Well. It's sort of complex your question...
"Clark,
Can you spin out a little bit your scenarios for Russia?
The players,
The mafiya
ultranationalists
military
communists
reformers
citizenry"
Actually, they are none of the above Peter. To go back a bit perhaps.
I'll try to give you a modest answer to a question I have wondered about for 30 years of pomndering this question: what is going to happen to Russia???
In 1976, in a conversation I had with Lord Mountbatten I said that India was the last empire. He pointed out to me that the largest empire was still going strongly....it was Russia, or as it was then called the USSR.
First, as a given I suppose basically there are a lot of people in the world the Russian have pissed off.
You have to see that Russia has deeply pissed off it's minorities: the Ukranians, the Muslims, the Cossacks, etc. They all hate the Russians...well, there are some other folks too they have pissed off... the central Europeans, the Rumanians, the Baltic states and the Germans.
Some facts: 40 percent of the male population of say Estonia and Latvia was "stolen" from the Baltic states and died in the Artic Circle camps. Whole Muslim minority populations after World War II were "deported" to Siberia after the second world war, etc. The list goes on and on.
All these people are good haters that is the point.
Now. The Russians have lots of nuclear bombs. The US and Europe want these "neutralized". They want a weak Russia.
What does Russia have that everybody wants.
Siberia.
Siberia succeeded from Russia twice in the 20th century. 1905 and 1918-21.
So. Ask yourself if Russia will survive. Not with a meagre population of 140 milliuon people. Not with so many peoeple who deeply, tryly hate and laothe the Russians.
Siberia will become part of what country? Will it become it's own country? Think this through....
In ten years I'd say Siberia being a natural part of Alaska, of course, it will ask to be the 53rd state. It will be that or the succeeded state of Siberia will be part of China.
Of course this will piss off the Chinese. But hell this is politics as usual isn't it? And everyone knows, at least the strategic planners do, that the big thing in 2010 and 2030 is US Chinese rivalry. Someone has to counter the aggressive Chinese policies that are pissing everyone off.
And the Russians. Well the Russians live in a cold country with lots of vodka. It is now at this monmet as we speak a rump state like Austria in 1919... stripped of it's empire. Left by the tide of history on the reedking mud bank.
Nobody likes the Russians (hell they don't even like themselves) and they are a country that just got the go to jail card.
My best, hurriedly
Clark |
