their ethnic identity, national pride, and currently even a partly restored, powerful state and military machine.

To take an example, Russians feel a great deal of resentment about the overwhelmingly Russian Crimea ending up in Ukraine. But setting right this historical injustice, which is not based on any convincing legal grounds even, through bloodshed? God forbid. As the Russian saying has it, bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Compromises and integration, including mutually advantageous economic integration, (or rather reintegration of Ukraine and Russia) and opening of borders are much better than conflicts. The situation in Eastern Kazakhstan with its predominantly Russian population is another case in point.

The desire to live in peace and avoid war, death and destruction is crucial for both nuclear and peripheral ethnic groups. But one particular circumstance makes it more vital for the lesser peoples ­ the fear of conflicts with neighboring ethnic groups. Therein lies, as has been noted, a most essential function of empires ­ suppressing interethnic conflicts, providing security for all ethnic groups within their jurisdiction.

Examples of practical operation of this function are numerous and self-obvious. For Ossetia and Ingushetia to leave the Russian federation would mean immediate resumption of a long-standing conflict over territory.  For Dagestan with its more than thirty ethnic groups such a departure would be simply suicidal: the shaky interethnic and inter-clan peace there is maintained primarily by the efforts of the federal Center. We observe, right at the moment of writing this text, that a weakening of these efforts has led to an incredible degree of that republic’s criminalization, to regress, in the words of its Acting President Ramazan Abdulatipov, to the times of feudalism, so that now the Center has to resort to emergency measures to normalize the situation.

13. What follows from the above is a perfectly obvious conclusion borne out by easily observable facts: self-determination of an ethnic group does not necessarily take the form of secession, splitting from a larger entity such as an empire. An ethnic community may, and often does, opt for self-determination within a larger entity, finding it more beneficial in terms of economics, culture, education, healthcare and, most importantly, in terms of security, freedom from internecine strife and threat of external aggression.

The factor of outside aggression determined the behavior of various ethnic groups in certain well-documented historical episodes. To borrow a couple of examples from Russian history, Ukraine opted for self-determination as part of the Russian Czardom when threatened with aggression and annexation by Poland. So did Georgia, eternally prey to Persian and Turkish incursions, under Czar Irakly II of Kartli and Kakheti; its entry in the Russian Empire was formally enshrined in the Treaty of Georgievsk.[xv] Elsewhere, a similar choice was made in the 19th century by the previously disunited regions of Italy and Germany.

It appears self-evident that all the ethnic groups within the Russian Federation, both their elites and the overwhelming majority of their population, have long since opted for this manner of self-determination and have no intention at all of switching to a radically different mode.

Contrary to this historical evidence, Prof. Furman insists: “Genuinely democratic elections in the national republics within the Russian Federation that would not involve demands for independence are simply unimaginable.”

Well, anything at all may be “demanded”;  there are individuals in those parts who may demand a lot more, like a global caliphate. But the people who live in those republics are by and large not extremist al-Qaeda partisans or members of the Islamic Party of Turkistan, still less Parisian students of 1968 with their motto “Be realists, demand the impossible.”

A study of the actual situation in Russia’s republics where democratic elections are alleged to be “unimaginable” without demands for independence (Furman assiduously avoids any such analysis and does not so much as mention a single republic except Chechnya) will show that what is really “unimaginable” is their independence and secession from the RF in any shape, manner or form different from their present status.

14. Let us take some RF republic practically at random ­ say, Bahskiria. There the Bashkir are the second largest ethnic group after Russians. The number of Tatars in Bashkiria is only marginally smaller than that of the Bashkir[xvi]. Those “genuinely democratic elections” which, according to Furman, would necessarily involve demands for ethnic self-determination “even unto secession,” would in fact transform present-day Bashkortostan into the Ufa Province of the Russian national state instead of an independent Bashkir state, democratic or otherwise. Which the Bashkir and the Tatars would hardly accept, and the “rivers of blood,” so glibly mentioned by Furman, would become unavoidable. But the people who live on that land are no political analysts pipe-dreaming of Russia’s breakup. They realize only too well what will happen if the inter-ethnic peace that has taken centuries to achieve and is guaranteed by the Russian Federation were to be destroyed. So they are all for the status quo, for living peacefully within the big home, the Russian Federation, and shudder to think of secession and independence and what they would entail.

As in practically all ethnic republics, the “titular” ethnic group, the Bashkir, endeavors to secure a special position for itself, which causes some ethnic friction (as was the case during the recent census, when there were attempts to register local Tatars as Bashkir, to pad the statistics somewhat). This calls for intercession from the federal Center (some might call it the “imperial hand”) to put things right. Of course, it is criticized if it fails to do so as well as if it does not, but everyone realizes that dispensing with its ministrations entirely would come at too high a price.

