Should the war in Ukraine result in a Russian loss, what will the future hold for Russia?
Well, we know the road ahead for the Russians is going to be a rough one, but that doesn’t mean the country will collapse from within immediately. The military and internal security services hold too much power, and since the heavily propagandized, aging, ethnic Russians account for 70% of the population, an internal uprising isn’t of concern.
The real threat to Russia comes from the outside. Neighboring countries or those with an interest in seeing Russia remain destabilized could take advantage of its weaker borders and limited economic and strategic capacity.
Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to take a question from the Patreon page, a bit of a what if, if the Russians lose the war in Ukraine or what does that mean for national stability within Russia proper? Are we looking at an immediate disintegration or what? Great question.
Now, there are a lot of examples in Russian history of where the center has broken. And a loss in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mean that the Kremlin loses power, but there’s really two big pillars of power in Russia. One is the military and the other one is the internal security services. And the important thing to remember about Russia is, unlike a country like Iran, where the country is actually half non Persian, and so the military is primarily responsible for occupying itself in order to keep all the minorities, under control in Russia.
That’s not the case in Russia, even if, the Russian census data is completely fabricated, which it probably is, we probably have at least 70% of the Russian population actually being ethnic Russian. So among those populations with the possibility of Saint Petersburg, where there might be an economic push for independence, most of the Russians are going to stay put. They’ve been conditioned. They’ve eaten nothing but propaganda for quite some time. And most importantly, most of the young people are gone. Not only is the birthrate in Russia been dropping since before World War two, it plummeted under Khrushchev. Fell even more to Gorbachev and particularly nosedived in the 1990s. You add in a million casualties in the Ukraine war, in another million people under age 30 fleeing. And there really isn’t that youth generation that generally generates, revolutionary activity. And the Russian population will be concerned about losing what little they have left. So the chances of them being really rebellious are pretty low. The other 30%, of course, is a different question. You’ve got a number of minorities, mostly Turkic, of some flavor or Bashkors, Tatars, Chechens, English. This is where things would get really interesting. So, the military’s primary goal is to be on the borders in the Russian sphere and prevent any sort of invasion. And in a post Ukraine scenario where the Russians lost their borders are very, very, very long. And so they really won’t be available for any sort of domestic suppression of rebellion that will fall to the intelligence services, which are just as strong now as they were three years ago.
So you can have an open rebellion in places like Tatarstan or Bashkortostan and the Russian government remains relatively capable of dealing with those. Now, they can’t deal with it everywhere, as we saw in the Soviet system, when the internal services were much stronger than they are today. If you’ve got two dozen places going into some degree of rebellion at the same time, then you’re kind of screwed.
But when those two dozen places went into rebellion at the same time last time around, they were Kazakhs and Uzbek and Georgians and Latvians and Estonians and Armenians, and as a Rajani, none of them were ethnic Russians. And when the Soviet system fell, 14 of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union were not majority Russian, and they are now independent states.
What was left with rump Russia is much smaller, much more difficult to defend, but is actually more ethnically homogenous. So the Russian state, the Kremlin, would have a much better chance of suppressing internal dissent.
Now, this is all pretty much a starvation diet because they post Ukraine. Russia loses a lot of its income. Its security situation is much worse.
Its financial position is considerably worse, and there would probably be pressure on it from the entire western and southwestern periphery, because once Ukraine wins, you’re going to have any number of European countries that include, but are not limited to two Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania, who are going to be pushing at the Russians to try to make sure they stay off balance.
The Turks will probably get on that to the EU’s backs down south will probably get into that. And based on the circumstances in East Asia, Japan or China could get in that as well. So I wouldn’t say that a post Ukraine. Russia is long for this world, but it’s not probably going to fall from within without a lot of help. Russia is in a relatively slow motion decline. It’ll probably still be there regardless of what happens in the Ukraine war by 2040. But once you fast forward past 2050, that’s when the demographic shift really starts to shift. And most of those Turkic minorities have strong birthrates. You combine that with what happened in the war, in gutting the younger generation and very, very, very low birth rates and high death rates among the Russian population.
By the time you get to 2060, you’re in a very different environment and then you can start thinking about an internal disintegration, but it’s going to be from the outside first. And, the end of all of this really does depend on what happens to Ukraine. Because if Ukraine falls, then the Russians have a more secure external border.
It’ll buy them 20, 30 years. That’s not a rounding error. That’s why they’re doing it in the first place. But we are still looking at the end of the Federation before the end of the century. That’s pretty much just a question, whether it’s front loaded or not.
