Of course, Russia’s ethnic composition is already hugely varied: the country is home to more than 150 different officially recognized groups, from the 5 million-strong Tatars, descendants of the Mongol armies, to the Nganasans of the Arctic, who number barely 900, and from the myriad mountain peoples of the North Caucasus, predominantly Muslims, to the shamanic Udege of the Amur River basin, among scores of others. But taken together, these groups comprise only a small part of the totaclass="underline" Russians have always been the dominant group within their multi-ethnic empire, and today account for 80 per cent of the population. Even with substantial immigration, it will be some time before ethnic Russians lose their overall majority status. But since fertility rates among non-ethnic Russians are at present higher than among ethnic Russians, the demographic preponderance of ethnic Russians will visibly be eroded soon enough, regardless of migratory flows. The social consequences of this demographic tilt are hard to predict. Politically, its effects bleed into those of another critical matter that will confront Russia in the years to come: the ‘national question’, which beset the USSR in its final days, and which reared its head once more during the Ukraine crisis.
Nominally, Russia today is a federation, comprising eighty-three territorial ‘subjects’ – plus two more since 2014, with the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol – each of which possesses its own constitution, government, parliament and flag. On paper, these entities have many of the attributes of statehood, and only delegate certain powers to the federal centre in Moscow. But the reality is very different: in practice, Russia is a highly centralized polity, and the country’s supposedly federal subunits are little more than administrative divisions within a clear hierarchy – what Putin himself famously called a ‘vertical of power’.
This gap between federal form and centralizing substance was present during the Soviet period: the USSR was constitutionally a federation of equally sovereign components, but in reality all major decisions and even many minor ones were made in Moscow. In the early 1990s, however, many of Russia’s own subunits gained effective sovereignty, having been encouraged by Yeltsin to ‘take as much as they could swallow’. This led to prolonged tussles between the federal centre and regional elites. By 1994, Yeltsin managed to claw back the advantages Moscow had yielded (with the single exception of Chechnya, which refused to sign a new Federal Treaty, having already declared full independence).
Putin carried on and completed the centralization Yeltsin had begun, imposing his ‘vertical of power’ through administrative reorganization – adding a layer of federal plenipotentiaries and eliminating elections for regional governors – and by tightening the purse strings: in 2001, tax revenues were split roughly fifty-fifty between Moscow and the regional governments, but by 2008 the federal government’s share had risen to 70 per cent. The effect of this was to reinforce and widen the gap between federal form and content. In the words of political scientist Brian Taylor, Putin ‘saved Russian federalism by killing it’.{20}
Chechnya’s bid for independence marked a critical turning point in this process: the war Yeltsin unleashed in that republic in 1994–96 was supposed to ‘restore constitutional order’ by bombing the Chechens back into line. The deaths of tens of thousands of Chechnya’s civilians and the flattening of its cities were intended as an example, showing the rest of Russia’s federal subunits what would happen to those who made further breakaway attempts. Here again Putin completed Yeltsin’s work, bringing Chechnya back into the federal fold by imposing on its beaten population a dictatorship loyal to the Kremlin, and in particular to Putin personally.
Yet the force of the example was undermined only a few years later, when after the 2008 war with Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Whatever was left of Russia’s commitment to the idea of territorial integrity vanished completely during the Ukraine crisis, when it first annexed Crimea after a hasty referendum supervised by 20,000 Russian troops, and then backed secessionist rebels in the Donbass, while making intermittent noises about absorbing eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking territories. It seems unlikely that this second annexation was ever seriously considered: the Kremlin was instead floating the idea of reconstituting ‘Novorossiia’ in order to push the West to back down. The attempt clearly failed; but at the same time, it opened up once more the Pandora’s box of separatisms Russia had apparently fought so hard to keep shut since the early 1990s.
Could Russia itself go the way of the USSR? The Soviet Union had separated into fifteen pieces that were already distinct, like the drifting apart of shards from an ice sheet that was already cracked. By a historical irony, the hollow constitutional structures of the USSR came to be filled with national content that helped pull the Union apart. But the equivalent scenario for Russia would mean a much more dramatic reconfiguration of the map: several of the country’s non-Russian components – the likeliest candidates for secession – are not located at its edges, but embedded within a huge landmass with a predominantly Russian population. Another wave of secessions would mean balkanization on a continental scale, turning much of Eurasia into a territorial jigsaw. This, of course, was the nightmare that had haunted Russia in the early 1990s, only to melt away in the wreckage of Grozny. Among many Russians and Westerners alike, the conventional assumption is that this devastation was the price of maintaining the country’s territorial integrity. The same reasoning has been used to legitimate the strangulation of federalism ever since: any power Moscow surrenders to the regions, the argument goes, will ultimately encourage them to peel away entirely.
Yet this logic rests on false premises. The first is that Chechnya’s example would have been emulated by other regions. Though there were certainly nationalist currents among a number of Russia’s ethnic minorities, the struggles between Moscow and the regions mostly revolved around the distribution of resources; only in Chechnya did a serious and sustained push for sovereignty develop.{21} The second false premise is that since ethno-nationalism killed the USSR, any further manifestations of it would spell the same outcome for Russia. Again, nationalism framed in ethnic terms certainly did play a role in the unravelling of the Soviet system, but to attribute an entire, epoch-making set of events to this single cause makes little sense. Moreover, it neglects the critical contribution of Soviet elites, who deserted the system in droves, helping themselves to pieces of the planned economy on the way, and thus accelerated its disintegration. The important point here is that the existence of the USSR’s formally sovereign republics provided those elites with plenty of other states to desert to. From this self-interested point of view, the subunits of Russia itself – especially the landlocked ones, far removed from borders with other countries and hence from alternatives to alliance with or dependency on Moscow – are nowhere near as attractive a proposition.