15. Let us consider Tatarstan next. In the chaos of the 1990s certain sections of the Tatar elite (Tatars are second to Russians in terms of numbers in the RF, though they account for just  3.7 percent of its population) briefly entertained the idea of turning their republic into a kind of Lesoto, surrounded on all sides by Russian territory. That idea soon expired and is now cherished mostly by extremist Islamists with their dreams of Tataria eventually becoming part of the world Islamic caliphate.

The reasons for such a swift demise were numerous. First, there were the economic realities. Russia may do quite well without Tatarstan’s oil and other commodities, while Tatarstan would have to pay Russia for transit of those goods across Russian spaces any dues that Russia might care to impose.

There were other, demographic reasons, too. In Tataria itself the “titular” ethnos barely accounts for half the population, the rest are Russians and Russian speakers of all kinds of ethnicity; the latter were not exactly overjoyed at the prospect of finding themselves behind customs and border barriers that would separate them from relatives “abroad.”

Further, more Tatars are scattered throughout the rest of Russia than reside in Tatarstan itself. Particularly numerous is the Tatar community of Moscow. This last got organized and, wanting no problems whatever with their citizenship, lodged a vehement protest against the nationalists’ plans. Most of these Tatars’ forefathers had lived in the capital for centuries, they themselves were natives of Moscow and quite comfortable in this prestigious “home.” The “Tataria for Tatars” slogan was just as alien to them as “Russia for Russians,” a slogan they rightly believed boded no good for them.

16. Such are the obvious conclusions that suggest themselves when one takes concrete ethnic republics and tries to figure out whether their secession from the RF is at all possible, and if so, what the results of such a move would actually be. These conclusions absolutely refuse to fit the schema drawn up by Prof. Furman, which is precisely why he restricts himself to abstract speculations studiously avoiding any case by case analysis.

The only republic he does mention is Chechnya. Well then, let us consider the case of Chechnya. The analysis will have to be pretty thorough, for in this case the recommendation for ethnic republics to strive for self-determination in no other form than secession from the RF was practically carried out for a few years in the 90s. So it is important, both from the theoretical and practical standpoint, to analyze the way it actually happened and what came of it. History one might say staged an experiment here; its result is altogether unequivocal, and it shows up
clearly the fallacy of the predictions and recommendations mouthed by the harbingers of Russia’s disintegration.

17. In fact Furman’s paper merely repeats some of the absurdities current in certain circles, especially abroad, that backed Chechen “freedom fighters” and castigated “Russia that forcibly crushed Chechen separatism” (to quote Furman’s article).
Among other things this author writes about Chechen history that “practically” all of it was “a history of resistance to Russian conquest.”

Really, this is the kind of statement one should expect to hear only from someone in the heat of propaganda fever. It is totally out of place in a work offered as a research paper. Not just experts, but practically anyone with a modicum of interest in the Caucasus knows that, prior to the
Russian conquest, the “entire history” of the Chechens, as indeed of all the other Caucasus tribes, was a history of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, war of all against all. A history of internecine strife, brigandage, forays, taking hostages (amanats), capturing slaves, extermination of entire clans in the course of blood feuds,[xvii] and other similar pursuits.

The Chechens differed from other ethnic groups of the Caucasus in that they had never developed even the rudiments of statehood in the form of feudal entities, the kind that had taken shape in, say, Dagestan; Chechen society remained at the stage of clan (teip) structure. All that was outside the teip was fair game, just a big hunting ground to be raided for movables, including women and slaves.

The reason was not some congenital bloodthirsty ferocity of the hillmen, or their heroism in defending their independence (the Chechens, as I indicated, had no state to defend[xviii]). The reason was of the most prosaic, basic kind ­ a matter of economics: mountains produced more people than they could feed. Unable to earn their livelihood by peaceful toil, hillmen resorted to force of arms; stealing cattle from neighbors was the commonest occupation of abreki (brigands) and the cause of many an internecine war.[xix]

Resistance to the Russian conquest was thus merely a facet (admittedly, a most important element ­ perhaps) of this unending war of all against all. It would be groundless to deny, though, that after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus this state of things gave way to a more or less peaceful coexistence of various peoples there. In Soviet times Chechnya, for the first time on record, received at least a semblance of statehood (to be sure, somewhat limited, nominal, like in all the other ethnic entities) within the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR.[xx]

18. So what happened when Chechnya (which at that time called itself Ichkeria) achieved, amidst untold chaos and weakening of federal authority, virtual independence formalized in the Khasavyurt Agreement at the end of the first attempt at restoring constitutional order there? Did it all result in the emergence of a national democratic Chechen state a la Furman?

The facts of life in Chechnya at the time are only too well known. Ichkeria has gone down in people’s memory as a piratical, filibuster territory divvied up among a number of “field commanders,” each with a private army or armed gang of his own. They thrived on robbing their neighbors in Stavropol Territory and elsewhere, on slave trade, drug trafficking, stealing oil from pipelines, production and sale of counterfeit money, and a dozen more similar unseemly pursuits.[xxi] Nor should one overlook lavish cash injections from al-Qaeda, Saudi Wahhabis, and generally from al-Umma, the global Muslim community; terrorist acts against Russia were generously rewarded in very hard currency indeed.

