Russia’s Future: How to Separate the Possible from the Impossible

Russian oppositionists and the entire Western world dream of a democratic revival in Russia after the end of Putin’s regime. But is this revival possible, as long as Russia and its intellectual elite do not get rid of their imperial matrix? The Ukrainian philosopher analyzes the cyclical trends of Russian history in the longue durée and his conclusion is categorical: Russia must put an end to its colonial past and present, restoring freedom to the many conquered peoples who are part of it today. This is the sine qua non condition of its democratic future.No ceasefire will put an end to the current Russian-Ukrainian confrontation. If Russia is not satisfied with Crimea and Donbas, what reason is there to think that it will be satisfied with the other Ukrainian lands it seized at the time of the ceasefire?

This confrontation will not end even if Ukraine manages to retake by force all of its territories, including Crimea. Obviously, a militarily defeated Russia will seek revenge.

This will not happen only under one condition: if Russia itself undergoes internal transformation.

In this article, I do not address the question of when and how such transformations will begin. It is clear that sooner or later it will happen (perhaps after a military defeat; this has already happened in Russian history). However, in preparing for them, it is important to understand the range of possibilities: what kind of future Russia can expect, and what kind it cannot expect, and why not.

It is clear what transformations the Russian liberal opposition is calling for: democratization, liberalization, and establishment of the rule of law — in short, the standard package of democratic reforms. In order to assess the range of real possibilities for changes, it is necessary to go beyond current events and evaluate the Russian situation in the context of “big” historical time — what Fernand Braudel aptly called longue durée¹. First, we will briefly recall the history of liberal reforms in Russia, starting with Alexander II; then we will state some unchanged characteristics of Russian foreign trade over the past 500 years; after that, we will recall the main features of Russian territorial expansion over the same period. I am going to show that it is from these three components that the “jigsaw puzzle” of the Russian future is formed, which allows us to determine which transformations in the future Russia are possible, which of them are desirable, and which are impossible and why, so that talking about them only distracts from reality.

All attempts at liberal reforms in Russia have ended in political or personal disaster for their initiators.

The first large-scale attempt at liberal reforms in Russia in the 19^th Century was made by Alexander II, nicknamed “Alexander the Liberator”. He also became the leader among Russian tsars on the basis of the number of attempts on his life: after ten unsuccessful attempts he became the victim of the eleventh (1881). Most of the attempts were organized by Russian supporters of radical change, to whom the tsar’s reforms seemed too indecisive; however, the result of their attempts was, on the contrary, to stop even these indecisive reforms. One assassination attempt was carried out in Paris by Antoni Berezowski, a Polish national seeking revenge on the tsar for suppressing another Polish uprising against the Russian government.

In the early 20^th Century, liberal agrarian reform was initiated and carried out by the head of the Russian government, Pyotr Stolypin. By the number of attempts on his life he equalled Alexander II: having survived ten, he also became the victim of the eleventh (1911).

In the last years of his life Vladimir Lenin managed to see the unviability of the “command economy” and proposed a New Economic Policy (NEP), i.e. partial liberalization of the economy contrary to the program goals of his party. After Lenin’s death (1924), this policy continued for a few more years, until it culminated in a massive agrarian procurement crisis (1927-1928), after which the NEP was abolished and its leading proponents (including Nikolai Bukharin) were physically exterminated by Stalin throughout the 1930s.

Nikita Khrushchev, who initiated limited liberal reforms after Stalin’s death, was luckier than Bukharin: he was not physically eliminated, but only deprived of his position and all publicity (1964) until his natural death (1971).

The fate of the last Soviet reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, was most paradoxical: the liberal reforms he initiated quickly led to independence movements in the so-called “union republics” (primarily the Baltic states, Georgia, and Ukraine), and after several failed attempts to stop this process by force, the Soviet Union finally collapsed (1991), which was not in the plans of either Gorbachev or his contemporary Western leaders.

Boris Yeltsin tried to continue liberal reforms in the largest fragment of the USSR, known as the Russian Federation. However, the result was the same as Gorbachev’s: it was no longer the Soviet “Union republics” that wanted to secede from the Kremlin, but the Russian “Federation subjects” (the Chechen Republic was the most active, but similar processes were developing in a number of other Russian republics, such as Tatarstan). This process in the Caucasus had to be stopped again by brute force, which eventually led to the replacement of Yeltsin with Putin and the gradual transition from liberal reforms to another restoration of Russian authoritarianism.

