# Musing about Russia in the near and long term future **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Tags:** ukraine-invasion\ **Created:** [May 8, 2022, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150 "2022-05-08T19:06:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2022, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150/41 "2022-05-10T18:17:10Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > My original theory on the reason for this war was that Putin needed a shock to cover the coming partial collapse. Now he can try to blame it on the Western economic sanctions. But I don’t think that strategy will work. > > Although I take your point about the difficulty of change in the Russian Government, I think they are ripe for a major turnover. If the kleptocrats are smart, they will step away and let the new guy take responsibility for cleaning up the mess (including the retreat from Ukraine). I think you are at least half-right about Putin’s motivation for the war; certainly, he is looking for a way to cover the severe, long term economic problems that Russia has been experiencing since even before he nominally took over and which it cannot escape from without evolving out of the export-focused petrostate that it is. I don’t think he specifically intended to blame Western economic sanctions but rather just to use the war—excuse me ‘special military operation’—as a mask for austerity measures, perhaps assuming that control over the Donbas region and ultimately a land bridge to Transnistria and around the north Caspian would give Russia new access to gas reserves and routes to expand gas and oil exports. That this hasn’t worked out the way he intended was kind of predictable and indicates that people within Russian government who were advising him were either too fearful of his wrath to provide constructive criticism, deliberately wanted the effort to fail, or possibly some combination of both. I think the believe that popular sentiment will cause radical reform in Russian governance is at best hopeful pleading. There is a certain segment of the population agitating for this but not an especially powerful one, and the aging Russian population seems inclined toward strength and ‘unity’ (even if they have to bomb Ukraine into the Stone Age to annex them) rather than freedom and choice. Russia has gone through two periods of major civil unrest in the 20th century in which it briefly appeared that more egalitarian elements would advance the system, and in both cases they reverted to brutal authoritarianism. I don’t want to be so presumptuous as to say this is the default Russian culture but certainly the people who lived through ‘reforms’ in the ‘Nineties see little advantage to ‘democracy’ (such as they had it) and generally prefer living under a strong leader who keeps the economy going at some functional pace even if it does mean living with endemic corruption. It’ll take another twenty or thirty years that demographic of the Russian population to die out enough that newer voices can dominate, and by that time the economic impacts of the population crash may literally render Russia a decaying ‘Third World’-type nation that is exploited for its natural resources by its more economically secure neighbors. There is a reason that young, bright Russians have been fleeing the country for the last decade to settle elsewhere because Russia literally has no bright future regardless of who is in control. > [@TruCelt](#): > > It has been noted that Russia and Ukraine, between them, account for 30% of the world’s wheat supply. Russia cannot maintain it’s current economic levels even if they regain their petro customers, because too much is skimmed off the top by non-productive entities. We agree that they will have to find a new basis for their economy, and I think food production is the level to which they have to retreat. It will be a very long time (if ever) before they are a major player again. And we will find out just how much they have been helping to keep China at bay. That’s gonna hurt us. Being an ag producer is certainly a firm basis for an export economy, but it has substantial limits to growth even assuming that ag production drops elsewhere. Energy has been the economic driver of the latter half of 20th Century (and really, since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution) because the demand for energy just keeps growing well beyond population scale, while demand for agricultural products is essentially linear with population (and will start to decline once world populations start going down). Russia has vast energy resources but has been largely inept at effectively tapping them or using them as a resource to capitalize other industries they way that, say, the Nordic Countries have with North Sea oil. > [@TruCelt](#): > > There is no one quick easy massive scale answer to switching to renewables. Sadly, I still think when we really dedicate ourselves, it will happen faster than the Russian and Middle Eastern economies will adjust, and there will be a great deal of suffering there. There are definitely ways to build a portfolio of sustainable energy technologies that can (mostly) replace petrofuels, and if we had a Manhattan Project-style effort to develop them they could probably be ready for deployment in wide scale in about 15-20 years. If we’d started working this problem circa 1990 at the end of the Cold War, turning the defense budget toward sustainable and renewable energy (again, with the eye toward energy independence as a national security issue) we could have almost complete energy independence now and the ability to export or license those technologies to the rest of the world. The US energy-govenment-military complex elected to not do that because it would be to disruptive to the status quo, and now here we are. I agree those would have major impacts upon petrostate economies, but a) not our problem, b) we could provide alternatives to those states in the form of licensed technologies or financing industry conversions, and c) all of this would be preferable to facing the existential crisis of energy scarcity and global climate change that scientists in the field have been warning about for forty years, but again, too much change to contemplate so we pushed ahead with business as normal. Anyway, Russia isn’t having any of that. They are going to keep being Russia as long as possible and crack down on independent thought and reform because they’re even more frightened of that than the West is. That is my prediction, for what it is worth, although I also predicted that Putin wasn’t actually going to invade Ukraine because it would be a stupidly counterproductive thing that would devastate Russia economically even if it succeeded, and he ignored my opinion and did it anyway ‘cause he’s a big poopie-head. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2022, 8:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150/42 "2022-05-11T08:25:35Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > I don’t know enough about Navalny to predict what comes next. But I suspect it will be him, and that he will retreat and re-build. Sorry, no chance. The machine will have him serve out his current sentence and (if they can) find other trumped up charges, while finding another front man (Medvedev again? Or someone else from within their ranks). Even if they let go - and there’s no reason for them to think they should - there’s no guarantee Navalny would have majority support, nor (even if he did) that he wouldn’t pick up on the same Slavic nationalist/exceptionalist themes. His campaigns have been about corruption and fraudulent elections, not about making Russia a model Western social democracy. ---
**Author:** ![Fluffy\_PickleSniffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/77aa72/32.png) [@Fluffy\_PickleSniffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fluffy_PickleSniffer)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2022, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150/43 "2022-05-11T12:33:12Z")
I remember reading once that Navalny was very nationalist and wasn’t any keener on “the West” than Putin was. I couldn’t find that article, it was years ago, but I did find this one which gives a rundown on him: [Who is Alexei Navalney](https://www.vox.com/22254292/alexei-navalny-prison-hunger-strike-end-russia-protests-vladimir-putin) ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2022, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150/44 "2022-05-11T12:55:43Z")
There was a recent TV documentary following him and his wife and associates through the poisoning, his recovery, their identifying the people responsible, and his return and imprisonment. At one point they raised the question of his associating, in the early days of his campaign, with some of the more unpleasant nationalists and speaking at one of their rallies. He was a bit equivocal about it, as I recall. Those people, one assumes, are now all for Putin anyway. > **[Aleksei Navalny: new film about jailed dissident who dared to defy the power...](https://theconversation.com/aleksei-navalny-new-film-about-jailed-dissident-who-dared-to-defy-the-power-of-putin-181118)** > > A new CNN documentary about jailed opposition figurehead Aleksei Navalny offers insights into Putin’s challengers. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-about-russia-in-the-near-and-long-term-future/964150.md?page=2)