Basic state functions like education, healthcare, support for culture, retirement pensions etc. were reduced to zero in Ichkeria. There’s this curious detail that tells volumes about the somewhat peculiar nature of Ichkeria’s independence: Chechen old age pensioners continued at the time to draw pensions from the relevant RF agencies!

In a word, independent Ichkeria was a classic failed state, a territory whose rulers and people proved incapable of building any statehood at all, let alone a national democratic state postulated by Furman.

19. A democratic Chechen state in the European mould was, I’d say, the last thing Ichkeria’s rulers had in mind. Jokhar Dudaev declared the Chechens to be “an ethnically central nation in the Caucasus.” The other ethnic groups of the Caucasus, to say nothing of the infidel Russians and others, were therefore “non-central,” second-rate, and they had to submit to the “central” nation. A typically Nazi line, that. As in the case of Nazi Germany, it inevitably entailed expansionist plans. Hence the idea of a “Great Ichkeria from sea to sea,” from the Black Sea to the Caspian.

Thus if Ichkeria was an embryonic state, it was clearly a Naziist one, without a trace of democracy about it. The Nazism found expression not so much in the pronouncements of Jokhar Dudaev, Movladi Udugov or any other “theorists” as in the horrendous practice of carnage and persecution of all non-Chechens, above all Russians. The latter found themselves in Ichkeria in precisely the same situation as had Jews in Nazi Germany. The consequences of that are still there ­ Chechnya is virtually an “ethnically pure” republic. There the slogan advocated by Furman ­ “Chechnya for the Chechens” ­ has been implemented most literally.

The other ideological and practical basis for the unity of Dudaev’s Ichkeria was Islamism of the most extremist nature and its indispensable component, the idea of jihad or holy war against infidels.[xxii] Accordingly, plans were nurtured for Great Chechnya eventually forming part of the world Islamic caliphate that would arise out of the worldwide victory of that holy war.

In everyday life, Chechens found guidance in adat (a system of law based on custom and tradition) and the newly introduced Sharia law, with public executions, stoning, caning, and other similarly democratic proceedings.

20. That’s the sort of independence it was, such was the democracy. There is absolutely no reason to doubt, in today’s context, that should Russia expel Chechnya from the RF, it  would immediately see on its southern border a second edition of the gangster republic of Ichkeria with an even greater dominance of extremist, radical Islam. In a situation like that one would indeed have to live up in the clouds of pristinely pure “self-awareness” unadulterated by any base considerations of national security to allege that independence of ethnic republics, Chechnya included, “far from being a loss for the Russian people, would rather be a gain.” Some gain, that!

However, this insistence on the desirability of such a development could be prompted by other motives bearing little relation to abstract thought unsullied by contact with reality; I will have a few words to say about these motives later.

Apart from considerations of Russia’s national security, there are also other fairly important factors vital above all to the people of Chechnya. The question here is the same as centuries ago ­ economics: can an independent Chechnya exist relying strictly on its own natural and other resources without recourse to outside aid or reverting to brigandage, to robbing its more affluent neighbors?

The answer to this question is supplied by a simple fact of that republic’s financial-economic life: in 2010, the year Furman’s paper was published, the budget of Chechnya amounted to 56.8 billion rubles, of which 52 billion came from federal public funds ­ from the RF Ministry of Finance. That is to say, Chechnya earns less than one-tenth of its budget; the other nine-tenths it sponges off the federal Center, or rather off other entities of the Russian Federation, the donor ones.

In the circumstances to follow Prof. Furman’s advice would be an inhuman act on Russia’s part, and for Chechnya it would mean the prospect of financial and economic suicide, or else a reversal to the practices of Ichkeria. Neither the Chechen elite nor the federal Center will have any of that, that’s for sure. The situation now is definitely not what we had in the accursed 1990s, and it seems a waste of propagandist ardor to propound senseless recommendations like Furman’s.

21. So the question naturally arises whether authors of such recommendations are familiar with the facts of Chechnya’s history and current state related above. One would imagine they could not possibly be unaware of them, as these matters were and are continually discussed in the press, not to mention specialist research. And yet, the facts notwithstanding, we keep hearing about the beneficial effect of ethnic republics leaving Russia. Why so? What are the motives of these insistent recommendations? What sort of information flow are they part of?

The answers to these questions are pretty obvious. It is enough to cast a cursory glance at the geopolitical developments of the last fifteen to twenty years. A look at the events of the “Arab spring” or at what is right now happening in Syria will clearly reveal the main vector of the West’s efforts. The United States and its allies (in the Muslim world these are above all Saudi Arabia and tiny but enormously rich Qatar) aim at undermining and dismembering all national states in this part of the world that are at all independent and sovereign. The strategy consists in triggering off and maintaining the state of “controlled chaos.”

