Is Russia imperialist and doomed to collapse?

Russia might follow the historical path of Britain, France and other European former colonial powers.

Russia’s recent war of aggression in Ukraine has given new voice to arguments that Russia is an empire and heading towards inevitable dissolution.

In Western discourse it was often the collapse of the USSR in 1991 that was set as the definitive end of empire. However, the war, the notable overrepresention of Russian minorities among the mobilized, and the destruction of Ukrainian historical heritage in the occupied areas have all given new currency to arguments that Russia is an inner core or an unreformed empire.

Circa. 30 out of 140 million Russians self-identify as ethnic minority citizens, and the war has accentuated many pre-existing arguments questioning whether there are cogent reasons justifying St. Petersburg and the formerly Persian Derbent in Dagestan (among a plethora of other places) finding themselves within the borders of the same country.

Historically, empire has been a term of self-aggrandizement (see Russian Empire) as well as a means of emphasizing the moral bankruptcy of a polity labeled as such, whether by anti-colonial activists in the 1960s or Ukrainian public speakers today.  

A more dispassionate definition of the term implies a polity with de jure inequalities between its constituent parts. French Algeria was governed under a different set of legal norms than French Provence, India was not politically equal to Surrey. 

Empire or not?

Does modern Russia fit this definition? The claim for de jure power imbalances within the Russian Federation gives rise to a messy picture. As a heritage of Soviet (what many would describe as performative) internationalism, regions with ethnic minorities are technically supposed to enjoy greater autonomy. 

However, according to decolonization activists such as the League of Free Nations - an NGO uniting activists from a number of ethnic minorities (such as Tatars, Bashkirs, and Buryats), the inequality between Russia’s regions is so severe that it amounts to legally sanctioned imperialism. What also connects Russia with the empires of yore according to the League is that political and economic inequities are seen as mapping over ethnic boundaries: Moscow is the metropole and minority regions are the colonies. 

The debates surrounding decolonization discussions in Russian anti-war circles are not so much related to the presence of regional inequality - it is widely recognised - but to the degree to which it is predicated on ethnicity and whether it makes the survival of the Russian Federation impossible in the long term. 

Some liberal oppositionists argue that the metropole - and – colonies - esque relationship between Moscow and the rest of the country is based on the hyper centralizing political traditions of the country. Regardless of whether one is a Russian or a Buryat, their money will be hoovered to Moscow, and their region will be presided over by a goon sent from the center. This is the position of the urbanist-turned-politician Maxim Katz. He argues that poverty afflicts Russian peripheries regardless of ethnicity, and is the reason why ethnic minorities (who happen to inhabit those peripheries) are overrepresented among individuals sent to die in Ukraine. In this scenario, the relatively high salaries paid to contract soldiers act as perverse vehicles of upward social mobility. This view is countered by Alexandra Garmazhapova, a Buryat activist and social media influencer (who does not nevertheless support the separation of the Buryat Republic from Russia). She argues that the poverty of her home region, the Buryat republic, is not due to a development that is ethnically neutral but stems from a long tradition of economic exploitation by the Russian center.

Thus the fault line is between views of failed federalism on the one hand and a view of Russian history as a narrative of colonial exploitation on the other. To voices like Katz, rather than being an empire, Russia is a very flawed, albeit redeemable, federation. While the country might indeed be reformable, Katz’s view does perhaps overlook the historical reasons for the abject poverty of so many Russian regions populated by ethnic minorities: differences in GDP per capita between Moscow and previously insurrectionary Chechnya are measured in orders of magnitude.  

What is to be done?

In an interview with Maxim Kurnikov on the Russian Bild, Katz mentions that the conversation on secession is not politically topical and ought to be had only if it gains sufficient momentum in the form of public support. A reform of the federal structure is inevitable, secession is not, and the demand for it ought to be gauged through public discussion and referenda in the context of freer political expression after the regime’s collapse. 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the minority activists, such as the League of Nations would say. One can face a prison term for speech that questions the ‘territorial integrity’ of the Russian Federation, naturally disincentivizing individuals with separatist sympathies from voicing their opinions. To a League activist Ruslan Gabbasov of Bashkortostan, popular opinion is actually irrelevant, as it has been under the influence of the Russian education system and cultural dominance for centuries, making it less likely that secession would enjoy immediate electoral support. Independence thus needs to be proclaimed as soon as an opportunity presents itself, regardless of popular sentiment.

For those who are interested in popular opinion and other soft liberal niceties, the current conditions of Russian society make it difficult to gauge secessionist sentiments in the regions. What adds to this complexity is Russia’s kaleidoscopic diversity. It is not a given that attitudes are similar in Tatarstan, which toyed with independence in the nineties, and more historically quiescent republics such as Sakha (Yakutia). 

Russia’s tightly policed public sphere does not offer grounds for clear conclusions: demand for separatism cannot be definitively corroborated or falsified. What can be said for certain is that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shed light on issues afflicting ethnic minorities previously ignored by both Russian liberal opposition and the West. In the optimictic scenario this can lead to a reform of Russia as a federation after Putin’s departure, or a series of velvet divorces akin to the Czechozlovakian one in 1993. In the nightmare scenario, Russia turns into Yugoslavia with nukes – neither of these outcomes are close to anything that Putin, the arch-imperialist, intended to achieve by his Ukrainian gambit.