The fall in oil prices will inevitably raise the question of Russia's transformation from an empire into a Russian national state

In the article “How to cure Russians of xenophobia,” Sergei Guriev touched on a number of problems relating to interethnic relations in modern Russia. We can only thank the author for this publication. There has been a long-standing need for an open and honest discussion about this sensitive issue. At the same time, one can argue with some of the assessments made in the article.

It is not surprising that Muscovites view immigrants from the North Caucasus and Central Asia with distrust. Russia has been a territorially integrated empire for the last three centuries. Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus were conquered as a result of wars, sometimes long and bloody. Along with other territories, these lands became colonies of the Russian Empire in the 19th century. There is nothing supernatural in the fact that the native inhabitants of the metropolis have always perceived and continue to perceive their own compatriots differently from immigrants from the colonies. Russians are not alone in this. For a whole century, Algeria was not just a colony, but also an administrative part of France. Despite this, Parisians perceive Algerian migrants somewhat differently than the French themselves.

Residents of the colonies always treated immigrants from the metropolis as strangers. How else to explain the anti-colonial uprisings that at different times swept Africa, Asia and Latin America. Russia is no exception here: it is enough to recall the Bashkir uprisings of the 17th-18th centuries, the Caucasian War of 1817-1864, and the uprisings in Poland in 1830 and 1863. The revolution of 1917 could have become the final point in the existence of the Russian Empire. However, the Bolsheviks, under the slogan of internationalism, managed to restore it. The age of the Soviet empire was short-lived. Uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland were the prelude to its collapse. The severe economic crisis of socialism provoked the collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. Long before these events, Central Asia and the Transcaucasian republics ceased to be part of the union political and legal space. The leaders of these republics exchanged external loyalty to Moscow for the right to establish their own rules, like Sharaf Rashidov in the Uzbek SSR in the 1970s. As soon as the union center began to weaken, the republics demanded independence. It is no coincidence that the first open conflict on ethnic grounds in a long time was the protests in Alma-Ata (December 1986), whose participants demanded that a Kazakh be appointed head of the Kazakh SSR.

One cannot help but see obvious parallels with modern Russia in this.

Today, the republics of the North Caucasus are not part of the Russian political and legal space.

When Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan in 1999, instead of support, he encountered resistance from the local population, who chose Russia and began to form a militia. But ten years later, Dagestan became an even more unstable republic than Chechnya. It is not without reason that supporters of the bill giving the regions the right to refuse direct gubernatorial elections appealed specifically to the appeals of the heads of the North Caucasus republics. As in the USSR, subsidies from Moscow are the financial basis for the corrupt regimes of personal power existing in the North Caucasus. This state of affairs can continue as long as the federal center has the money for multi-billion dollar transfers. The situation will change dramatically if a severe budget crisis breaks out in Russia. There is no doubt that it will come sooner or later. You don't have to be a Nobel laureate in economics to realize the fantastic irresponsibility of the current Russian government, which is unable to balance the budget at an oil price of $100 per barrel. The experience of the 1970s clearly showed that oil prices cannot remain at such high levels indefinitely. Therefore, today it is necessary to prepare for the political consequences of a public finance crisis.

When the budget crisis becomes a reality, the centrifugal tendencies, driven deep with the beginning of the construction of the “vertical of power,” will again make themselves felt. It can be predicted with high probability that the republics of the North Caucasus, which sought independence in the early 1990s, will demand it again. In this situation, the Kremlin will face a fork in the road: either forcibly retaining the Caucasus or agreeing to secession. When passing this fork in the road, it will be important to avoid the mistakes of the first post-communist decade. Hope for a peaceful outcome is given by the growing awareness in Russian society that the Caucasus is not Russia. In the early 1990s there was no such understanding. Despite the fact that the threat of Russia's disintegration was overcome with the end of the crisis of dual power (October 1993), fear continued to exist in society that Russia would repeat the fate of the USSR. In 1994, any practical politician would have to answer the question whether the independence of Chechnya would entail the secession of other republics. Perhaps this explains the small number of anti-war rallies held by Yegor Gaidar and Grigory Yavlinsky in Moscow in December 1994.

These fears were in vain. Russians cannot have another homeland other than Russia. Russians will not separate from Russia. With the exception of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, there are no longer any territories in Russia where Russians constitute a small minority. Even in non-Caucasian national republics, the share of Russians is at least 35-37.8% in Yakutia (the share of Yakuts among the local population is 49.9%), 39.7% in Tatarstan (the share of Tatars is 53.2%), 36.3 % in Bashkiria (share of Bashkirs - 29.7%). Although, of course, some subjects of the Federation in the future may have the same cultural autonomy as the Canadian province of Quebec. In the early 1990s, even many resource-rich Russian regions sought independence: one can recall the projects for the creation of the Ural and Far Eastern republics. However, in reality, the demands of local elites boiled down to a redistribution of the tax base. Apparently, approximately the same thing can be seen in the near future: a situation in which 70% of tax revenues are taken by the center cannot be the norm in a federal state. Finally, the federation itself can only be built on voluntary principles: not a single subject can be forcibly retained, nor can it be excluded from the union by force.

The creation of a functioning democratic federation will be a critical step on Russia's path from empire to nation-state. Completion of this transition will be impossible without the approval of a new configuration of the post-Soviet space. The existence of the Russian and Soviet empires was subordinated to the logic of control of Eurasia. The Belovezhskaya agreements could not negate this logic. The Union of Russia and Belarus, the CSTO, the Customs and Eurasian Unions - all these organizations were created with the aim of strengthening Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet space. In reality, the principle “money in exchange for loyalty” applies. Financial assistance to the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, multibillion-dollar loans to Tajikistan, cash injections into South Ossetia are evidence that Russian taxpayers are paying for the dream of preserving the empire.

Instead of passing a long-overdue law on the repatriation of Russians (similar to the laws on the repatriation of Germans and Jews in Germany and Israel, respectively), the Kremlin is funding Russian parties in the Baltic states, thereby provoking tensions with Latvia and Estonia.

The most striking thing in this situation is that even the authors of the updated Strategy 2020, who emphasize the importance of integration of the countries of the former USSR, have not left the paradigm of “gathering Soviet lands.”

But even a schoolchild can see that Belarus, Tajikistan and other post-Soviet republics cannot be sources of technological and institutional innovations. For Russia, the prospect of membership in the Organization for Economic Commonwealth and Development (OECD) is much more profitable.

All neo-imperial alliances in the post-Soviet space are obstacles on Russia’s path to creating a modern state with a developed market economy. To realize this, it is not enough to recognize the importance of Russia’s integration into the economic and political associations of developed countries. It is necessary to rethink Russia as a Russian national state.

Unfortunately, this rethinking was not possible for the reformers of the 1990s, who completely rejected everything reminiscent of Russian nationalism. But one cannot help but remember that all anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe were permeated with nationalism. The reforms of Mart Laar in Estonia, Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland, Kakha Bendukidze in Georgia were not just market transformations - they were based on the dream of transforming these countries from colonies of the Soviet empire into modern market democracies.

In the first years of post-communist Russia, such an organic synthesis of the national and democratic was complicated by the status of the metropolis, which had just lost its colonies. This is largely why the main opponents on the Russian political scene were liberals and nationalists. This was especially evident in the civil war on the streets of Moscow in October 1993. However, today the conditions for synthesis are ripe. The escalation of instability in the North Caucasus threatens Russia's status as a European rather than an Asian country. Apparently, defending this status will be the main task of reformers of future generations.

Why you shouldn’t be afraid of the collapse of the country