Russia is, historically and currently, an imperial power. The regions are economic colonies of the central government, which extracts their wealth and transfers it to Moscow and St Petersburg. One of the things that Putin did when he became president was to grab most of the tax revenue that previously went to the regions and at the same time transfer responsibilities from the centre to the regions, so that regional governors now had to beg him for money.to fund their budgets.
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No disagreement there; that’s exactly why I find the fact that (in terms of external trade and the economic activity of the local elites) they also look a lot like a colony at the same time so unusual.
One is used to countries fitting more or less neatly into one category or the other(with imperial powers plundering others to enrich themselves; and colonies being worked to death, sometimes literally, for some combination of cash crops, extraction economy resources, and cheap labor; with deliberately minimal investments made in their own future and most of the proceeds offshored); but Russia looks a lot like an economic colony that’s also running an empire: it’s elites make imperial noises, wage imperial wars; and extract from the provinces to the capital; but they also starve local investment in favor of substantially colonial-style plunder that ends up being offshored to ‘the west’(both for laundering and to buy the sophisticated inputs that years of systematic plunder have left them incapable of producing locally and luxury goods) and(unlike Chinese local elites) even the ones who talk the talk on ‘import substitution’ and the glory of the motherland’s industrial might are either turning a blind eye to, or actively participating in, the plunder that keeps them substantially dependent on imports for high end expertise and sophisticated tech.
Putin personally is sort of an odd one, in that he has comparatively few public vices(no getting caught with a luxury watch for him; and the decadent luxury that is most convincingly pinned on him is domestic; but he certainly hasn’t kept his hands clean; and, whatever the estimate is for the percentage he claims personally, he has absolutely tolerated vast amounts of plunder on the part of people who demonstrate the necessary loyalty. He’s absolutely an imperialist; but he has also been at least willing, possibly eager, to abet the sort of plunder at home that normally gets imposed on colonies.
Someone like Navalny(at least so far as he remains distant from enough power to actually abuse); would be a much less ambiguous figure in that regard: he’s not especially different from the current administration in terms of willingness to bring the light of the russian world to the long-suffering neighbors; but he’s a strident opponent of the institutional rot and plunder that have, to a great degree, kept Russia from converting the loot into investment and power in the core regions.
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That might be the answer: for Russian elites, are the regions that get plundered part of the Russian nation or merely colonial possessions?
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sus
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Why not fit in a little medical tourism in between the shopping and beach time? It’s not like any of the other G20 leaders want to spend time with this thug.
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Putin has been caught on camera over the years wearing a lot of ultra-expensive luxury watches. The difference between him and Kirill or Lavrov (or his American asset von Clownstick) is that he avoids blingy and flashy ones or easily identifiable Western brands. No chunky gold, no diamonds, no gold bands, no Rolex or Apple. Instead, he chooses more understated pieces that only other watch collectors (but certainly not your average Russian Know-Nothing ultra-nationalist) will recognise without resentment.
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Isn’t the resolution of the contradiction relatively simple: The USSR was an empire, whereas the New Russia is simply the shell and appearance of an empire, which has been devoured from within by a mafia elite who stole an entire superpower, were aided and abetted by the west to launder the proceeds, and are only really sticking around to pick up the profits of the extractive industries.
In short, the current Russian elite didn’t think of anywhere in Russia as the “core” to which resources were funnelled. The core was your own luxury bolt-hole in Cyprus, London or New York, until this nationalist madness that was useful for holding onto power while you looted the place suddenly became much more inconvenient.
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The word that gets machine translated as “depth explorers” - “глубинариев” - is a contraction of “глубинный народ” or “deep people”. It’s a concept introduced by Putin’s spin doctor Surkov in this essay:
Its roughly the concept of the lumpenproletariat - an uneducated, largely apolitical, reactionary mass - except put on a pedestal (at least by Surkov, not by the author of that tweet).
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Zelensky still outraged at Russians coming to Ukraine, so … you know. /s
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The whole of Russia is a self-colonising, two-layer empire. The Russian people are much the same as other empires’ colonised people, and the elites are the extractive colonists.
In Russia, it was ever thus. This is what Russians have experienced throughout their history and thus what they expect, even today.
(@fuzzyfungus - perhaps this is the TL;DR version of the excellent analysis in your posts? Not that I want to seem to recommend not reading them!)
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Thank you!
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Now we know that the deep people will bring Sergei Lavrov back to the Motherland if his Apple Watch and Jean-Michel Basquiat t-shirt lift him into the transnational.
/s
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I think “deported” is the wrong word here. If someone steals children the kindest word is “kidnapper.” “Human trafficker” and “heartless bastard” also come to mind. After that, it gets colorful.
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“Genocide” also comes to mind.
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as
… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[7]
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