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“Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? Isn’t it Russia that attacked Ukraine?” The questions hurled at the police by a clamorous group of indignant women outside a theater in Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala were left unanswered.
The police stalked off as the protesting women chorused the chant, “No War.”
That was last month and the confrontation between infuriated mothers in Dagestan, a mountainous republic within the multi-national Russian Federation, took place shortly after President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization. The scene was captured on video. Elsewhere in the north Caucasian city, standoffs between protesters and baton-wielding police were fiercer with jostling and heavy-handed arrests, according to geo-located posted videos.
Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics, as well as other far-flung territories, or krais, even majority ethnic Russian ones, have seen anti-mobilization protests in recent weeks — as far afield as the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic and Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. They appear now to have died down with protesters intimidated by the repressive response. “People are really scared and keeping quiet,” says Margarita, a freelance journalist who’s been traveling Russia widely and asked for her family name to be withheld.
But as Putin’s war flounders in the face of stiff and agile Ukrainian resistance — and as the Russian military death toll mounts and the body bags are returned home, including of recent draftees — what’s left is sullen anger and resentment, which is compounding long-standing economic and local political grievances in the Russian Federation’s periphery.
How long will people in Russia’s ethnic republics and far-flung territories remain quiet and subdued? Not for much longer suspects Russian-born political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, a former chief editor at Russian business broadcaster RBC-TV.
The republics have long chafed under Moscow’s imperial rule — so too territories in the far east and parts of remote northern Russia. The seeds of potential rebellion, especially in the North Caucasus, the Sakha Republic and the Middle Volga, are being sown, he thinks. Increasing economic distress and impoverishment, the exploitation of natural resources only for the benefit of Moscow, the failure to drive development and investment, a reckless attitude to pollution and environmental degradation, and governance swinging from repression to negligence are all stoking simmering grievance.
What could trigger real revolt? “It could be a small spark,” he says. “Look at what triggered the Arab spring — a Tunisian fruit vendor setting himself on fire over injustice. Or look at Iran now: it can be something [like] … the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Revolt is often be sparked by perceived insult. So, it could be a violation of religion rules or local mores. It could be drafting people who should not be conscripted. Maybe the death of some of them in combat,” Sumlenny told POLITICO.
Fracture points
Some small sparks have already been seen. The latest flash of a backlash a shooting Saturday reported to have taken place in the Belgorod region in southwestern Russia, bordering Ukraine, where two recruits, both of non-Russian ethnic background, opened fire on other conscripts killing 11 and wounding 15 others. Last month, a gunman shot a local enlistment officer in a Siberian town in an apparent protest of Putin’s mobilization order.
Moscow has long been nervous about these internal fissures. Just a few months before Putin unleashed his botched offensive on Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a comparison to Yugoslavia, warning external pressures combined with internal threats risk breaking up the Russian Federation along ethnic and religious lines. It is a nightmare theme he and other Kremlin power brokers have returned to time and again in recent years. At the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in 2019, Shoigu said: “Chaos and the collapse of statehood are becoming the norm. It is enough to recall Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.”
“The Kremlin views the country’s regions as exploitable resources and also as liabilities that need to be suppressed to prevent fragmentation,” notes Janusz Bugajski in the recently published book Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture. “Throughout its imperial history, Russia’s rulers have harbored a neurotic fear not only of enemies outside the empire’s borders but also of the subject peoples within them,” added Bugajski, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington. Other observers over the centuries have noted that Russians, rather like Western colonizers with their African and Asian possessions, have tended to romanticize their colonies while fearing them.
From 1721 on the Romanov tsars expanded Russia ferociously in all directions — the expansion coincided with the decline of rival neighbouring powers, including the Swedish Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire.
The Bolsheviks inherited from the Romanovs a sprawling, cantankerous and rebellious Russian empire and struggled how best to command it in line with Communist principles. The Romanov autocrats saw their empire as indivisible with Russia as the ruling nation within a great realm. Lenin broke with that colonial approach — at least superficially. The Soviets paid lip-service to the idea of nation-building assigning to each officially recognized national minority its own territory to fulfill the nationalist aspirations of non-Russians, but really offered only a fiction of self-government and blocked any real autonomy.
When the Soviet Union dissolved it wasn’t only the big constituent republics of the Soviet Union — like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan — that sought independence. Many of Russia’s smaller republics and even some far-flung predominantly Russian territories, cities and regions used the political turmoil to claim or to try to grab autonomy.
