Russia's Mobilization May Be Putin's Fall

 Perhaps the most disturbing news for the Kremlin in the last week has involved headlines far from Moscow — rare public expressions of anti-Russian sentiment in the far reaches of the Russian Federation. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his “partial mobilization” of troops, protests in these places have evolved quickly from confusion about the orders to fear and anger over potential deployment to Ukraine, and now — in some corners of the country — to calls for secession from Russia.

Such demands have been heard in Dagestan, a multiethnic republic in the southernmost tip of the country with a population of over 3 million, and in Bashkortostan, a republic of 4 million that straddles the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. Fury in other places has taken a variety of forms. In Yakutia, a vast, thinly populated region in the northeast, a local leader complained to the New York Times that those being drafted were the “reindeer herders, hunters and fishermen” upon whom the community depends. “We have so few of them anyway,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, leader of an Indigenous group known as the Yukaghirs. “But they are the ones being drafted most of all.”

Throughout the 22 years of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin has often touted the accomplishment of preventing a similar breakup within the Russian Federation — which includes 21 republics in which the majorities are not ethnic Russians. Indeed, keeping the republics together has been an impressive achievement; many of these places are utterly different from, say, the areas around Moscow or St. Petersburg. They have their own constitutions, parliaments and ethnic populations.

Putin’s mobilization — intended as a military measure and perhaps a way of placating the hard-line nationalists who have been demanding a tougher war — now threatens the stability and integrity of some of these far-flung regions. It has made at least some citizens remember one thing they do not buy into as members of the Russian Federation: an empire that forces them to go to war in faraway lands.

Why should anyone care about a flurry of anger and anti-Putin feeling in such faraway places?

For one thing, similar protests in the late 1980s, in the republics that once made up the USSR, sparked a chain reaction that became known as the “parade of sovereignties,” demands for independence that ultimately brought what Putin would call “the main geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” — the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This weekend, the Bashkir National Political Center, until recently a little-known political organization in Bashkortostan, published an “appeal” to Kazakhstan, in which it requested help for citizens who were fleeing the mobilization. Kazakhstan was once the second-largest republic in the Soviet Union; now, it’s an independent nation that shares a border with Bashkortostan. The Bashkir appeal ended with these words:

“We believe that Putin’s imperial machine will break its back against the steel character and the will of the Ukrainian heroic people, and our republics will gain independence, just like you once did!”

Also on the weekend, the former deputy chief of Bashkortostan’s president’s office, Abbas Gallyamov, now an opposition figure living in exile, wrote that before the mobilization, people in Bashkortostan were politically quiet and certainly not speaking openly of a break with Russia. Putin’s announcement has changed that, he said, by galvanizing so many segments of the population.