In Ukraine, Russia’s active military confrontation with West is entering its final stage. Having so far decided against using nuclear weapons, and seeking to preserve the lives of as many of its valiant soldiers and as many civilians as possible, Russia seemingly will not—for now—achieve the kind of victory that it won over Napoleon, giving Europe four decades of peace. Nor will Ukraine’s Nazism be defeated like Germany’s was (in spite of the support given to it by the overwhelming majority of the European subcontinent), leading (alongside the advent of nuclear weapons) to relative peace in Europe for seven decades.
The Russia-West confrontation will continue until a new generation replaces the current globalist-compradorial European elites, who have failed morally, economically, and politically. They have brought Europe, once an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse, to a deplorable state, and need war and an inflated external enemy to justify their grip on power. No lasting peace can be attained while power is retained by the incumbent elites of the U.S., Ukraine, and many European countries. But Russia should nevertheless pursue such a peace, decisively wielding strategic deterrence and fencing itself off from the fascism and inhuman values that are spreading across Western Europe. Without a victory like those achieved in 1815 and 1945, the world will continue to slide towards World War III. Attaining such a victory is our duty to our country and to humanity.
But it is crucial that, while victoriously completing the active phase of confrontation in Europe, we do not get stuck in the Western strategic direction. Infected for years with Russophobia, Europe is fading away. The future is in the South and East.
Some countries in Central and Eastern Europe will sooner or later gravitate towards Greater Eurasia. So we should not reject elements of cooperation or the restoration of cultural and economic ties. But the next decades’ main vector of development must be different. Russia’s 300-year-long European journey is over. It would be better, of course, if it had ended a century ago or earlier―we could have avoided, at least partially, many of the terrible tragedies that befell our country and people in the 20th century, almost all of which came from Europe.
It is time we ‘return to ourselves’―to our roots as a great power. Those roots are in Siberia. Russia would hardly have survived on the unprotected Central Russian Plain, under constant attacks from the west and south, if the Cossacks had not fantastically advanced from Perm to Kamchatka in less than a century, developing new lands and binding Siberia to Ancient Rus.
The ‘return to ourselves’ will require that we shake off the European yoke and recognize the civilizations of the South and East as the main external sources of our culture and political organization. Our soul lies in the religions―Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism―that came from the South. Our political organization―the power vertical, loyalty to the leader, and selfless service to the state and common cause―came from the East during two centuries of interaction with the Mongol Empire, which plundered our people but did not impinge on their soul or faith. Without the power vertical, inherited from the East and partly from Byzantium, and without the spirit of vastness, our ancestors would not have created the largest state in the world.
The ‘return to ourselves’ requires a strategic shift of the country’s spiritual, economic, scientific, technological, and political development to the Urals and Siberia, which will become the main drivers—for the foreseeable future—of growth in national power, economy, and prosperity.
Over the past eighteen months—together with an expanding group of scholars, public figures, and businesspeople, mostly from Siberia—I have been working on the project Eastern Turn 2.0, or the Sibirization of Russia. We have also developed a draft of A Living Dream-Idea of Russia, a Code of the Russian Citizen in the 21st Century, ideologically substantiating Russia’s further development as a civilization-state. Sibirization is part of this project. The first results of our work have been presented to society and the state.[1]
Now about one of the most important aspects of Russia’s new strategy: the development of the transportation network, especially its vertical axis. I happen to be on a team of scholars responsible for conceptually developing Russia’s North-South transport corridors and their connection to Greater Eurasia.
Starting such work, we must acknowledge that sea routes (especially the traditional ones) are becoming increasingly vulnerable and, thus, maritime powers are losing the advantage that has been attributed to them in the past.
There are many proposals regarding the North-South corridors of European Russia. These include the actively discussed and partially used—but problematic—corridors around and through the Caspian Sea, to Iran and then the Persian Gulf. Other options include Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Afghanistan, and/or a second Bosphorus with Russian participation.
But there is an urgent need for North-South logistics routes that would connect Russia, through Siberia, to the markets of rising Asia―the markets of the future.
The strategy’s cornerstone should be the recognition that external ties, important as they are, will become less reliable in the coming decades and are not goals in themselves. Rather, they cement Russia’s internal cohesion and facilitate its internal transformation.
Naturally, the concept of North-South corridors, complementing the existing East-West corridors, should be drafted and developed in close cooperation with specialists from our Asian neighbors. Our Chinese friends have launched the Belt and Road, a great initiative. Its routes will be available to everyone, but their augmentation with vertical routes is necessary for an independent Greater Eurasian logistics network.
These vertical routes should ensure the safe and successful development of Greater Eurasia and deepen the interaction between its peoples that was seriously interrupted by the West, whose maritime powers deliberately destroyed inland routes during their 500-year dominance.
