Vladimir Putin did this in his Address to the Federal Assembly in February. The conclusions to be drawn from it are plain enough: ahead is a long and fierce struggle, which will show whether our country is able to persevere and continue to win after the defeats of the 1980-1990s, and what the world will be like in fifteen to twenty years from now and what place our country will have in it.
As an official, the president cannot say everything he thinks. So, I will try to offer a “detached view.” Perhaps it will be useful for further public policy and for society’s self-determination.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see many miscalculations in late Soviet and Russian foreign policy. They require a thorough assessment. For the time being, I will only make a general observation: hopes for integration with the West as a sovereign great power did not materialize and were largely counterproductive.
We should have made an ultimatum demanding that Russia’s legitimate security interests be reckoned with earlier, thus preventing the West from turning Ukraine into an anti-Russian strike force, before the metastasis of fascism being revived in Europe penetrated so deeply. If we had plans for a quick victory, they were inaccurate.
The experience gained allows us to clarify the goals of this operation. These, of course, include the defense of Donbass, the reunification of original Russian lands in the South and the East, and demilitarization, i.e., the destruction of the military machine of what may remain of today’s Ukraine. And of course, denazification and re-education of people infected with fascism just like the Germans after 1933. This was done by the Soviet Union in the GDR, and it will have to be done again in the new conditions. It would be unacceptable to allow Ukrainian statehood to continue to be based on a mixture of Russophobia and its monstrously compradorian elites, who have plundered a once relatively prosperous territory and now seek to protect what they have stolen by selling Ukrainian cannon fodder to the West. This is a difficult and distant, but mandatory task.
For now, we should keep pursuing less obvious, but no less pressing goals. The special military operation allows us to squeeze the fifth column out of the country almost without repression, and free our minds from Western centrism and Westernism, which once helped Russia modernize itself and create great literature, but now outdated and pulling it back.
Western elites, in despair over the possibility of suffering a historical failure and losing the five-hundred-year ability to siphon world wealth in their favor, have launched a war to destroy Russia, which they view, often justifiably, as one of the root causes of their problems. By defending our security, national freedom, and sovereignty, we have undermined the foundation on which the centuries-old system of cultural, political, and economic dominance, robbery, and military superiority was based.
Enraged, our opponents are losing not only the remains of conscience, honor, and decency, but also mind. Their enmity helps Russian elites cleanse, reformat, and consolidate themselves. And so, those who remain pro-Western are either completely bribed or intellectually squalid.
The majority of people have long understood on an intuitive level what is behind the talk of Europeanness, democracy, and human rights.
Having lost their minds, Western elites are doing one more useful thing for Russia―their sanctions, property seizures, and Russophobia are destroying the Russian comprador class, which grew immensely after the unsuccessful reforms of the 1990s. The introduction of private ownership without legal protection pushed money and the rich to the West. Now, furious as it is, the West is actively helping us nationalize our elites and their attitudes.
Despite its limited successes on the ground, the special military operation is solving the most important task―it is preparing the country and society for two decades of life in a crumbling world order with an inevitable series of conflicts and a global earthquake that started in the second half of the 2000s and has been intensifying ever since. Clearly, this global earthquake requires a clear system of values and a partial change of elites and their mentality because joint service to the Homeland is above all else. Without it, well-being, personal and public, will collapse. Management practices also must be altered.
All three positive processes―the eradication of counterproductive Westernism, the elimination of compradorian attitudes, and the redesigning of management practices for living in a new world―are underway, although they will still require a lot of time and effort. But that goes without saying anyway. The neglected, partly due to our inaction, Ukrainian wound cannot be cured quickly.
But we must not only treat the wounds inflicted by the past, but also use the energy generated by the military conflict in order to move towards new horizons.
The Ukrainian operation distracts administrative and financial resources in the Western direction, which holds little promise for the future development of the country.
