Window on Eurasia

Kremlin Must Focus on Russia’s ‘Internal Geopolitics,’ Analyst Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 5, 2006 – In order to be in a position to respond to challenges from abroad, a leading Moscow analyst argues, the Russian government must focus on “the internal geopolitics” of the country, something its opponents routinely do but that many in the Russian political elite ignore.

In an interview posted online last week, Vadim Tsymbul’skiy, who has
written extensively on security issues over the last 15 years, argues
that the current debate about shifting the Russian capital out of
Moscow is for him at least simply an effort to attract the Kremlin’s
attention to the importance of the country’s “internal
geopolitics.”

Given the enormous size of the Russian Federation and the variety of
countries along its borders, Tsymbul’skiy says, Moscow has no choice
but to consider the way in which the country is structured internally
if it hopes to have a successful foreign policy
[http://www.apn.ru/publications/print9922.htm].

The security analyst argues that at a minimum, Moscow must take into
consideration three different aspects of geopolitics within its own
borders. First, the Kremlin must always remember that there are two
important vectors – north-south and east-west – of trade and
transportation across the country and consider their intersections.

Second, it must take into consideration that there are three “real
parts” of the country, Euro-Russia, Far Eastern Russia and the
gigantic Ural-Siberia region in between them. The first and third of
these are based on a north-south axis, while the second, which links
the two, is based on an east-west one.

And third, the Russian government must rember that there are four basic
regions of the country: the North-West from Murmansk to Kaliningrad,
the South-West from the Black Sea to the Caspian, the South East which
Moscow now calls “the Far East,” and the North East which includes
Kamchatka and neighboring regions.

Central Russia needs these four regions to survive, but for Central
Russia to develop it must be defined in terms of geography rather than
in terms of the location of the current capital city of Moscow, which
in fact now lies almost on the periphery of the Russian Federation.

Given that reality, which Tsymbul’skiy says is widely understood by
many analysts and politicians, it is no surprise that some of them have
suggested moving the capital out of Moscow to a city located more
nearly at the center or at the intersection of east-west and north-south
communications lines.

Indeed, he suggests, ever more people are coming to understand the
absurdity of the situation the Russian Federation finds itself in
today: Its “real center is called a periphery,” and the space located
along the Western border is called “the center,” something he argues is
not true of most other major countries.

That widespread understanding not surprisingly has sparked controversy,
the Moscow analyst points out; but he adds that for him, “the idea of
an alternative capital” is significant less as a plan for immediate
action than an occasion for discussing these larger internal
relationships.

One reason some have focused on moving the capital out of Moscow,
Tsymbul’skiy continues, is that over the past century, Russians have
either shifted their capital or talked about shifting it whenever there
has been a serious political crisis or challenge from abroad.

In 1918, faced with a challenge by White Russian and interventionist forces, Vladimir Lenin decided to move the Soviet capital out of
Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg). Initially, he
considered moving it to the Urals-Kuznetsk area because of the iron and
steel resources available there, but eventually he decided on Moscow.

In 1941, at the time of the German invasion, Stalin moved many
government functions out of Moscow to Kuybyshev, and German
intelligence reported at the time, Tsymbul’skiy says, that the Soviet leadership
ultimately planned to move its headquarters to Sverdlovsk.

In 1991, at the time of the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, he
continues, representatives of Boris Yeltsin sounded out officials in
Sverdlovsk about making that an alternative capital if the GKChP group
had succeeded in taking over key institutions in Moscow.

And in October 1993, when the Russian Federation’s Supreme Soviet
challenged Yeltsin for control of the country, Tsymbul’skiy says,
“leaders of oblast and local soviets” appealed to Yeltsin’s
opponents to consider shifting the parliament to Novosibirsk where it
could set up an alternative to Yeltsin’s regime.

Talking about shifting the capital out of Moscow in the near term is
premature, Tsymbul’skiy continues. If that does in fact occur, it
will not happen in the immediate future. But in making his case for the
importance of “the internal geopolitics” of the country, he
advances two further arguments.

On the one hand, he says, even if the political capital remains in
Moscow, officials there must recognize that other parts of the country
may in fact be more central economically and even politically to the
needs of the country as a whole and even to their own.

And on the other, they must acknowledge that Moscow is losing some of
its centrality even though few are willing to admit that openly. As
evidence, the Moscow analyst notes that children of the top elite now
study in Cambridge and Oxford, while those from “the periphery”
fill the desks at formerly elite institutions like MGIMO.