I suggest the following principles for the development of a North-South logistics network that would benefit Russia and others.
First. Economic calculation is necessary, but the network should be based principally on considerations of security and long-term development. Private business can and should be engaged in specific projects, but major logistics programs are the prerogative and responsibility of states. Economy-first approaches are becoming generally obsolete, although economists are needed to assist strategists and cool their ardor.
When Minister (not yet Count) Sergei Witte and his allies argued for the Trans-Siberian Railway, they faced enormous resistance from financiers and merchants who did not want competition to horse-drawn vehicles and argued that there was too little traffic to justify the project. (Just as people would later argue against the bridge across the Lena in Yakutia.) If Witte had listened to such arguments, we would never have built the Trans-Siberian Railway, and Russia would not have survived and triumphed in the greatest war in human history. But he launched a powerful PR campaign and engaged Dmitri Mendeleev―the greatest Russian genius, an outstanding Siberian, a brilliant scientist, as well as a statesman and industrialist.
Second. It is necessary to shift the center of infrastructural development from European Russia to Siberia, even though infrastructure is economically less efficient in the latter. Devising our logistics strategy, we should look beyond the horizon and see that the center of not only Russia’s infrastructure, but also Russia’s spiritual, economic, and cultural development should be built beyond the Urals. A third, fourth, even fifth capital should be built there by relocating the headquarters of some corporations and ministries there. I and others have called for transferring companies’ headquarters to the regions where they mainly do business. I am glad that these calls have been heard; President Putin has ordered almost 150 corporations to relocate their headquarters to their operating regions.
Third. Russia is not a maritime, but a river power. It once strived to break free of the continental curse: under Peter the Great and later it forced its way to the sea. That was the right thing to do. But we have never made proper use of Siberia’s rivers for transportation, or its freshwater for national development. (Such use should not involve stupid plans reversing Siberian rivers.)
Our river transportation system should be revived and connected to other corridors. Traveling recently along the Yenisei and Lena, interviewing colleagues who have cruised the Ob and Irtysh, and studying the literature, I have found out that Siberian rivers are grossly underused. They have lost, with the exception of the Lena, the icebreakers that could extend navigation for a month and a half until winter roads are opened. I know that the 73rd Meridian program is already in the works to invigorate traffic via the Irtysh and the Ob to the Arctic Ocean, and via the Irtysh farther to Kazakhstan and even neighboring China.
Fourth. The new strategy should preserve and develop Siberia’s small towns as part of the entire country’s broader Sibirization.
Fifth. Transport corridors should contribute to the revival of Eurasia’s civilizational unity in diversity.
Sixth. The new logistics matrix should not only complement the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), but it should also be similar in scale to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. During the Great Depression, he initiated nationwide transportation development not only to strengthen infrastructure, but also to relieve unemployment and social tensions.
We do not have such a crisis on our hands, but soldiers returning from Ukraine could get promising, high-quality, well-paid jobs building Siberian infrastructure (d replenishing the managerial class). Many of them could stay there and become Siberians, like those who built the Trans-Siberian Railway and the BAM.
Seventh. Siberia should cultivate a new Russian elite, not infected (as Moscow and other central cities are) with Westernism and Europhilia, which are becoming increasingly counterproductive, intellectually wretched, and morally indecent. The new elite and the whole country should feel engaged in a major effort to build a new Siberian Russia and Greater Eurasia. Russia needs great projects, without which our development becomes sluggish. Constructing the transport infrastructure of a Siberian Russia and Greater Eurasia should become such a project.
Eighth. To build a new network of North-South transport routes, we should engage with our Asian neighbors at the design stage, drawing on their potential and expertise. China’s One Belt One Road is often seen in our country as a competitor to the Trans-Siberian Railway. But why don’t we look at it from a different, much more reasonable perspective? We should think about how to connect the North-South corridors to China’s Belt and Road. This will give us new access to Iran, Pakistan, India, Africa, and the warm seas.Ninth. We need to not only create new North-South routes but reshape our thinking with their help. By building new routes, we will move from outdated and harmful Western-centrism to a sovereign and independent mindset. In the past, great Siberian construction projects molded new Russian and Soviet elites. This is what new projects should do today, too. They are not only absolutely necessary for the country’s development, but they should also boost people’s morale, as the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Northern Sea Route, the BAM, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Bratsk, and many others did before.
[1] For more detail, see the reports ‘Eastern Turn 2.0, or the Sibirization of Russia’ (https://svop.ru/papers/65104/) and ‘A Living Dream-Idea of Russia, a Code of the Russian Citizen in the 21st Century [The Ideological Foundation of the Russian Civilization-State]’(https://svop.ru/projects/rossijskaya-ideya/65079/).