So says a Russian professor quoted here on the Jamestown Foundation web site, with an interesting metaphor:
As a scholar, I establish the fact that the Russian Federation is developing signs of the initial stage of a breakup," Professor Alexei Malashenko, Scholar-in-Residence of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Jamestown on February 12. "Not unlike the case of the USSR, the current economic crisis threatens to bring already badly strained internal ties to the breaking point."
The first parts to break away, Malashenko believes, will be the Kaliningrad enclave, wedged between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and firmly oriented to Europe, and the Far East on the opposite side of this country, firmly locked economically to China, Japan, and South Korea.
The Kaliningrad region and the Far East have as little in common within the Russian Federation as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan did in the Soviet Union. No viable economic ties exist between the extremes of this large country. There is nothing like Route 1 from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent on the Canadian border to link Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
Only centralized control, known as Putin's vertical of power, has kept Russian regions together like hoops on a cask. As the systemic crisis loosens the hoops, however, the decayed cask will start falling apart.
There's no reason at all why Kaliningrad should want to be linked with Vladivostok really. Kaliningrad, and indeed some corners of the Baltic States, would be quite happy being linked to Moscow or St Petersburg, rather than somewhere on the other side of the world. 10 hour difference in time zones is quite a lot more than in the US, not to mention other differences. These days Vladivostok and the Russian Far East is far more focussed on the rest of the Far East, where its trade links are likely to be found, rather than a railway link and a poor air service.
In a recent kerfuffle over Japanese car imports, Putin called in OMON not the local police, since they were probably just as keen on the car imports as the rest of the locals.
I wonder how much of the Russian army is stationed in the Far East, these days, to keep control.