As regards control, things are not all that great, but the chaos and disintegration of the states involved have been an unqualified success everywhere. The more or less peaceful existence of secular regimes, albeit authoritarian or openly dictatorial, gives way to bloody tribal and religious internecine strife. Whole states (Libya is a classic example) virtually vanish from the map of the world. What remains is mere territories populated by ethnic, social and religious groups at loggerheads with one another, territories from which transnationals can siphon off natural resources unhindered.

It is noteworthy that latter-day Euro-Atlantic neocolonialists prefer someone else to do their dirty work, unashamedly accepting as allies the most extremist Islamist groupings (cf. again the current events in Syria). Western support for Chechen “freedom fighters” was one of the first instances of this cat’s-paw strategy at work. The target at the time was Russia. Here, as in Afghanistan before that (where the CIA is known to have nurtured the Taliban), and later in Egypt or Libya, extremist Islamism was used as a handy tool.

In a somewhat different way, minus the Islamists, but likewise in the cat’s paw mode, the scenario was re-enacted in the bloody gamble played by the criminal Saakashvili regime thoroughly armed and egged on by the West, above all the United States, as well as by Russophobic Yushchenko then in power in Ukraine, and other US allies.

Both those gambles flopped dismally, and the focus of the actions aimed at dismembering and ultimately destroying Russia as a sovereign state was shifted to the area of information warfare. This warfare, as in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and now Syria, has for its cover the slogans of promoting democracy and human rights. Seeing how “democracy promotion” ends in the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in bloody religious strife in Iraq, in al-Qaeda and its sister groups fighting on the side of the “democratic opposition” in Syria, these slogans sound for all the world like samples of perverted humor. Not funny at all.

Propaganda about the beneficial effect of Russia getting rid of its ethnic republics should be treated in the same spirit. When Furman says that only the dismemberment of Russia can help defeat Russian authoritarianism and promote democracy, that’s just a black humor type joke, no more.

Thus it is abundantly clear what broader context this sort of recommendation fits in snugly. In fact it is an element of the soft power, more accurately known as information warfare, that is being waged against Russia as a single nation and an independent sovereign state.[xxiii]

22. As stated before, it’s no use looking for any analysis of the actual chances, if any, and inevitable consequences of Russia’s disintegration in Furman’s paper. His conception, with its pseudo-Hegelian focus on what goes on in the mind to the exclusion of all else (see above), posits that the one thing that keeps the Russian Federation from instantly falling apart is the Russians’ warped mentality (consciousness, or self-awareness).

Of the latter he writes literally this: “Russian self-awareness has not yet morphed out of the cocoon of imperial and Soviet self-awareness. It is a morbid self-awareness vacillating between imperial chauvinism/revenge-seeking and Russophobic self-abasement and fear of disintegration of nation and state.”

In my view none but a truly morbid consciousness (or one working within a set propagandist paradigm) could produce this chimera. Russians’ self-awareness is just as imperial as that of the Americans, the Chinese or of the nuclear ethnic groups of Europe’s mini-empires. It is the self-awareness of a people with a thousand-year-long history, a people that has built a vast and powerful state.

In that state 80 percent of the population are ethnic Russians, and practically 100 percent, Russian-speakers. It has been said (perhaps debatably) that this kind of ratio between ethnic Russians and the rest of Russia’s ethnic communities makes this country, to all intents and purposes, a mono-ethnic state. Anyway, Russia’s ethnic makeup is nothing like the motley ethnic landscape of, say, India, which nevertheless defends its national unity against the separatism of its various ethnic groups quite successfully (crushing not long ago the Tamil Tigers, to take just one example). Why the self-awareness of Russians living in such a practically mono-ethnic state should vacillate between the horrific extremes painted by Prof. Furman is altogether beyond comprehension.

Nor can one hope to find a rational explanation for his contention regarding the sufferings of the Russian people said to be lacking a “national home” of their own. No polling data are provided to back this claim; it is strictly the author’s own invention. Try and ask any Russian whose mind has not been muddled by reading papers like the one being discussed here whether they have a rodina (literally, Motherland; “home” is merely a journalistic curlicue) ­ and the answer will be utterly predictable: they have both their malaya rodina (literally, “lesser Motherland”; the place where he or she comes from) and the Rodina with a capital R stretching from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the east. The same fully applies to any other Russia national, not just an ethnic Russian or someone who regards him/herself as such[xxiv].

