A longish introduction.
Boris Eltsin (or Yeltsin in a variant pseudophonetic spelling), if you remembered the constantly tipsy fellow, was the first president of post-Soviet Russia, transferred his office to Putin in what amounted to a constitutional coup. This was done not because Eltsin, himself a puppet, wanted to get a strong ruler for the country (the word president is really a degraded joke in the greater post-USSR domain) but because the gang that captured Russia and Russia’s assets wanted to put on the throne a pliant puppet who would safeguard their loot, preserve the system and make a good tough guy impression on the populace in order to maintain the system for as long as would be possible. That was all to it.
If Germany is the nation of Germans, regardless of their ethnic background, and America is peopled by Americans since all American citizens are Americans or Japan is the nation of the Japanese (one like Korea that is ethnically homogeneous), Russia is not the nation of Russians. When the Soviet Union fell apart or was rather torn apart in another constitutional coup against the wishes of its inhabitants (they expressed their wish to maintain a united Soviet Union in a referendum), all fifteen Soviet republics split apart along the Bolshevik-drawn internal borders. Originally there was a Russia, a united and indivisible one. I want that Russia to be restored right in the borders before the Communist takeover of 1917 or in the borders of 1913 and 1914. Then the Bolsheviks, to diminish the Russian power, as they were alien to Russia and her people, created internal Soviet “republics”.
When the Soviet Union was torn apart by the local nomenklatura and other interests, those Republics became artificial states and statelets, like the Ukraine. Because those states and statelets needed some identity and they lack history or own culture, the only identity they could produce was ethnic or tribal. That means that all fourteen Soviet Republics became tribalist ethnocracies ranging in severity from openly fascist like Estonia or Latvia to relatively mild ethnographic satrapies like Belorussia.
Mind you that I mentioned fourteen and not fifteen republics because Russia or rather the Russian Federation is the sole exception (the Russian Federation is much small than Russia. The latter would include the Ukraine or the Baltic statelets). In it, the Russian people lost even the modicum of autonomy they had under the Soviet Union as the territory was preserved into something else, reduced in size, and privatized the Soviet Union, with the Russian people effectively becoming bums.
Those who eat the top of Russia’s governance and property pie, and in today’s Russia the concepts are almost interchangeable, are not even Russia but come from the multiethnic Soviet nomenklatura. That’s a different topic altogether, and I’d get to it later, because I am going to address it in some great detail.
Illustration, a painting by Dragan Bibin, a contemporary Serbian painter.
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