Going their own way
In 1990, fourteen of the 22 republics of the Russian Federation declared themselves sovereign and when a Federation Treaty was being negotiated the heads of several republics, including Tatarstan, demanded the new post-Communist Russian constitution recognize their “state sovereignty” as well as a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya refused to sign the Federation Treaty and declared independence, triggering an 18-month war of liberation.
Putin has methodically been bringing the republics and krais and other so-called federal subjects — around 85 in all — to heel, centralizing state power and for a time ending gubernatorial elections. In 2002, Russia’s Constitutional Court ruled the sovereignty of the Russian Federation would override any declaration of sovereignty by the republics or other federal subjects. Provincial authorities have been weakened through tax reform and the neutering of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament.
Gubernatorial elections were brought back in 2012 but any candidate who wants to register must have Kremlin backing and Putin can sack and appoint regional heads at will.
But there have been signs of mounting regional frustration — especially in the far east. Russian officials were clearly surprised in 2020 by months-long anti-Kremlin protests in Khabarovsk, 30 kilometers from the China–Russia border, where locals reacted furiously to the arrest on criminal charges of a popular governor and political outsider, Sergei Furgal.
Two years before, in 2018, the Kremlin suffered a series of electoral rebuffs in regional and parliamentary elections, including in Khabarovsk, Siberia and central Russia, when candidates from Putin’s ruling United Russia party lost to rivals from the anti-Western Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party, who were only the ballots to give the polls a veneer of legitimacy. Locals voted tactically in an ‘anyone but Putin’ turnout.
The Kremlin is alive to the dangers of a surge in nationalism among the Federation’s ethnic groups, banning and labeling as extremist any organization promoting national rights, independence or autonomy, such as Bashkort, which seeks to protect the rights and interests of the Bashkir people. On October 11, Bashkir nationalist Shamil Amangildin called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to recognize the independence of Bashkortostan.
In 2021 the Russian justice ministry suspended the activities of Tatarstan’s All-Tatar Public Center “due to its extremist activities.” And Kremlin insiders were infuriated this year after the Free Nations of Russia Forum, an umbrella organization advocating for the right of self-determination, held meetings in Europe and presented a map of Russia divided into 34 states which, according to the forum, should form a new “Commonwealth of States of Free Russia.”
Resentment towards Moscow appears only to have been compounded by Putin’s mobilization order, Russia’s first public mobilisation since World War II, which has been more vigorously, if not over-zealously, been enforced in the periphery, the ethnic republics and krais with enlistment officers calling-up even ineligible men.
Telegram channels are full of mobilization complaints. Tens of thousands of young men have fled to escape the draft, many from non-Russian ethnic groups. And observers in Georgia and neighboring central Asian states say that many of the draft-dodgers, some Muslim, are different from the first wave of Russian war refuseniks — they’re less ideological, more lost and angrier, likelier prey for recruiters from violent Islamist and separatist groups, they say.
Cracking up
Last month, retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said the West should prepare for the Russian Federation breaking up within the next four or five years. “We were not prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to be prepared for this possibility,” he told Times Radio.
Sumlenny agrees with the general’s prediction and says Putin’s hubristic war risks inadvertently breaking Russia apart. “The richer republics, like Tatarstan, are tired of losing out materially because what they produce lines the coffers of the Kremlin and not their own. The smaller, impoverished ones, who’ve never really been developed and are pretty hopeless, could start feeling this is the moment to breakaway and that maybe they can run things a little better,” he said.
Regional elites may start calculating that Moscow isn’t able to stop them breaking away, he says. “Once it starts, it could unravel fast,” he adds. Kremlin aides point to break-up predictions by Western analysts and officials as evidence that the West is plotting to dissolve Russia. But, in fact, Western policymakers seem unnerved by the possibility of a break-up of nuclear-armed Russia, fearing the chaos it would unleash and the potential for destabilizing neighboring states
That was also the case with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western leaders preferred the status quo and frowned on Ukraine and others breaking away. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred,” President George Bush said in an infamous 1991 speech in Ukraine nicknamed the Chicken Kyiv speech.
A further unraveling of what the tsars and Bolsheviks built would set off alarm bells as much in Western capitals as Moscow.