The real problem Russia’s society has to deal with now (see Section 2 above) is not at all some ethnic group lacking a “national home” of their own, but rather the fact that once they leave the bounds of their malaya rodina, the lesser Motherland, ethnic minorities have difficulty in adjusting to the new cultural environment. Vast experience shows, however, that such adjustment is merely a matter of time. European states also encountered similar problems in the past, and there too these difficulties were overcome through mutual adjustment, without their states falling apart (the first instance that naturally comes to mind is that of Scotland and England, but that is just one of innumerable cases).[xxv]

Not one of the “normal national” European states came into this world as fully democratic at birth, like Aphrodite out of Zeus’ head. On the contrary, such states as Spain, Italy or Germany have known, both in the distant past and quite recently, extremely undemocratic regimes, yet eventually they developed into democracies ­ without “self-determination taken to the point of secession.” Why such a path of development is ruled out in Russia’s case is not susceptible of any intelligible explanation. Apparently the only grounds for rejecting that possibility out of hand is the irrational conviction that nothing good at all can ever happen in Russia ­ only authoritarianism and “vacillating self-awareness,” for which Russia’s  disintegration is the only cure.

I believe enough has been said above to show that Furman’s way ­ through locking up both the nuclear ethnos and ethnic minorities in “national homes” ­ spells suicide in the first place for the latter, simply the operation of purely material factors. What is now the Russian Federation has for too long a time developed as an integrated economic organism, both in the Soviet Union and before that. The consequences of the disruption of economic links that had evolved in the Soviet Union can be observed daily throughout Russia which provides jobs for millions of gastarbeiters from the now independent Ukraine, Georgia, Moldavia, Belorussia,  Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizia.

None of this is of any concern to Furman. The principal target that he hits out at is the Russians’ “morbid mentality (self-awareness)” that stymies them and prevents them from rising to the heights of democracy via disintegration of the Russian state. In discoursing on this subject Furman makes statements that are not just astounding but at times simply shocking: “Russians are a people with a vague, uncrystallized national self-awareness.” The Russians’ self-awareness has not only “crystallized” over the many centuries of their history; it also found expression in extremely diverse forms ­ political, social, ideological, and cultural. Only in the heat of propagandist myth-creation can anyone negate the existence of such “crystal structures” in the Russians’ consciousness. Really, only in that kind of fever is it possible to forget the names of Russian geniuses who produced some shining crystals not only for the benefit of their own people’s “consciousness” but that of all humankind, too.

23. Just as astounding is this statement: “The system imitating democracy that has become established here does not have an ideological basis, it is internally contradictory and fragile; it is naturally falling apart, and what awaits Russia in the future is an inevitable crisis connected with a new attempt at transition to real democracy.”

Truly this is a unique collection of absurdities and fact juggling. This bit about Russia’s political system lacking ideological foundation is especially peculiar. Both the Russian elite and the Russian people have opted for sovereignty, independence, market economy, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and other generally accepted values of the civilized world. Does that not constitute a necessary and sufficient ideological basis on which to build state and society? I would claim that as far as ideology is concerned, things are more or less fine in this country[xxvi]; it is the practical implementation of a fairly well constructed and tested project that is beset with difficulties ­ just as everywhere else in this imperfect world.

As regards the imitative character of democracy, I’d say Russia has a great deal to learn from, say, the USA. Gore Vidal once observed rather astutely that the American political system has “two right wings.” And still this zoological monstrosity flies about and even preens itself as the world’s most democratic creature whose mission is to impose its notions of democracy on everyone else.

Next point: Russia’s political system is “contradictory and fragile.” Well, for one thing, just show me some political system devoid of contradictions. There simply aren’t any, not outside a Utopia. As for the fragility or strength of the system, Furman’s claim is too patently absurd. The country was closest to disintegration (as heralded by Brzezinski and others) in the damned nineties (see section 1) which are now upheld as the time of efflorescence of freedom and democracy by Western propagandists and Russia’s fundamentalist liberals. Since then Russia has moved away from the brink of that abyss, its unity and strength have markedly increased ­ which only well-blinkered eyes will refuse to see.

Next point. I will agree that a crisis of Russia’s political system is possible; not inevitable, just possible. But that danger does not lie in ethnic contradictions, as harbingers of Russia’s disintegration would have us believe. The main cause of a potential crisis lurks in socioeconomic and consequent political contradictions. The country is currently dominated, economically and politically, by Big Business, an oligarchy that bears down on medium and small businesses, mercilessly exploits the country’s natural and human resources, and is essentially transnational and antinational. Naturally, I can only touch on this subject in passing here. Let me note merely that a discussion of problems of democracy focusing entirely on ethnic problems and ignoring socioeconomic ones is not only conceptually defective ­ it does a lot of harm, diverting attention from the real difficulties of building democracy in Russia.

