Confederalization is Russia's only chance to survive

A brilliant article in today's Gazeta.ru:

http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2009/02/19_a_2945783.shtml

I fully agree with the author.

Russia is a country too large to be effectively managed in a centralized way. And this means that the country has to be decentralized, has to be truly federalized (what it isn't now) or even confederalized.

You can't manage any problems in a same way in the Islamic Northern Caucasus, the Finnish borderlands and the semi-inhabited far eastern Kamchatka that have completely different economical, geographical, cultural conditions. It's impossible to even have a single educational system on a territory that large. Therefore functions should be transferred from the Federal power to local administrations, the more the better.

People should have the chance to achieve real changes on local level and not just to migrate to Moscow or St. Pete for opportunities and career. They should have the freedom and the responsibility instead of relying on the Federal government. The Federal government has to encourage people to develop their home regions - and the only way to do so is to decentralize the country.

Otherwise we will see Russia falling in parts as soon as it faces a serious economic crisis where Moscow starts lacking resources to control the regions. And this process would be accompanied by terrible wars that would make a second Yugoslavia, if not a second Rwanda, out of the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region.

On the other hand, there is the problem that confederalization and decentralization of a country like Russia may end in its collapse. We're used to be forced to live together and every loosening of the brutal binding power creates the temptation for the local elite to break away completely. Especially this relates to regions that are able to live separately like Yakutia, Kaliningrad (former German Eastern Prussia), Tatarstan, Vladivostok.

This means that some other motivation should be created for the regions to be loyal to Russia. One should not be proud of being Slave of an Empire, but should enjoy being a free member of a Federation that gives opportunities and is an attractive example for the neighbouring states.
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How bad can the crisis get us?

Somebody said that one should always hope for the better and be prepared for the worst. Looking at all those news related to the economic crisis, hearing about collapsing Eastern Europe, watching that incredible industrial production decrease percentage numbers, seeing the fund market's negative reaction on Obama's signing this Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Mr. Obama's election for US president itself should have already said us all that there's nothing good to expect), is makes you think of what could be the worst thing to happen.

Back to industrial age or even deindustrialization? Dissolution of the Russian Federation (I heard the Constitutional court recently officially re-approved the 1990 for-now symbolic Declaration of Independence of Yakutia, the Siberian republic)? An other world war?

Yeah, and here it reminds me of the Apocalypse scheduled for December 2012 according to the Mayan calendar. Would be funny to wonder in four years from now, how the hell the Mayas could have predicted it so precisely, heh?
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