This short list is a good illustration of the recurring historical pattern. First, liberal reforms in Russia are always initiated solely by the head of the supreme or executive power. (Soviet historian Nathan Eidelman aptly called these attempts at liberalization “revolution from above².”) In no case were these reforms the implementation of some party program or the initiative of a parliamentary majority. Secondly, these reforms have always caused mixed reactions in Russian society: first, relief from the expansion of available freedoms, then growing dissatisfaction with the intensification of various “side effects”, which some members of society explained by insufficient, and others, on the contrary, by the excessive radicality of the reforms. Third, the government almost always curtailed these reforms on its own initiative (Stolypin’s agrarian reform, which the Bolsheviks confirmed when they introduced the NEP and then canceled together with the NEP, was a long-lived example). The exception was Gorbachev’s reforms, which led to the collapse of the USSR in just six years.

Why did the leaders of the Russian government regularly initiate liberal reforms, and why did all these attempts at reform either end in the restoration of authoritarianism or (like Gorbachev’s reforms) lead to unexpected political results? The answer to the first question can be found in the unchanging features of Russian foreign trade since the 16^th century.

Russia’s foreign trade: raw materials in exchange for technological goods

A great deal has changed in Russia over the past 500 years. From the Moscow kingdom the state turned into the Romanov Empire, increased its territorial possessions many times over, broke into many pieces in 1917-1918, regained power over most of the imperial lands as the Soviet Union, after 1945 took control of a large part of Central Europe and then lost that control, almost bloodlessly let fourteen “union republics” go free and continued to exist as the Russian Federation. However, the nature of Russian foreign trade has not undergone any significant changes during all this time. Russia has always offered its European counterparts raw materials and products of low level of processing in exchange for technological goods and consumer goods of the Russian elite.

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries Russia exported to Europe primarily hemp, flax, potash, tar, tallow, blubber, wax, fur, and leather, and imported from Europe fabrics, metals and metal products, weapons, jewelry, wines, and spices.

In the 18^th Century, the leaders of Russian exports to Europe remained hemp, flax, potash, lard, and fur; exports of timber, iron, and bread grew. Russia imported fabrics, dyes, sugar, wines, spices, and industrial equipment for the first Russian factories.

The same pattern can be observed in the 19^th Century: hemp, flax, potash, leather, timber, tar, iron, bread, and lard were brought from Russia to Europe, and fabrics, dyes, sugar, wines, spices, and industrial equipment were imported from Europe to Russia.

The export of raw materials continued to dominate the foreign trade of the Romanov Empire / USSR / Russian Federation also in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. For example, in 2013, Russian exports were led by mineral products, and in imports, as before, industrial equipment.

After the Industrial Revolution began in Russia (first half of the 19^th Century), this trade asymmetry became a constant headache for the Russian authorities. The Russian government was well aware that the country was critically dependent on Western technology, in exchange for which it could offer only raw materials, and thus was not in a state of strategic economic parity with the West, which made it vulnerable not only economically, but also geopolitically and militarily. Changing this situation required liberalization of economic life, which, following the example of Western countries, was to provide economic incentives for intensive, free, creative labor. These were the considerations behind the reforms of Alexander II, whose plans began to be developed after the painful defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, as well as Stolypin’s agrarian reform, which was similarly prompted by Russia’s humiliating defeat in the war with Japan in 1904-1905.

What obstacle did these liberal reforms invariably face? To answer this question, we will have to look even deeper into history.

The legacy of the Golden Horde and territorial expansion

The strengthening of the Moscow principality and its transformation into the main center of power in the territories east of Lithuania took place in the 13th-15^th centuries under the strong, in some respects decisive influence of the Golden Horde — one of the largest fragments of Genghis’s Empire³. Moscow princes who were more successfully than their neighbors and competitors interacted with the rulers of the Horde, and when the Horde weakened due to internal contradictions and lost the war with Tamerlane (1395), not only refused to obey the Horde, but also began to declare themselves (for example, in correspondence with various Asian rulers) as its, the Horde, legitimate heirs. The Moscow rulers justified their conquest of the Khanate of Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556), and Siberia (1582-1598) by their claims to the Horde’s heritage. As a result of this explosive territorial expansion, Russia in the early 17th Century already controlled vast territories inhabited by a large number of non-Slavic peoples, mostly of non-Christian faith. In order to keep them in submission, the Russian government constantly resorted to economic and legal pressure (e.g. restriction of residence and occupation), backed by the power resources of the Russian Empire⁴.

