Yesterday Vladimir Putin spoke at the regular congress of the so-called World Russian People’s Assembly. The video of his speech is provided below to illustrate the absolute lifelessness of these events and the ideas promoted at them, and that they are not taken seriously even by those who are supposed to believe in them because of their status. Anyone who pays attention not to what is said, but how it is said, to whom it is said, and how it is listened to, will discover that the people who are brought to this event for the sake of the masses are openly bored under the protocol bustle, following the words of a person who imagines himself to be a «national leader».
Of course, it is useless to comment on all this in detail. However, it is impossible to overlook the following fragment about the plans of some mysterious forces: «The aim is to create various faceless protectorates. After all, it is easier and more convenient to manage disunited nations, robbed of their national memory, reduced to the level of vassals, and to use them as agents of change in one’s own interests.»
But isn’t this the essence of the national policy of the Kremlin itself, which wants to erase the national republics with their national educational components in the nationally faceless «Russian nation» (cemented by Russians) and faceless territorial entities? As early as 2012, Putin nostalgically recalled: «In the Russian Empire, there was no division according to national-territorial entities. There were governorates… And everything seemed to work and worked quite well.»
At the same time, the fact was ignored that in the Russian Empire there were what are now declared to be threats to the security of the «Russian nation» — «ethnic enclaves». For example, Muslim settlements (mahale) where Muslims lived according to Sharia law within their own community. The Communists abolished them, but gave the people republics instead; now Putin’s supporters want to «prevent the emergence of enclaves» and gradually abolish the republics.
However, Putin’s supporters are not only pursuing this policy within the Russian Federation. For example, Putin himself has repeatedly declared that Ukrainians are the same people as Russians. Those who disagree with this formulation are labeled extreme nationalists, despite the fact that even in the nominally internationalist USSR, Russians and Ukrainians were considered different nations, albeit fraternal.
As for the attempts to reduce them to the level of vassals — when the same Ukrainians advocated the creation of an association with the EU instead of joining the Customs Union with Russia, one part of their country was officially annexed, and a war was unleashed on another part by flooding it with «vacationers» and «weapons from military stores». Did the Americans really do this? Or is someone else trying to turn Ukraine and other nations of Russia and the post-Soviet space into submissive vassals and national faceless protectorates?