1) People do not want the collapse of Russia.
2) Why does a group of random people decide about the independence of the whole region, who will limit their arbitrariness?
3) All these “Ingrias”, “Sakhas” and “Idel-Urals” will lead to internecine wars.
4) Regions have no economy.
As the coordinator of the armed resistance of the Civil Council and an ordinary member of the Free Ingria movement, I will answer these questions in my own way.
1. The phantom pains of an empire
The fact that citizens do not want the “collapse of the country” is often said by both Zaputinists and anti-Putinists. This is the first argument in the dispute between liberals and activists from the national republics and various independence projects. But if you talk to the citizens calmly and deeply, then they are afraid not so much of the dismantling of the empire, but of uncertainty in the future. People are afraid of the symbolic death of their phantom identity as citizens of a great power, or rather subjects, slaves of the empire. And even those who are older are afraid of traumatic memories of the collapse of the USSR. And for whom this collapse was bad? For the Baltic countries? After 10 years of secession from the USSR, ethnic Russian residents of Estonian Narva looked at neighboring Ivangorod as a city of fools. Or for Ukraine, whose people sacrifice thousands of lives, just not to come back?
Let’s admit that the scarecrow of the collapse of the country is pure manipulation and substitution of concepts. In the 1990s, the chaos in the streets happened because of the economic collapse and the fall of the state as a set of Soviet institutions, and not because of the fact that the union republics seceded. Organized criminal communities of fellow citizens from the outskirts of large cities, from the Russian Caucasus and the Volga region, rampaged on the streets. Criminal groups were “supervised” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB (FSK, FSB). The organizers of this chaos were not “Solntsevo”, “Podolsk” or Chechens, they were always people in uniform. Just like now, the owners of thugs like Kadyrov, Delimkhanov or Prigozhin live either in the Lubyanka or right in the Kremlin.
You can almost describe the organization of the explosions of houses in Moscow in 1999 in person . And these are the faces in uniform, the same ones, approximately, who oversaw the Wagner rebellion today.
Therefore, the threat is not in decentralization, not in the termination of Moscow’s powers as a federal center, but in a failed state – the collapse of the state, which the Putin regime allowed. And, of course, in the war in Ukraine, which this failed state unleashed as a colonial one, but which is rapidly turning into a civil one within Russia itself.
Who will suffer from the dissolution of the Chekist empire, hiding behind the identity of a multinational people? Only Moscow, even more precisely, the Moscow bureaucracy and its servants. Because they live off the resources of Siberia, sold through the Baltic, Black Sea, Far Eastern ports, well, and through gas and oil pipelines. All these fairy tales about the creative class and the financial center in a resource-based economy are Sunday sermons for office plankton. There will be no money from hydrocarbons, and lovers of premium brands of watches and cars will disperse to Israel, some to the States, some to Europe. Trade Moscow will remain, as it should be. If technology companies come back, engineering will also learn to do something.
2. Who are these people?
These are those who take responsibility for organizing a normal life in their regions and republics. To do this, it is necessary to remove from power all those who threaten public and international security (the current regime: its beneficiaries, participants in uniform and executing bureaucrats), return the main assets to citizens, organize security, respect for rights and protect property, create transitional justice and begin to form legitimate government institutions.
This is not at all like “organizing free and fair elections” out of thin air, because it is not clear who and on what basis the voter will choose? Again another king to reign through electoral anointing events? Let local self-government nominate representatives, and it will be precisely self-government, without any 131x or other federal laws. The people themselves will decide how to govern themselves, choose a sheriff and a judge, write their charters, define collective property and how to manage it.
To implement this, a political organization is needed. Which is necessarily limited by the European Convention on Human Rights and other rules and regulations that protect citizens from arbitrariness and make public, political and economic activities in the region or republic accessible to everyone. It is important that the members of the organization voluntarily accept these restrictions, which work in the same way as the bushido code used to limit the arbitrariness of armed people in medieval Japan both in relation to citizens and in relation to each other, coordinating the interests of everyone.
We propose to consider such an organization as a public political (self-governing) corporation, with collegial management, with a transparent budget, its own armed units and a clear, accessible for discussion program for building effective political institutions. Personally, I see the founders of such a corporation in Free Ingria, Free Siberia or Nezavisimaya Sakha. And that is what my colleagues and I are now starting to build.
The creators of the corporation, as political entities, are responsible both to the world community and to the citizens of the regions and republics.
This means that while we are fighting against the regime, it is necessary to formulate and propose a political program for the support and formation of local self-government, the structure and principles of which are determined by the local communities themselves and local conditions, limited only by the Charter of Local Self-Government of the Council of Europe. There is no need to draft any federal laws on local self-government. What can be decided at the level of local communities and territories should remain in their hands. What is impossible is transferred to a higher level with the corresponding formation of collegiate elected bodies of this level. This is how modern democracy is built in Europe, based on the principle of subsidiarity.
In addition, we need to formulate the principles of restitution programs for different territories and different historical horizons, the principles of transitional asset management, the program for financing the restoration of Ukraine, which will remain in effect until all these documents are replaced by decisions of local communities carried out through legitimate political institutions.
