The annexation of Crimea did not solve any of Russia’s internal problems – Moscow political scientist
Moscow - Simferopol, February 17 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Despite the fact that the Russian Federation regularly makes it to the top of world news after Crimea, the country’s situation is more difficult than it seems, writes in “Novaya Gazeta” Head of the Department of Political Science at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and Social Sciences Vasily Zharkov. He lists Russia's main problems, “obvious to every honest observer.”
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Firstly, writes Zharkov, “Russia is a poor country. We can be as proud of our nouveau riche limousines as we want and buy expensive phones, but our answer about the size of our future pension will most likely cause pity even in the poorest country of the European Union. The situation of Russian villages and small towns in the provinces is comparable only to the poorest countries in Africa. The brilliance of the capital’s shop windows is not so much a sign of wealth as evidence of monstrous inequality and injustice, which for some reason are perceived as the norm.”
Secondly, “contrary to the name of its largest political party, Russia has not been united for a long time. Moscow and the province are not just different countries, where the ongoing registration regime serves as an analogue of a Schengen visa. We are talking about the difference between the first and third world,” notes the political scientist.
Thirdly, “having lost Soviet political institutions and not gained any others, Russia is balancing on the brink of an internal war of all against all. This war has been partially mitigated in the last decade and a half due to high oil prices and the dominance of one of the power groups, which has taken control of most of the economic and information resources. But this is still not a state, if only because the main means of governance in the existing neo-feudal ladder is corruption.”
Fourthly, according to Zharkov, “Russia can no longer be considered a big country.” “A huge territory has not yet been completely colonized. On the contrary, desolation occurs in the very center, in the historical areas of settlement of the Russian people and the development of Russian statehood,” he explains.
Fifthly, the political scientist is confident that “all our cultural and scientific achievements are in the past. In the present, libraries are burning, schools and universities are being downsized, obscurantism is replacing humanitarian knowledge in the same way that psychics and healers are replacing modern medicine.”
“It is possible, of course, in response to all these challenges to take the well-known path by announcing another mobilization plan,” the expert argues. “However, unlike the early 1930s, in Russia there is no longer a peasant mass that can be turned into a labor army, and it is increasingly difficult to import labor migrants from outside.”
All this makes Russia a tempting target for external expansion and taking away the most delicious resources from Russians, Zharkov sums up. Now this process is restrained by nuclear weapons, but, according to the political scientist, they “will remain in effect until the United States and China reach a new level of weapons development.”
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