Beginning in the mid-17^th Century, the main vector of Russian territorial expansion changed from eastern to western and southwestern. By the end of the 18^th Century Russia had mastered the territories of the present Baltic States, Belarus, and most of Ukraine, in the early 20^th Century — part of the territories of present Moldova and Poland, and then began to “conquer” the Caucasus. In all these territories, Russia immediately or gradually abolished all or almost all local “liberties”, after which it began systematic exploitation of local natural resources and Russification of the local population — that is, it sought to deprive the population of identity at least to the extent that this identity was incompatible with Russian subjection (and those who resisted it, instead of identity, were deprived of freedom or life, as is happening now in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine).

It is clear that it was only possible to keep all these gigantic territories with a fundamentally heterogeneous “Eurasian” population under centralized Russian control through strict authoritarian rule. Thaddeus Bulgarin, even under Nicholas I, clearly formulated this interdependence between the cultural diversity of the Russian population and the need for state unity of command: “Only faith and autocracy can keep in balance this immense vastness, Russia, almost a special part of the world, containing all climates, all tribes of men⁵!”.

The political opposition to this authoritarianism was twofold. First, there were local ethnic movements whose ultimate goal was to acquire or restore state independence (in the 19^th Century, the Poles played a particularly active role). Secondly, the authorities were opposed by a Russian-specific radical-left movement, whose representatives demanded that all peasants be given full freedom immediately, after which the people’s happiness would come as if by itself. It was from these two layers that all the participants in the assassination attempt on Alexander II came.

Any relaxation of authoritarianism as a result of liberal reforms necessary to revitalize the economy immediately strengthened the above-mentioned movements, and they, in their turn, undermined the structure of the imperial statehood.

This is why, starting from the mid-19^th Century, the same cycle has been invariably repeated in Russia: liberalization, driven by economic needs, quickly leads to a loss of governability of the state, as sharp social and ethnic/regional contradictions immediately come to the surface; in order to restore governability, it is necessary to return to authoritarianism, which can briefly provide “despotic growth” (the best example is Stalin’s industrialization in the 1930s), but it is inevitably followed by economic stagnation, which inevitably leads to “despotic growth”. It is precisely because of this vicious circle that Russia hardly creates its own high technologies (it mainly buys or steals others’), and raw material exports are still the basis of the Russian economy.

According to the observations of Daron Adjemoglu and James Robinson, a similar “pendulum” for a much longer historical time could be observed in China: the strengthening of the centralized state for a short period of time provides “despotic growth”, but at the same time destroys economic incentives for productive work, which leads to stagnation, which in turn forces the government to move to limited liberalization, but it soon has to be curtailed due to the loss of political controllability⁶. However, the Russian situation, owing to the “Eurasian” location of this empire, is much more acute, because the cultural heterogeneity of the Russian population, despite all the efforts of the authoritarian center, is significantly superior to the Chinese one — in terms of diversity of ethnicities, religions, local languages, regional economic interests, and cultural orientations. Another key difference between Russia and China is the historical instability of borders: a region that was not Russian the day before yesterday could become so yesterday, cease to be Russian today, but the Russian government has not given up hope that it will become so again tomorrow. Therefore, Russia, unlike geographically localized China, was accustomed to compensate for the chronically low intensity and culture of its subjects’ indentured labor by extensive development, i.e. by seizing and exploiting neighboring lands, with their natural and (no less important) human resources.

Among other things, this means that for today’s Russia, regaining control over Ukraine is neither Putin’s whim nor a mere vestige of “imperial ideology,” but first and foremost a geopolitical necessity: this is Russia’s traditional way of trying to maintain its global competitiveness in anticipation of a future (20-30 years) sharp drop in demand for fossil fuels, after which Russia will have no significant natural resources left to support its unchanging foreign trade pattern of “raw materials in exchange for raw materials”. That is why, according to the logic of the Russian leadership, Russia should seize maximum territory now, while gas and oil can still fuel Russian expansion — in order to trade with the rest of the world, if not for raw materials, then at least for geopolitical influence.