It is often said that citizens en masse are not capable of becoming qualified shareholders. But people instantly mastered online banking and other convenient applications and use them instead of Sberbank tellers. Also, tools should be arranged to enable citizens to consciously participate in the management of assets and the budget for basic services and services. For example, through a special application for managing a personal personal account and monitoring the income and expenses of publicly owned enterprises, other municipal and regional budget revenues and utility costs, including security and real estate registry. This is the case when technology, like iron or the steam engine, will help change the social order.
We need transitional justice, based on the experience of international tribunals, taking into account the old legislation, but initiated by the missionary work of building the spirit of the rule of law.
This is the task of a civil tribunal, which can be organized by experienced qualified international lawyers and human rights lawyers with a clean reputation not only within Russian society, but also in the world. The creators of the new judicial system should be, as already mentioned, missionaries. There are such, they will be able to form the institution of the tribunal and formulate the principles of law, which will be transparent and fair, as well as deal with the crimes of Putinism, providing justice and cleansing society. This is the only way to return the basic ethical legal norms that are absent in the Russian Federation today.
So, as legitimate political institutions are formed, the political corporation will transfer its powers to parliaments, courts, sheriff’s offices, etc., leaving behind only a part of the functions that guarantee the sustainable democratic development of the states being created.
The decision to enter into union, confederal or federative relations with other political entities, partnership at the international level, for example, with the European Union, is taken at referendums organized by a legitimate and sovereign state, for example, Ingria, which retains its full sovereignty. This is a completely different level of integration into the international political system and a different level of guarantees for the further democratic development of all political subjects. Instead of the rusty hook of the KGB repressive machine, on which, according to the figurative expression of Viktor Cherkesov, an empire frightening Europe with dangerous fragility and toxic aggressiveness was held, we offer a dense social fabric of self-governing communities immersed in the construction of their own sovereign life.
3. Dismantling an empire stops wars, not provokes them
All regional and republican political movements included in the Civil Council are independent, but form a single international corps and a single partisan movement. We learn in advance to agree on common actions and coordinate different interests, the core of our political system is the councils of volunteers. We are the ones who will stop the civil war, not start it. It is being launched right now by Putin, Prigozhin, Kadyrov, and many others who are not yet visible in public. They divide zones of influence, industries, territories and financial flows. Their war with each other is a war of survival, so they will increasingly use not only weapons, but also propaganda. They will use old wounds and grievances between peoples and different social groups, setting people against each other. We must be stronger, we must be more and we must have a clear vision for the future of our regions and republics. Then together we will be able to stop the endless fight for the redistribution of the phantom of the dead empire.
And does anyone really think that nuclear weapons in the hands of Prigozhin or Kadyrov are safer for the world than under the control of international observers and the international corps that will grow out of the Siberian battalion? We are fighting for our only homeland, for Siberia, Ingria, Sakha, Circassia, Idel, so that our children live there, and not in order to plunder resources and buy the citizenship of a democratic country.
The most popular economic objection is based on the question – “how will these small countries live, some without access to the sea, without borders with Europe or China?” Like, the larger the subject of economic activity, the greater the economies of scale. Interestingly, all these exclamations are often heard from experts who talk a lot about good institutions and institutional economics.
Institutional economics is based on the theory of transaction costs. And we come to the Coase theorem, and most importantly, to his short and poignant old work, The Nature of the Firm . The important idea of this article for us is that the size of a firm is limited by accumulating transaction costs. But the firm operates in the commodity market, and the empire – in the political. And empires can irrationally grow at the expense of internal and external resources, increasing the transaction costs of governance, regardless of market expediency.
This is, first of all, the growth of spending on the bureaucratic and law enforcement apparatus, which is not limited by either the market or society.
The growth of corruption is inevitable in such monsters as the Russian Federation – without corruption at all, the signals cease to pass. Corruption is a kind of mechanism to circumvent prohibitive administrative costs, if the income from the lobbied operation allows.
Of course, if you want to maintain an army of three and a half million, you cannot do without an empire. But that doesn’t work anymore. The Kremlin was forced to change it to private military companies in order to somehow stay on its fronts. In the modern world, the system of international security is more important: given the global nature and variety of modern threats, it makes sense to build various military, economic and political alliances at the interstate level.
Economic success today depends on two factors: on people – they must be motivated and ready to constantly learn, and on costs, which must be minimal.
The objective prospect of the future for the whole world is to hide the “bureaucracy” in a smartphone, and send all public services to the open market. This is a continuation of the conversation about new technologies that are changing the social order. It is strange to talk about this in the midst of the war, but soon we will all understand that we have no one and no reason to change the corrupt bureaucracy, which imagines itself to be the new nobility. Once upon a time, former colonists in the United States decided to do without aristocrats and built their own free states. Today we are like these colonists – we will be forced to build our states on a neglected, abandoned territory, which for many years consisted of colonies, from which human and natural resources were pumped, and the earned capital was taken to the West.
Our proposal is not a terrible collapse of the empire, it is the gentrification of a terrible decaying empire, which is dangerous for its subjects and neighbors. Gentrification, which consists in the transformation of subjects into citizens, through their political and national self-determination and the creation of self-government, in the transformation of colonies into full-fledged sovereign states, in technological intervention and the elimination of the costs of corrupt bureaucracy.
Denis Sokolov, Civil Council
Гражданский совет