24. Let us do some summing up. Nationalism is incompatible with democracy. That is why the dismemberment of historically formed communities like Russia, the USA, China, and others that have become cemented over centuries by the action of economic, political, social, demographic, cultural, linguistic etc. factors, their division into “national (ethnic) homes” under slogans like “Scotland for the Scots,” “Basque Country for the Basques,” “Tataria for the Tatars,” and so on can only engender ethnic strife and xenophobia, not the flowering of democracy.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union provided abundant evidence of that. Take for instance Baltic states like Latvia or Estonia (to a lesser degree, Lithuania). Having ceded from the Soviet Union, they eventually joined the European Union ­ that is to say, they rose to the highest stage of national democratic development, according to Furman’s template. In fact, however, they practice apartheid of the vilest kind: hundreds of thousands of people born in these “democracies” are officially classed as “non-citizens,” that is, in effect, second-rate citizens, while the ethnically pure Latvians and Estonians have the status of a higher race. Though racial terminology is not in official use there, it’s racism of the (ethnically) pure water. Thus what we have here is the flowering of extreme, simply indecent forms of nationalism or racism rather than of democracy.

Russia has been lucky in this respect. For centuries it was part of the Russian Empire, for over seventy years, part of the Soviet Union, and in none of these periods was nationalism a dominant ideology or the prevailing attitude of the masses.

In the Russian Empire there was no place for such an ideology for the simple reason that the very idea of a nation was nonexistent, superseded by the religious idea: a Russian saw himself above all as an Orthodox Christian, brother to Serb, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, etc.; at state level, the prevailing state ideology was that of imperial greatness and expansion. In the Soviet Union the dominant ideology was that of internationalism and friendship of the peoples; several generations were brought up in this spirit from infancy, and this could not but have a positive, long-lasting impact on interethnic relations.

In this light the idea that Russia is a country of the “catching-up type of development” which has yet to go through the stage of disintegration to be followed by subsequent entry of the scattered pieces in the European Union is factually untrue and clearly absurd. The Soviet Union actually led the world in terms of interethnic relations, it became a supra-ethnic community long before the European Union did, and that’s an undeniable historical fact. That supra-ethnic community, the USSR, was not democratic, it was a one-party state lacking many democratic attributes, the hand of the imperial Center was heavy, but interethnic peace and cooperation were not just an ideological dogma ­ they were part of everyday life[xxvii]. The Soviet empire was fully up to the job of keeping interethnic peace, a function every empire worth the name should perform. In any case, it did this job much better than the states that have recently fallen away from Russia are doing now.

The most vital task now lies in consolidating this positive heritage on a new, democratic basis. In specific terms, this task is solved (or at any rate must be solved) through strengthening the rule of law; that is to say, through the state machine ensuring equal rights of any citizen in any given part of the country irrespective of which ethnic group sees itself as “titular” in this part. The notion of “titular” ethnic group is not even mentioned in the Russian Constitution, and the sooner it disappears from actual socio-political practices and everyday life, the better for the country and for each of its citizens[xxviii].

The opposite way ­ through self-determination of “titular” ethnic groups taken to the point of secession, through rousing the worst, tribalist instincts ­ would be absolutely disastrous for democracy, not to mention other consequences outlined above in sufficient detail. Thank God, the overwhelming majority of real, normal human beings instinctively shun such projects preferring other values ­ such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

NOTES

[i] See, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. 1998. There is also a Russian translation (minus the subtitle in the heading): Zbigniew Brzezinski. Velikaya shakhmatnaya doska. Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya Publishers, Moscow 1999.

[ii] These characters are clearly mentioned here merely as convenient markers, labels for certain historical processes..

[iii] Igor Panarin has been an active proponent of this idea since 1998. See, e.g., http://www.e-reading-lib.org/chapter.php/134273/5/Panarin_-_Krah_dollara_i_raspad_SShA.html

[iv]  I cannot forgo the pleasure of mentioning in this connection that I predicted the coming to power in Russia of a leader whose strategic goal will be the rebirth of Russia as a united, sovereign and independent power way back in 1996, when Russia’s situation was most troublous and uncertain, several years before Vladimir Putin appeared on the federal political stage, let alone was elected as president. See Sergei Roy. “Russian Ethos in War and Peace.” Moscow News, 1996, issue No. 9, July 3rd.

[v] Here’s an example from my personal experience: my native (well, practically native) Pyatigorsk, a southern town where the street crowd has always looked somewhat more colorful than in central Russia, was mostly Russian only a decade or so ago; nowadays it is even outwardly dramatically different in ethnic terms ­ its streets display a clear overabundance of the dark-haired swarthy type.

[vi] This idea has been elaborated, among others, by S.V. Kortunov; see, e.g., his monograph Stanovlenie politiki bezopasnosti (The Formation of Security Policy), Moscow 2003.

[vii] There is a linguistic difficulty here. Russian has two words for one English one: Russky (meaning an ethnic Russian) and Rossiyanin (pl. Rossiyane) designating a citizen of Russia of any ethnicity. Whenever possible, I will use the phrase “ethnic Russian” for Russky; in some contexts ­ as in the present ­ the use of the term Rossiyanin (-ne) is inevitable. There is also the more manageable Ross for Rossiyanin, only it’s decidedly obsolete.

