Decolonization of Russia

The unexpected announcement by Siberians that they have launched a quest for independence, sovereignty and self-determination from Russia is a welcome development that bodes well for the pursuit of global democracy.

Today Russia is the last colonial empire on earth, still enslaving dozens of nations and ethnic groups.

From small beginnings around Moscow, over more than a millennia Russia has expanded in three directions, from what is today Germany to the Black Sea and the Pacific Ocean – a distance of 14 time zones.

Russia expanded with the help of weapons and fire and kept its colonies intact the same way. Blood flowed freely in the Russian empire – regardless if it was tsarist, communist or now federalist.

However, fortunately, humankind’s quest for independence and freedom knows no bounds and slowly the captive nations began to break free of Russia. First the so-called Eastern European satellite countries left the Soviet Russian empire in the 1970s and then the so-called soviet republics began to declare their independence that contributed to the implosion of the Soviet Russian empire in the early 1990s.

It seemed as if the iron curtain was finally torn down. However, remaining inside the latest version of the Russian empire are dozens of nations, peoples and ethnic groups, still hoping for wind of freedom to leach into their lands.

The latest major crack in Russia’s prison of nations came this week with the revelation that Siberians are seeking self-determination from Russia and this reportedly is adding to the Kremlin’s headaches.

Siberia – a land that conjures images of desolation, frigid temperatures and concentration camps. However, it also offers the potential of virtually boundless untapped natural resources and a vital defense outpost for Russia’s eastern flank on the Pacific Ocean.

Undoubtedly, Putin wouldn’t want Siberia to go the way of the other captive nations on his watch.

Earlier this week Siberians, who have already designed their own national flag based on the design of the “Stars and Stripes,” planned to hold an independence march on August 17 in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, but Moscow quickly put an end to that plan. While advocating separatism in Ukraine, Moscow again emphatically showed that it will not tolerate secessionists inside the federal Russian empire.

BBC and other western news outlets working in Russia had interviewed the leader of the Siberian movement, Artyom Loskutov, and they were quickly reprimanded and threatened for such an audacious concept. Russia’s media monitor Roskomnadzor insisted that BBC delete the interview from its web or face possible expulsion from Russia. Fortunately, the broadcaster didn’t succumb to Moscow’s bullying.

UK’s Guardian reported that Russia’s prosecutor general issued warnings to 14 media outlets covering the protest under the country’s extremism law, and blocked an event page for the march on Russia’s most popular social network. The editor of Slon.ru, which was forced by the prosecutor general to remove an interview with Loskutov, later argued in a Facebook post that the article did not violate the extremism law because it did not name a specific time or place. It also noted that the activists had not yet been given permission for the march.

The Novosibirsk mayor’s office earlier this week reportedly denied permission to hold the march “in order to ensure the inviolability of the constitutional order, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian Federation.” Under that law, Moscow will curtail human rights of all citizens.

Loskutov, a young artist known for organizing an annual absurdist rally called Monstration, told the Guardian that the activists had re-applied for permission to hold a March for the Inviolability and Observation of the Principles of Federalism.

Loskutov was quoted as saying the Novosibirsk protest was meant to both ridicule the Kremlin’s hypocrisy on self-determination in Ukraine and to raise the issue of Siberia’s delayed development. Most of Russia’s oil and gas output comes from western Siberia, but the region lags behind Moscow, St Petersburg and some southern areas in quality of life ratings, he said.

“It’s using the rhetoric that our government and their propaganda use,” Loskutov explained. “They decided to tell us how great it is when some republic moves for self-determination. Okay, well let’s apply this to other regions. Can Siberia allow itself this same rhetoric? It turns out it can’t.”

Andrei Piontkovsky, a liberal Russian political analyst, correctly observed to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that by encouraging separatism abroad Russia may have “shot itself in the foot” at home. He said Russians may begin to ask “Why can there be separatism in Donetsk, and if that's fine, why can't there also be separatism in Russia, in Siberia?”

We wish Siberians God speed with their quest. We hope that the freedom-minded idea that Loskutov is propagating will permeate throughout Russia and cause Russians and non-Russians alike to wonder “why not us?” and thereby chip away at the Russian empire.