HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

So we have to immediately attack on two fronts: prepare the ground for a tectonic shift, while taking temporary, compromise measures. These may be imperfect, but they’ll still go some way to solving the problem.

What can serve as a template for this new system? Strange as it may seem, the answer can be found in Russia’s distant past, even further back than the usual point from which Russian statehood is measured: the Tsardom of Moscow.

Today, the united forces of reaction are pushing us into the past, and they see their ideal in the state that was created by the princes of Moscow. But our history didn’t begin with the victory over the Tatars and the creation of Muscovy that followed this. There was another Rus’ before this. It was a country of self-governing and totally independent towns: Gardarika (as the Vikings who came from the north called it in their epic tales of the time). And even though these towns have been lost in the endless boundaries of Russian civilisation, it’s Gardarika that we need today in place of Muscovy as a fundamentally different state structure; an alternative to the harshness of centralisation.

Towns have always been the cornerstone for the development of European civilisation, and to this day they remain the principal places for the growth of the new global civilisation. But now we’re talking not just about towns, but about metropolises – huge cities where millions of people live in close proximity to each other. As the fundamentally new way of social organisation, it’s these metropolises that have become the engines of global technological, economic and even cultural change.

Strategically, even in the medium term historical perspective, Muscovy, with its single dominating centre for taking political decisions, should be transformed into a metropolis of political multi-centrism. Ideally, the basis of the state structure in Russia should be a political union of metropolises. This would greatly broaden the political class, taking it beyond the Moscow Ring Road.

The fundamental difference between the modern world and that of centuries past is that now there are far fewer centres of development. Development is now focussed on huge metropolises, where there’s a sufficient concentration of people and infrastructure. A metropolis is a place where people live in relatively close proximity to each other, and where you can reach the centre in less than an hour. The surrounding area then becomes the territory for servicing these centres of growth. In Russia, the emphasis should be placed on developing into a metropolis any city with a population of three to five million people, bringing it up to 15 to 20 million.

This is less of a technical question than a political one. How many of these centres do we need, and how many can we allow ourselves? This is the essence of proper strategic planning (if, of course, we want to control the direction in which we are heading and not merely go with the flow of time).

In my opinion, there should be no more than 20 such centres in Russia. We simply don’t have a large enough population for more than that. In the future these metropolises will become territorial centres, the capitals of a new structural organisation. We might call them “lands”.

We’re talking about new economic and political entities. These will be the building blocks of the new Russia, constructed from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as has been the practice up until now. This new network of “lands” will eventually replace the existing system of oblasts  and republics.

I am convinced that in any case at some point in our historical development we will have to change today’s territorial and state delineation of Russia, that has its roots partly in the country’s ancient history, and partly through spontaneous decisions and passing interests.

It may well be that we have to change the territorial division of guberniyas and oblasts , that we’ve known for nearly 300 years. These divisions arose randomly during endless Russian colonial expansion. They underpin uneven development, and strengthen the peaceful coexistence between the rich regions (each of which could become a separate European state), and the poorer areas, that survive only thanks to grants from the centre and are totally unprepared for an independent existence, not just economically but in the wider cultural meaning of the word.