Borderline Consciousness

The inevitable near future of any Russian government, no matter what political orientation it adheres to, is the search for ways to keep the country within its current borders.

Recently, United Ossetia, the largest party in the Republic of South Ossetia (SO), which exists only in the imagination of Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Tuvalu, turned to South Ossetian President Leonid Tibilov with a request to hold a referendum on the issue of "reunification with North Ossetia." The initiators of the referendum propose to hold it together with the parliamentary elections this summer. So far, there has been no official Russian reaction to this idea, but Moscow is unlikely to be delighted. From a financial point of view, joining does not change anything. Russia both before the war with Georgia and after it contains South Ossetia. And all its inhabitants, of course, with the exception of Georgian refugees, have Russian passports. However, the political costs of such accession are high: practically the whole world, unlike Russia, continues to consider South Ossetia a part of Georgia. And the accession of this territory to Russia would definitely be perceived as an annexation.

But this incident with United Ossetia's attempts to join united Russia involuntarily exposed almost the main problem of our country - territorial. For centuries, Russia has developed solely through the annexation - sometimes violent, sometimes not so much - of new lands. With the collapse of the USSR, this path stopped for an indefinite historical period. Tiny South Ossetia, even if the Russian authorities agree to annex it, clearly will not make our country stronger and will not reverse the general trend of “Russia's decline”.

Our generally recognized technological backwardness from the advanced powers is not so bad. Worse, Russia does not have sufficient human, economic and value resources to maintain full substantive control over all its lands in the foreseeable future. The Chinese will become the second or third (after the Russians and Tatars) ethnic group in our country in the horizon of 10-15 years. Moreover, the Chinese also have their own China at hand, while the Russians have no other Russia.

The program for the development of the Far East, which the president speaks of as a priority for the entire 21st century, even without the traditional domestic game of “kickback-cutting”, costs a lot of money and effort. The big question is whether we have the economic and intellectual potential for such development. The mental divide between the Caucasus and Central Russia is also rapidly deepening, although Putin and the ruling party in the Caucasus continue to be voted on with Soviet results of 90 percent or more. It is hard to deny that Chechnya and, say, the Krasnodar Territory are united only by hatred of "Western values."

Ultimately, disputes about the future of Russia come down to how — by a final plunge into the new Middle Ages, the conservation of stereotypes of a slavish paternalistic consciousness, or technological breakthroughs on the basis of real political and economic liberalization — to keep the country within its current borders. Or not hold back at all, but try to make the new, territorially more compact Russia competitive.

So far, Russia has been relying solely on the export of energy resources, while both the American oil company ExxonMobil and Norway have gained access to the Russian oil shelf. So this part of sovereignty, in the jingoistic sense, we have already partly given up. At the same time, Russia has gigantic reserves of drinking water, which potentially makes us by the middle of the 21st century - again, the question is: within what boundaries? one of the world's leading powers.

The transitional period from the USSR to the new Russia is over. It is no longer possible to hide behind references to the chaos after the death of the Union or the “dashing 90s”: too much time has passed, and Putin has been ruling for almost twice as long as Yeltsin. The current political and economic trajectory of Russia, alas, resembles the second half of the half-life period: we continue to eat up oil and gas resources and the Soviet technological legacy, gradually losing real control over the territory of the still huge country.