In a piece at Foreign Affairs Stephen Kotkin hypothesizes about five possible futures for Russia. They are:
- France. A bloody revolution followed by a more liberal democratic Russia
- Retrenchment
- Vassal of China
- North Korea. Non-functional dependency on China
- Chaos
I would dismiss the first. It’s not going to happen. Mr. Kotkin never actually defines what he means by “retrenchment”. Russia won’t be a vassal of China or a long-term dependency of it.
Of the five I think the most likely are retrenchment or chaos. My definition of “retrenchment” would be continuing on much as it has although possibly less assertive. Chaos is the way Russia was before Ivan Grozniy.
What Mr. Kotkin either misses or dismisses is that there’s little that Russia is doing now that hasn’t been the case for 200 years or more. Somewhat Europeanize, not a liberal democracy, lots of corruption, authoritarian leadership, a somewhat paranoid foreign policy, the Orthodox church, etc.
While Mr. Kotkin correctly observes that Putin is not Stalin he misses the degree to which Putin is just a Russian politician. He’s telling the people what they want to hear.
We should all hope that Russia doesn’t follow the French model—Mr. Kotkin seems to forget that between the revolution and the emergence of a liberal democratic France there was Napoleon.
I feel this article is essentially an elaboration of a common view that Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country”.
I don’t know; any nation that pulled itself from real dissolution in 1991 and a close second dissolution at the end of Yeltsin’s Presidency to essentially drawing or even winning a proxy war with the global superpower and all its allies deserves a lot more respect.
As to Russia’s future; I suspect the biggest change compared to its past 300 years is its energy will be devoted eastward vs westward. Based on climate change, improvements in transport technology, and good alignment of interests with India, China, Iran, and the Arabs; the setup will be there for Russia 21st century to be much better than its 20th century.
That’s not a change—it’s a return to the norm of the 16th through 19th centuries. During the 300 years from 1580 to 1880 Russia expanded eastward from west of the Urals all the way to the Pacific.
One of the things Russia has in common with the United States and different from most other countries is the idea of the importance of the frontier. For the United States the frontier was on the west; for Russia on the east.
“to essentially drawing or even winning a proxy war with the global superpower and all its allies deserves a lot more respect”
Meh. Ukraine didnt have any official alliances and I think the general feeling was that they would quickly lose. What we learned was that Russia has a fairly poor military that is capable to fighting a war of attrition against a much smaller country when the countries providing support had to first be careful about the kind of support since Russia is a nuclear power and second, the US in particular has had to deal with about 10 congress people who have been able to effectively slow down, reduce or stop support.
Steve
I’m surprised another option from Russia’s history wasn’t mentioned – civil war. Perhaps he’s rolling up Russia’s history of that and various uprisings under the “revolution” rubric, but the historical record has never been one where democracy follows.
Civil War or an overthrow of the government are probably the two scenarios I generally rank lowest.
This is related to “generational theory”. In generally I find its a lot of speculation and strained interpretation but it does point at a nugget of truth — a society that goes through a traumatic upheaval like a civil war, or the collapse of basic governance is extremely resistant to that type of scenario again.
You could see it play out in the Prigozhin revolt last year; Russian morale was low but he couldn’t pick up any support at all.