For centuries, Russian history has resembled a broken slab. Creak, crash, bloody chaos, restart – and then the same old story repeats itself. The Romanov Empire collapsed – and from its remains, drenched in blood, an even more terrifying, red empire was built. The Soviet Union died, the country drank its fill of freedom in the 1990s – and again happily plunged into the warm swamp of personalist dictatorship.
Because of this damned “track effect“ many people today give up. It seems like a vicious circle. They think that when the current regime collapses (and it will collapse with a deafening crash), a new vampire with epaulettes will inevitably emerge from its ruins, tighten the screws, and plunge the country into another round of historical hell.
Relax. And at the same time - be terrified.
There will be no new cycle. The rut is over. It has hit a concrete wall of physical, biological, and historical impossibility. What we are witnessing today is not another spiral toward new greatness. These are the death throes of a once-mighty cannibal empire. Leviathan will disappear. And there are five reasons for this, which no political strategist or siloviki can oppose.
REASON ONE: Feasting on a corpse or the end of Soviet inertia.
Let's be honest: over the past twenty-five years, Russia has not been building a new empire. It has simply been feasting on the corpse of the previous one.
All this imperial entourage, geopolitical showmanship, and rattling of weapons were based solely on the colossal resources left by the Soviet Union. The infrastructure, the thermal power plants, the bridges, the railway junctions, and the hydroelectric power plants were built by our ancestors. The huge arsenals of armored vehicles and the millions of tons of shells that are now being joyfully burned have been in storage since the 1970s. Scientific schools, space research, aviation – all this was just a waste of the old stored fat.
For a quarter of a century they did not lay their own foundations. The regime knew only how to pump oil from Soviet wells through Soviet pipelines and buy loyalty and Western technology with this easy money.
Today this fat is exhausted. The infrastructure is falling apart, accidents are becoming the norm, warehouses are emptying. A new imperial push requires colossal initial capital. But there is none. The coffers are empty. The machines are worn out, the pipes are rotten. Inertia is gone.
REASON TWO: The demographic verdict.
Every aggressive autocracy capable of mobilizational leaps is built on excess biological energy. It needs a young, cheap and passionate "smoker's poison".
In 1917, Russia was a country of rural youth. The average age was about 20. Families had five to seven children. Women were constantly giving birth. It was this seething, illiterate, young mass that the Bolsheviks managed to throw into the furnace of the Civil War, pushing it onto the construction sites of socialism and into the Gulag. The empire had an endless human resource that was worth nothing.
Look at Russia today. It is a highly aging, urbanized country. The average age has exceeded 40. It is a nation of divorced women, pensioners and men with hypertension, mortgages and prostatitis. The birth rate has reached rock bottom.
An aging society is physically incapable of building totalitarian empires. It has neither testosterone nor manpower. Who will a new hypothetical dictator send to dig the White Sea Canal or to master Siberia? Forty-year-old sales managers with back pain? To start a new totalitarian cycle, millions of aggressive twenty-year-olds with nothing to lose are needed. They simply do not exist in Russia anymore.
REASON THREE: Technological impotence and the death of the “Stalin myth“.
The favorite dream of pseudo-patriots is: “We must do like Stalin“. To carry out strict industrialization, shoot the saboteurs and build everything anew.
This is a diagnosis. These people are stuck in the first half of the 20th century.
The Russian Empire had God, the Tsar and the Fatherland. The Bolsheviks had a powerful, global idea of world revolution and social equality that mesmerized half the planet.
What do we have now? What idea can the regime offer for a new round?
A schizophrenic mix of Ilyin, Soviet flags, priests with censers at cosmodromes, and hatred of gays? This is not ideology. This is white noise.
The very essence of the current system is total cynicism. Money triumphs over everything.
It is impossible to start a new imperial cycle on cynicism. The loyalty of the siloviki and bureaucrats is based solely on access to the feeder. As soon as the money runs out (and it runs out), this loyalty will evaporate in 24 hours. No one will die for free for the yachts of the oligarchs and the palaces of the bureaucrats. The ideological fuel has burned to the ground.
The CROSSROADS: What awaits us?
So: the fuel is gone. There is no demographics. There are no technologies. There are no ideas. There is no sovereignty. The Soviet legacy has been swallowed up.
The spiral of history for this form of statehood has ended. Resetting the clock and a new cycle are physically impossible. But does this mean that a happy democratic future lies ahead?
Not at all.
At the moment of collapse, the system will have exactly two paths.
The first path is difficult: Realization by regional elites, businesses, and the remnants of sensible siloviki that survival is possible only through agreement. True, violent federalization.
Rejection of the tsar's power in Moscow. Building a solid, pragmatic republic, where the regions retain their taxes, judges are elected, and parliament becomes an arena for debate, not for approving cannibal laws. This is a chance to create a modern economy. But this path requires colossal efforts, trust, and the emergence of a class of truly sovereign citizens. And this, in an atomized and traumatized Russia, is tantamount to a miracle.
The second path is real: Degradation.
With no institutions to build a republic, nor resources for an empire, the vast territory will simply begin to slowly and painfully rot and disintegrate.
This does not necessarily have to be a spectacular collapse with nuclear war between individual principalities. It will be a creeping “somallization“. Degradation of infrastructure. Primitivization of the economy. Emergence of regional barons with their own private armies and laws.
Moscow will lose control over its periphery, becoming just another city among many deprived of trillions in subsidies. China will silently and pragmatically take Siberia and the Far East under its economic umbrella – without a single shot fired, just buying up assets.
This will be a long, gray and hopeless decline on the technological periphery of the world. A rotting leviathan, unable to attack anyone again because its teeth have fallen out and its muscles have atrophied.
The choice will probably not be between Empire and Democracy. The choice will be between the hard work of building a Republic from scratch – or sinking into a warm, stinking, primal swamp. And judging by the state of society, the swamp has every chance of winning."
Author: Vladislav Inozemtsev/Facebook