[viii] See, http://www.nlobooks.ru/rus/nz-online/619/2051/2054 Incidentally, that article was eagerly reposted on dozens of other sites, which just shows that Furman’s views cannot simply be ignored.

[ix] In his paper the author calls Russia, and Russia only, a mini-empire at least a dozen times. This way of referring to the planet’s largest country with a population of some 150 million looks a bit odd and points to the way the author feels about his subject rather than to the subject itself. The same can be said of the term “lessening of Russia” (the Russian word umalenie is in fact much more derisive) ­ a most desirable process for Prof. Furman. This is very typical of a section of Russian citizens or rather individuals resident in Russia. While calling Russia a mini-empire and wishing it to shrink further, they are dead against the lessening of, say, Georgia (that has now lost Abkhazia and South Ossetia for good); nor will they ever refer to Georgia as a mini-empire, though the name fits that country to a T, as it does some others in post-Soviet space.

[x] Taking into account what they would become in the future, they could be designated as proto-empires, although it is hardly worthwhile to use that term: entia non sunt multiplicanda.

[xi] I have already had occasion to point out the positively comic nature of charges of “energy imperialism” leveled against Russia by the West: “One of the conditions for Russia acceding to the WTO is that it should raise its internal price of gas to world levels ­ in accordance with market principles. Yet when Russia raises the price of gas it is selling Ukraine to world levels, she is accused by the United States, WTO’s major player, of “energy imperialism” and similar nonsense.  To stay “non-imperialist” in the eyes of the West, Russia is supposed to subsidize Ukraine to the tune of $3-5 billion a year. Similarly with Georgia, Moldova and other post-Soviet countries. And that is just one example of the crudity of the prevailing criticism of Russia’s “imperial ambitions.” (Sergei Roy. “Russia: An Evil Empire or Just an Empire?” The piece was posted in 2006 at the Russia Today website and at www.intelligent.ru , an internet journal that met an untimely demise a while ago).

[xii] S.V. Kortunov. “I vse zhe: byt’ ili ne byt’ Rossii imperskoi?” (“And Still: Will Russia Be Imperial, or Will It Not?”). I quote from an article published in 2006 in www.intelligent.ru .

[xiii] I am reminded here of an amusing episode that occurred during the trial of Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane shot down over the Urals in 1961. In the preliminaries he was first asked about his citizenship, and he promptly replied ‘United States.’ The next question was about his natsional’nost’ “nationality” (properly speaking, ethnicity) which obviously baffled the American. After a short pause, he merely repeated, ‘United States.’ That was his national’nost’ indeed, and it never entered his head it might be anything else. America’s example in this area is certainly something to imitate and aspire to.

[xiv] What is particularly interesting about the Captive Nations Resolution is its origin. It was penned by Lev Dobrianski, professor of Economics at Georgetown University, a rabid Ukrainian nationalist and Russophobe. It has been pointed out that “the list of “captive nations” had the unmistakable markings of Nazi propaganda. The non-existent “nations” of White Ruthenia, Idel-Ural, Cossackia, had all been invented by Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s notorious minister for “Eastern Regions.” (Ed. Lozansky. “The Captive Nations Resolution: 50 Years On.” In: http://www.america-russia.net/eng/face/187144499 .
See also Susan Lisa Carruthers. “Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing

[xv] Russia’s history generally abounds in such instances of self-determination by various ethnic groups. Seventy years after Ivan the Terrible had conquered Kazan, Tatars joined Prince Pozharsky’s host in the fight against Polish intervention, although they could well have recalled past grievances and hit him in the rear. That was a distinct case of the Tatar people’s historical choice ­ to link its destiny with that of Russia.

[xvi]  Actually I’ve heard complaints about the iniquity of statistics, some Tatars insisting that Bashkirs are only the third largest ethnic group in Tataria. This is anecdotal evidence, of course.

[xvii] Before the revolution of 1917 Dagestan alone annually lost several hundred men in their prime owing to blood feuds.

[xviii] The Chechens did not constitute a uniform state or a quasi-state entity at the time when they were part of Shamil’s Imamate, either.

[xix] For more details, see Sergei Roy. “Chechnya and Russia Before and After Budyonnovsk.” Moscow News, 1995, issue No.26. There I wrote this, among other things: “The tragedy has always been there, and it’s bedrock simple. Bare rocks yield bare subsistence, and not for too many. Ethnographers even explain hillmen’s explosive pride and vendettas, constant internecine strife and brigandage, as nature’s own remedies against over-population. In the past, and not too remote past either, bands of Dagestani, Chechen and other “abreks” or brigands from one or several “auls” (villages) terrorized their neighbors, who lived in constant fear of being raided and sent their own youth on similar raids. The result was a siege mentality, contempt for honest (because useless) toil and an attitude toward the world outside the clan/village as a legitimate playground for killing, stealing and hostage-taking.”

