Nobody in the West penetrated too much into the essence of Russian federalism, which made it easy to believe that Russia was a natural part of the political world of Europe. In fact, however, this federal costume has always concealed the same authoritarian way of Moscow’s management of different nationalities in large territories, treated as conquered colonial peoples with a great deal of racist contempt.
It has always been an element of Russia’s policy and propaganda towards the West to pretend to be what it never was. The key to this masking strategy is the use of Western terms. Let’s take one example: Russia is a federation, but what does that mean?
Since the Enlightenment and Montesquieu, federalism has softened the hearts of Western liberals and the left. It was treated as a counterweight to aggressive nationalism and a centralized state. And since the United States, and in Europe Switzerland, was a shining example of the freedom that a federal republic gives to ethnically different peoples, Russia, beginning with Lenin, has been able to successfully moderate its imperialism in the eyes of the West through the use of federal staffage.
Nobody in the West penetrated too much into the essence of Russian federalism, which made it easy to believe that Russia was a natural part of the political world of Europe. In fact, however, this federal costume has always concealed the same authoritarian way of Moscow’s management of disparate nationalities over large territories, treated as conquered colonial peoples with a great deal of racist contempt.
Timothy Snyder in “The New Yorker” recently drew attention to this aspect, writing that Putin wages a typical colonial war against Ukraine. It caused fury among some American and German historians and political scientists, for whom colonialism or racism are terms reserved exclusively for exposing the guilt of the Western white man, so using them against Russia is “inappropriate.” In my opinion, however, it is absolutely appropriate, as it allows us to understand the whole fraud of “Russian federalism”. The way Moscow treats Ukrainians, but also how it ethnically selects young people from the republics of the Russian federation, whom it enrolls in the army and sends them to the front as cannon fodder, reveals the true sources of Putin’s policy: on top is the great imperial Russia and the “Russian world”.
Let us hope that the war that Moscow started will become its great self-exposure in the eyes of the West. It may also have one more specific effect – to show the peoples living in Russia that the federation is a myth which is to obscure the fact that they live in a large prison. Will they want to get out of it?
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