Kremlin’s losing battle: Next stage of disintegration of Soviet space

Violence in Kazakhstan and Armenia are the clearest sign yet that the post-Soviet space is entering into its second phase of disintegration, the result of the rise of a new generation that sees Moscow as the defender of the kleptocratic elites in their countries and thus an obstacle to the kind of future they want, according to Andrey Piontkovsky. These events, the Russian commentator argues, are anything but “accidental,” not because “someone from Moscow is organizing them.” That cannot be the case because “all of them are working against Moscow” and its interests. Instead, they are the product of people taking arms “against the allies of Moscow.” “We sometimes forget,” Piontkovsky continues, “that 25 years have already passed from the time of the first phase of the disintegration of the USSR,” a country centered on Moscow and its horde traditions and that Vladimir Putin has assured the world was simply Russia functioning under a different name. Since 1991, “a new generation of people who have nothing in common with the Soviet Union and with the old elites which have been penetrated by Soviet agents” has emerged. Twenty-five years ago, there was “a single conspiracy of the entire Soviet communist nomenklatura” which gave up its old ideology in order to grow rich. That model “triumphed in all the post-Soviet states, except the Baltic countries.” But now people in these countries and especially the young are “very dissatisfied with Moscow because they see that Muscovy is doing everything in order to support the regimes” which are oppressing them and preventing them from a freer future. This trend, he suggests, will continue, sometimes peacefully and sometimes with violence, but it “will always be anti-Moscow” at its base “because everyone understands perfectly that the main defender and the main sponsor of all these bandit and thieving regimes is Moscow.” According to Piontkovsky, “Moscow will always support the existing regimes because only with these regimes in place can it count on some influence and status.” But “what we see now in Armenia and Kazakhstan is the beginning of the next stage of the disintegration of the Soviet empire or more precisely the Muscovite empire.” The rulers in Moscow “still do not understand what is really going on,” the Russian commentator says; and consequently, they are taking steps as in the case of their criminal actions in Ukraine that are “accelerating these processes” of the disintegration of their empire and making it irreversible. That an opponent of the Putin dictatorship and its aggressive behavior should be saying these things may not come as a surprise, but some pro-Moscow commentators are predicting the same outcome, although blaming it on Western conspiracies and Moscow’s failure up to now to respond properly. In a commentary today, one such Kremlin supporter, Ruslan Gorevoy writes openly about “the end of the CIS,” pointedly arguing that the West has decided to organize “color” revolutions in several post-Soviet states and thus overload Moscow’s ability to respond.

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