Over the three hundred years of following the “European path” of development, we have borrowed―sometimes even too much (communism)―from Europe almost everything that could be useful. In the coming decades, Europe will not only be relatively, albeit unevenly, hostile, but also increasingly unstable. The European Union project is inexorably crumbling, and in order to extend its life, its elites go berserk in ramping up Russophobia. Just like the sanctions of the last decade, they need Russophobia, and say so almost openly, as some kind of girds that hold together the crumbling European integration. When and if it crumbles completely, the situation will hardly be much better. We will get a historically familiar bunch of countries with increasingly growing elements of fascism of every stripe, hopefully not Nazism with its misanthropic ideology, including Judophobia. The present-day territory of Ukraine will be needed not so much as a bridge leading to rich markets, but as a buffer separating us from instability, military threats, and all kinds of moral plagues. However, let’s hope that a part of Europe will not follow this path. In any case, we people of Russian culture need to cherish and nurture what we have gained from European culture, which has become a part of ourselves.
It will be necessary to help rebuild the parts of present-day Ukraine that will rejoin Russia, but certainly not all of Ukraine, plundered for thirty years and finished off by the current operation, especially its least culturally developed western and central regions, the cradle of what our publicists call Ukrainian fascism. After the Great Patriotic War, the Russian Federation helped rebuild the regions, including at the expense of the prosperity of its own core territories. The result is negative from a national point of view. In fact, central non-black-earth regions of Russia began to look nice and cozy only in the last fifteen years. Many regions in Siberia, which are quite promising in terms of living and which were hit the hardest in the 1990s, need to be developed as well.
Furthering the turn to the East clearly appears to be promising and beneficial from the economic, geopolitical, and ideological points of view. If it had not begun in the last ten to fifteen years, we would have found ourselves in a much more difficult situation in our unavoidable confrontation with the West.
But this turn has been only partly successful, actually it has been a “under-turn.” The reasons for the relative failure include the now receding Western centrism of the Russian elites, and the mainly technocratic nature of reforms, which did not captivate people. Nothing like the late imperial slogan “Forward to the Great Ocean,” which inspired the builders of the Trans-Siberian Railway, or the Soviet spirit-lifting Arctic exploration campaign was proposed. The turn also failed to encourage local people, even though it promised them potential benefits. It is still seen as something initiated by Moscow. There was also local resistance among those who did not want to change their usual way of life.
The turn to the new promising economic, political, and cultural markets of the East and South did not engage the whole of Siberia, which was a fundamental mistake. For bureaucratic reasons or evil thoughtlessness, Pacific Siberia―the Far East―and then even the Arctic (which looks completely absurd) were separated from the core territories of Western and Eastern Siberia. Having developed for many centuries as a single organism in human, cultural, economic, and administrative terms, the latter was torn apart. The problem of the “continental curse” in these sub-regions was not solved and they remained isolated from the adjacent budding markets, primarily Asian ones. Instead, attention was focused on remote and less lucrative Western ones. Only recently have we started building gas and oil pipelines to the East. There are still almost no meridian (North-South) routes connecting the region with future markets. But perhaps the most important thing is that the strategy of the eastward turn did not encompass Russian regions that are most advanced in terms of human capital and scientific potential, industrially developed, and rich in natural resources. The population in these regions continued to shrink faster than in the rest of the country.
So far, this mistake has not been overcome. The recent government strategy for the development of the Siberian Federal District (again, just one district, not all of Siberia) looks poor, and not only does it not lead forward, but causes a tired annoyance.
The Russia-West confrontation in Ukraine should finally force us to focus on a Siberia strategy―turning the whole country towards new Eastern horizons, bringing it back to itself. Russia would not have held out on the East European Plain without the incorporation and development of Siberia, without its “soft gold” such as furs, crude oil, gold, other mineral resources, Siberian oils, Siberian regiments and, most importantly, the Siberian ultra-multinational ambitious character.
The previous round of the eastward turn was conceived in the 2000s-2010s and began to be implemented as a turn of the entire country, relying on the whole of Siberia. The same idea underlay the Siberia Development Corporation concept, promoted by Sergei Shoigu, who was not yet defense minister at that time. A year and a half ago, he returned to this idea again. But like many in the ruling class, he is inexorably sucked in by the Ukrainian operation―fundamentally important for preserving the country and ensuring its security, but of little promise in geostrategic terms. There is nothing more to look for in the West.
