Where does Russia end?  By Demis Polandov, special to Prague Watchdog
Chechnya is the leading candidate for secession from the Russian empire. With its mono-ethnic population, today’s Chechnya makes one think of an overseas colony. The region has a clearly-established ethnic border. All the institutions of statehood have been created. They do not function as they ought to, in many of their manifestations they are inhumane, but they exist. The people, including the president, are replaceable. The rotation of officials is painless and organic. Of course, similar institutions also existed in the ChASSR (Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic), but during the deportations of the Chechens and Ingush they were almost completely destroyed. The deportations led to an enormous collapse in the level of educational attainment, and the development of the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy was stunted for an entire generation. The total nature of the deportations left no chance of rescuing the elites that had come into being the Soviet era, and the pressure on the "guilty population" lasted almost until the end of Soviet rule.
Two terrible wars and a drop in the level of education have not struck a similarly total blow at the "elite" potential of the Chechen people. In the post-Soviet period, Moscow's best universities have accepted and trained a large number of Chechens who are now experts in the fields of jurisprudence and economics. Clearly at present it cannot be said that the region enjoys economic self-sufficiency. This point would seem to support the arguments of those who support an anti-separatist view of the current position. However, the federal centre is currently making huge investments in the republic, and these are certainly strengthening the degree to which Chechnya can sustain itself. Also, these subsidies are in themselves a divisive factor – Russia does not want to go on paying the bills forever. Moreover, if a free and fair referendum were held in Chechnya today, it is likely that more than 80% of the population would vote for independence.
In the pages of Prague Watchdog Mikhail Pozharsky recently expressed the view of some Russian nationalists on the question of whether the separation of the North Caucasus from Russia is desirable or feasible. It is ironic that Russian liberals often come to a similar conclusion, though guided by quite different ideological attitudes. Though it is reasonable to wonder what point there is in discussing the approaches of liberals and nationalists if neither are in power, there is a point in raising such a question. The fact is that there are only two officially-sanctioned projects for the modernization of Russia, and both are potentially fatal to the empire.
Almost no economic proposals are heard from the liberal camp. The economic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s were essentially liberal, and so no really significant changes in Russia’s legislative base are needed. The only problem is that the laws that were written on paper have not been able to modernize Russia's economy. The liberals see the reason for this in the failure to implement the new legislation, less in the field of the economy than in that of human rights. They place the emphasis on the operation of a free market, minimal government intervention in the economy and the lives of citizens, the development of public institutions, and the rule of law.
Russia’s patriotic nationalists think of their country as a unitary state of the Russian people, and appeal to the ethnic Russians who make up 80% of the population. They believe that the abolition of the country’s ethnic division into regions, the dismantling of the federal structure and the suppression of national minority movements will be able to solve most of the problems and give Russia the prospect of a long-term future. However, many nationalists also realize that there are some regions it will be impossible to suppress completely and "integrate" within the Russian state, and they will therefore be offered separation or secession.
There is supposedly yet another project – something called "sovereign modernization". Despite the topic’s popularity and apparently obvious nature, it has never acquired anything close to a coherent conceptual framework. I have not been able to discover anything in it beyond an assertion of the need for modernization. It would appear that the Russian government and the experts who serve it are trying to invent some sort of special mechanisms borrowed from both West and East (China) which will carry out a modernization of the economy without modernizing society. The attempt is as old as the hills – a protective ideology, another symptom of the last stages of empire.
Trying to keep everything as it is constitutes the worst possible project, because it is not a project at all – rather, it reflects an unwillingness to change the badly crumbling foundations of society. All efforts to preserve an empire without real modernization merely speed up its centrifugal tendencies. Tactical decisions taken without any strategic vision of the future cannot lead to a different result. Liberal tax reform and bureaucratic misconduct, the abolition of elected regional heads and the actual existence of private fiefdoms under irremovable governors, the combating of corruption and the growth of corruption – the list of examples of unadorned facts and attempts to correct them is a long one. Incidentally, President Kadyrov and the two wars in Chechnya are also classic examples of such protective policy.
Nearly all the conditions for the Chechens to secede from Russia are now in place. A clearly-defined mono-ethnic territory with experience in building state institutions, an emerging elite, a shared ideology of secession from Russia – even though within Chechnya there are several ideologies (and I do not claim that everything will be calm and peaceful after the secession) – all these signs are adding to the empire’s general state of crisis and making the liberation of Chechnya the most probable scenario. It is unlikely to happen in the next few years. The Chechens will have to wait either for Russia’s modernization or for the profound crisis that will loom within it in fifteen or twenty years’ time. However, another war with the empire cannot be ruled out. Controlling potential revolutionary forces by means of small, periodic wars is an old method used by "protectors". Though one imagines that Russia is unlikely to take such a step in Chechnya.
Demis Polandov is an economics journalist and former deputy editor-in-chief of "Gazeta"
Photo: naviny.by. (Translation by DM) (P,DM)
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