[xx] Naturally, no discussion of the history of Chechnya can bypass the deportation of that people to Kazakhstan during the war. The issue is quite thorny and painful, but I stick to this view: wartime excesses are just that ­ wartime excesses. In 1944 the Red Army could not launch an offensive against the Germans to help out Russia’s British and American allies (who were then in pretty dire straits)  while there was the risk of an armed uprising in its rear, which was much hoped for by the Nazis who kept sending considerable numbers of their agents into those parts.

[xxi] For more detail, see my 1995 piece referred to above. It says, in part:, “As all industries except rudimentary agriculture ground to a halt, virtually the whole nation turned “abrek” combining age-old “abrek” mentality with 20th-century weapons and techniques: robbing trains and trucks; going on forays outside Chechnya to steal cattle, cars, tractors, and to take hostages; receiving stolen goods, especially cars stolen in Poland, Russia, Germany and elsewhere; hijacking planes to demand ransom; shooting holes in pipelines and filling tankers with precious petrol; running drugs, weapons and poisonous vodka made out of medicinal alcohol, forging money by the truckload, buying up planeloads of Russian currency in the newly independent states which had introduced their own currency, undertaken to destroy the Russian banknotes and hadn’t; sending out armed gangs as far as Magadan’s gold fields to buy up stolen gold; and a great deal else that would take a criminologist to describe.”

[xxii] Adherents of more traditional Islam maintain that interpreting the notion of jihad in such a spirit runs counter to true Islam. One can’t go into the finer points of theology here; what is important is how those ideas actually worked in the given historical setting.

[xxiii] The most amusing thing here is of course the fact that such work on formulating an ideological basis for the disintegration of Russia is carried out at the Russian Academy of Sciences, that is, at the expense of the Russian taxpayer.

[xxiv] It is perhaps necessary to explain this phrase of mine about people who regard themselves as (ethnic) Russians. I had a school mate whose mother was Armenian and father, Lithuanian; the only Lithuanian thing about Slava was his surname; he was an ordinary Russian chap. In my travels all over the Soviet Union I have come across even more exotic combinations: father a Komi, mother a Karakalpak woman; true, their daughter had a smattering of Karakalpak, but that’s because they lived in Karakalpakia (for those who have never heard the name: Karakalpakia ­ of which the literal translation would be something like Blackcaplandia ­ is part of Uzbekistan). For the rest the lady (quite an intellectual, let me add) regarded herself as a Russian woman just like any other. Considering the intensity of mixing and interfusion of different peoples in Soviet times, there must be millions of cases like that (incidentally, unaccounted for in any census). How would they fit in the project for building “national homes”? They would not, and that’s a fact. They already have a home, and no one should be allowed to monkey with that.

[xxv] I intentionally restrict myself to examples from the past at this stage. What is now going on in Western Europe under the guise of multiculturalism is a separate and very interesting topic, and I would not like to touch on it merely in passing.

[xxvi] The initial reaction in new Russia to the seventy years of communist ideology dominating the country was revulsion against any single ideology prevailing on the national level. Little by little this absurd situation gave way to societal consensus on basic ideological principles; the ideology described in the text solidified as a sort of natural process.

[xxvii] Let me cite here my own experiences to illustrate this. For decades I followed a hobby highly popular in this country ­ sailing and kayaking on remote waterways, mostly solo on a tiny inflatable kayak (for essays about many such trips see  www.sergeiroysbooks.de ). Among other areas I kayaked along the coasts of the Aral Sea and the Caspian. The locals I came in contact with were mostly poachers. These were on the whole a pretty rough lot, yet they invariably treated me as a welcome guest: the way they explained it to me, a wayfarer is a gift from Allah. That Muslim precept and custom worked in perfect unison with the official ideology of friendship among peoples, no contradiction between these tenets at all; total harmony, in fact. I often think what would happen if I tried anything like that now, in these times of disintegration of the Soviet empire and triumph of nationalism. One morning I might jolly well wake up a hostage or else minus my head, I guess. This sort of thing makes one wonder willy-nilly which is better, national self-determination or a not quite democratic empire; and which is higher, the right of nations to self-determination or the right of each innocent human being to life.

[xxviii] It must be noted that not enough is now being done in this area. There is a pressing need, for instance, for changing the Constitution to endow every entity of the Federation with equal rights, doing away with a situation where some regions (the ethnic minority republics) are more equal than others. One way of achieving it might be to raise the status of regions known as oblast’ and krai to that of land (zemlya). Then all the regions (provinces) of the Federation would be on an equal footing, they would all be zemli, an obvious parallel to America’s states and Germany’s Länder. This is, of course, too serious a theme to be developed in a footnote and must be dealt with in a separate paper. Still, I had to say this here to dispel the impression the reader might otherwise form that I believe the state of interethnic relations in Russia to leave nothing to be desired. That is not the case at all.

[featured image is file photo of random crowd in Russia]