“Prison of Nations”

The fact that the Russian Federation remains today a “prison of peoples” (as Lenin once called Russia, using the metaphor of the Marquis de Custine) is an open secret that has been ignored in the West (with a few exceptions) for too long, in a vain attempt to view today’s Russia as a “nation state”. The last time Russia spoke about this publicly was when Alexander Sokurov met with Putin on December 9, 2021 — less than three months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Sokurov essentially suggested that Putin do what President de Gaulle once did to the French colonies: let “all those who no longer want to live with us in the same state” go. Characteristically, Putin responded by talking about the threat of a “repeat of Yugoslavia,” the prospect of a “breakup of the Russian Federation,” and the categorically unacceptable to him transformation of “multinational” (sic!) Russia into “Muscovy” (which would actually be the equivalent of France or Britain losing its colonies, with the correction that in a “continental” empire the problem of geographical separation of metropolis and colonies is much more complicated, and therefore politically much more acute). It would be hard to find a more authoritative confirmation that today’s Russia, even without taking into account its claims to Ukraine, remains a colonial empire.

It is important to note that recognizing the reality of the threat of Russia’s collapse has been Putin’s constant public stance since the beginning of his rule. “If Dagestan were to collapse, that would be it. The Caucasus would have withdrawn, it’s clear. Dagestan, Ingushetia, and then up the Volga River — Bashkortostan, Tatarstan. This is the same direction to the interior of the country⁷”. Good democracy, from which a number of regions are ready to “move away” as soon as there is a real opportunity to do so!

However, this means that any new attempt to liberalize Russian economic or political life, which can be hypothesized “after Putin”, will inevitably lead to a new crisis of governability, which will present the then leaders of the country with a decisive choice: either to agree to a new stage of the collapse of this colonial empire, or to save the integrity of the country through another restoration of militant authoritarianism. Both of these scenarios are realistic, although the second one, for obvious reasons, is undesirable both for Russia’s neighbors and for the global community. At the same time, the third scenario, often discussed today, is unrealistic: the successful liberalization of the Russian Federation as a whole, with the preservation of its current internationally recognized borders, but with the change of its internal political structure to a Western-type liberal democracy. Liberal democracy in a “prison of nations” is impossible by definition.

A free Russia is a Russia without colonies

Russian oppositionists are quite right to claim that “a free Russia is as important as a free Ukraine.” However, what exactly should be understood by “free Russia”? As this historical overview shows, a “free Russia” is first and foremost the liberation from Russian colonial rule of those peoples who seek state independence, which will also enable the rest of Russia to shed its colonial past and begin the formation of Russia proper (or, if you prefer, “Moscovia”) as a nation-state. Unfortunately, most leaders of the Russian liberal opposition (except for representatives of ethnic minorities) in their projects of establishing (or “restoring”) “freedom and democracy in Russia” completely ignore the “national question” and call for turning Russia into a “peaceful, democratic and European” state without any mention of future decolonization. As this historical analysis shows, such attempts can at best be considered sincere, but shortsighted and vain illusions, which are harmful already because they direct the expectations of the Western public and the efforts of Western politicians on the wrong path.

On the other hand, one can only welcome the recent OSCE resolution in which this authoritative organization recognized the “decolonization of the Russian Federation” as a prerequisite for “sustainable peace”. It is necessary to prepare for such decolonization now, making every effort to ensure that it takes place as orderly and peacefully as possible. And it is this step that will make possible the real democratization of the region of Eurasia currently controlled by the Russian Federation. The chance for peace in this region will come only when there is finally an end to Russian colonialism.

How ready is the Russian opposition for such a prospect? The same question can be asked in a different way: to what extent is the Russian liberal opposition ready to consciously refuse to be Great Russian? Russia’s future also depends to some (significant?) extent on the answer to this question.

Oleksiy Panych

Oleksiy Panych is a philosophy professor, doctor of literary studies, columnist, and a member of the Ukrainian Center of PEN International.

1. Fernand Braudel, Histoire et Sciences sociales : La longue durée, Annales, 1958, 13-14, pp. 725-753
2. See: N.Y. Eidelman. “Revolution from above” in Russia. Moscow: Kniga, 1989.
3. Charles J. Halperin. Russia and the Golden Horda. The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Indiana University Press, 1985.
4. Michael Khodarkovsky. Russia’s Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Indiana University Press, 2002.
5. Thaddeus Bulgarin, Russia in Historical, Statistical, Geographical and Literary Relations, Part 4, St. Petersburg, 1837, p. 291.
6. Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson. The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. New York, Penguin Press, 2019, chapter 7, “Mandate of Heaven.”
7. N. Gevorkyan, N. Timakova, A. Kolesnikov. From the first person: Conversations with Vladimir Putin. Moscow: Vagrius, 2000, p. 135.