The current geostrategic and geoeconomic situation leaves no alternative but to propose and vigorously advance a new Siberian turn for the whole of Russia, shifting the vector of its spiritual and economic development to the East. Administrative centers should also move eastward, followed by ambitious and patriotic young people. Novosibirsk and Tomsk should become the natural scientific capital. This idea has already been put forward by the president but is still on hold. Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk should be the industrial capital, Vladivostok, the commercial one, St. Petersburg will remain the cultural capital, and Moscow will act as the military-political one. But for all its brilliance and splendor, it must reduce its role in sucking human capital out of the province.
With this configuration of the country, which is looking ahead, but also coming back home from its Western journey, no longer useful or attractive, Ukrainian lands reincorporated into Russia will become what they are destined to be by history and geography―the gateway to the South, to the Mediterranean, with western Ukrainian territories subject to mandatory demilitarization serving as a buffer on the outskirts of Russia.
Siberia has many territories which lack labor, but are more than habitable and even comfortable, especially in the context of climate change. The Minusinsk Hollow area, the size of a small European or Asian country, rich in black earth soils and water, and with almost as many sunny days a year as in Crimea, and for this reason quite suitable for growing apricots, can accommodate not just several tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people. Siberia has other very attractive regions as well. It is necessary to attract people there from manpower-surplus areas of Russia, former Soviet republics, and the war-torn territories of Ukraine, like in the days of Witte and Stolypin. The absence of a program for the resettlement of refugees from Ukraine to these regions in Siberia has no rational explanation.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2019, Vladimir Putin proposed the idea of advanced development for the central regions of Siberia and mentioned, among other things, the Minusinsk Hollow. The idea has not got off the ground yet even though it has become even more relevant.
The program to uplift the whole country by shifting its center to the east, to Siberia, should be prepared in Moscow. If it is left to the Siberians, the result, I’m afraid, will be obvious―Siberian regionalism and localism have repeatedly backfired before. Everybody knows the fate of outstanding patriots of Siberia such as Nikolai Yadrintsev and Grigory Potanin, who at the end of the 19th century sought its independence and resisted the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which, in their opinion, could have jeopardized its identity. Their efforts were largely fruitless. In addition, it turned out that there were places in the country where one could be sent into “exile farther than Siberia.” Both were exiled to the Arkhangelsk province. But creating and advancing a strategy for developing Russia through Siberia would be impossible without fully utilizing the latter’s most powerful intellectual resources, experience, and character.
One of the reasons why the previous round of the eastward turn begun to fizzle out was the minimal involvement of Far Eastern experts. The decision to bring St. Petersburgers into the Russian ruling class proved quite fruitful, but Siberia has as much human potential, to say the least.
A new Siberia strategy should begin not so much with dry economic calculations (in fact, the existing ones are more than convincing) as with bringing the splendid and breathtaking history of the development of Asian regions of Russia back to the center of Russian consciousness, spiritually and culturally. There were both tsarist hard labor camps and Stalin-era prisons in Siberia, but Siberia itself is the embodiment of the best and free spirit of the people. Russia has thousands of creative people, scientists, writers, and filmmakers fascinated with Siberia. We must make way for them.
And of course, we must restore and develop the richest traditions of Russian Oriental studies as the most promising of the humanities. The inability or even unwillingness of our education authorities to develop the knowledge of the East and the world majority is deeply baffling. At this point, despite the obvious need, there are only 610 budget-funded quotas for applicants who want to engage in Oriental studies. We need almost one order of magnitude more.
But for Siberian and other big projects to materialize, the country must ensure at least minimal peace, and avoid sliding into the third and last, since it will be global thermonuclear, war incited by the desperate attack of the West.
The special military operation in Ukraine will partly respond to this challenge as its top priority goals include stopping the military-political expansion of the West and surgically removing metastatic cancer called NATO, which was unavoidably leading the world to such a war. Let us hope that although we came to our senses late, it was not too late.
The special military operation will have to be supplemented with active steps up the “nuclear deterrence ladder,” which makes it more convincing for Western elites that have lost all fear of war and are now losing the remains of their mind and self-preservation instinct. Without climbing this ladder, the Russia-West confrontation in Ukraine will go on for a long time, distracting the country from moving towards new horizons. This distraction is one of the goals of Western politics. I will speak about how to climb this “ladder” in one of my future articles.