WILL RUSSIA BREAK APART?

Tbilisi, Georgia.  It's a beautiful morning here in Georgia, and there's not a Russian soldier in sight.  I could find them easily enough if I went looking for them over at the "border" with South Ossetia and Abkahzia, but here in the capital of Tbilisi and the rest of Georgia, they are nowhere to be seen.

Georgians are surprisingly unafraid of Russia inflicting its traditional role of barbarian invader upon them.  There are several reasons, one of which is the videos of Russian troops they've been seeing on Georgian television.

Russian soldiers are so ill-equipped many are wearing cheap tennis shoes.  They are so ill-fed they have to steal food from villagers, so hungry they eat fruit so unripe and meat so spoiled it makes them violently sick.

There is a surreptitiously-taken video of Russian soldiers ransacking a Georgian military barracks, stealing used socks (many of them have no socks), even used (!) toothbrushes, and carting off toilet commodes to sell back in Russia.

"It's really hard to take soldiers who have to steal used toothbrushes seriously," one Georgian friend told me. 

Thus the discussion here is less on what the impact of Russia's invasion will be on Georgia, and more on what the impact will be on Russia.

The consensus is that Russia may disintegrate.

Let's start with this Bloomberg story that Russia's billionaires have collectively lost in the crash of the Russian markets and oil prices a cumulative total of $230 billion between them: over 60% of their wealth.

They are unhappy campers.  And there is little hope they will regain much of it because foreign investment in the Land of Putinism is gone with the wind.  They form Putin's inner circle of power and may be drawing a bead on him. 

Yet however much the Russian economy collapses, that by itself won't precipitate the collapse of the Russian state.  The catalyst for that, future historians may say, was Putin's invasion of Georgia.  To understand why, we must understand the structure of the Russian Federation.

That's the official name of the Russian state – like that of the Soviet Union's was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR.  The Federation is a bewildering array of 83 republics, oblasts (provinces), krais (territories), okrugs (districts), and federal cities (Moscow & St. Petersburg).  All of the latter four comprise Russia directly ruled as administrative districts by the Kremlin. 

We'll focus on the republics, created as regions of non-Russian indigenous ethnicity.  There are 21.  Click on the "bewildering" link and look at 4-8 + Dagestan bordering Georgia and Azerbaijan.  These are collectively known as the "North Caucasus."

The group 9-12 + Tatarstan and Bashkortostan (pink, left-center of map) are collectively known as the "Middle Volga."

Insurrections and secessionist movements are breaking out in most republics in both regions.  The same is true for the Mongol-Buddhist republic of Tuva (northwest of Mongolia), and the giant Siberian republic of Yakutia.

Underlying these movements is Putin's abolishment of autonomy and democracy throughout the country.  The governor of every republic is no longer elected by his constituents, but is appointed by the Kremlin as a Putin puppet.

But what has set off the protests and demonstrations taking place as you are reading this is Putin's recognition via military force of the secession and independence from Georgia of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The most explosive is Ingushetia, where an armed insurrection has broken out after Putin's appointed governor Murat Zyazikov, on orders from the Kremlin, had the owner of a popular anti-Russian website Ingushetia.ru, Magomed Yevloev, murdered on August 31.

The violent anti-Russian unrest is spreading next door to North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.  It hasn't spread to Chechnya yet because Putin has placed the most ruthless thug, Ramzan Kadyrov, in power there.  But the only thing that keeps him in Putin's pocket is money.

The moment Moscow can't afford all that money and Kadyrov doesn't have his millions, the Chechens will stop taking his and Moscow's orders.

While these movements are ethnic-based anti-Russian, another has a more sinister tinge.  The largest of the North Caucasus republics, Dagestan, has been Moslem radicalized by Wahabbi money and missionaries from Saudi Arabia.

There's 2½ million folks in Dagestan and less than 5% are Russians.  It's rapidly spinning out of Moscow's control and in a dangerous way.

The oil-rich republic of Tatarstan is the most powerful and influential in the Middle Volga.  Last Sunday (10/12) in the capital of Kazan, there was a demonstration calling for the independence of Tatarstan and the entire Middle Volga. 

It was held on the 456^th anniversary of Russia's military seizure of the Kazan Khanate on October 12, 1552.  Speakers called for "the peoples of the Middle Volga, the Caucasus, and Siberia to organize and advance demands for the recognition from Moscow of our national republics based on the example of Abkhazia and South Ossetia."

Many in the audience waved the Tatarstan flag, called the "flag of the struggle for independence," and other Middle Volga flags such as that of Mari El.

Russian security forces were desperate to block the demonstration, even to the point of sending text messages to the cell phones of Kazan University students saying they would be expelled if they attended.  The demo was held anyway, and the protests for independence are growing stronger.

Such demands have now reached far away Tuva.  In the capital of Kyzyl, Tuvans have spray-painted graffiti on the Russian Orthodox church saying "Russians go home!" and "Russians are our enemies!"  Gangs of Tuvans are attacking Russians, beating them up with shouts of "Death to Russians!"

In a story about the situation in Moskovsky komsomolets magazine, a senior KGB (now renamed FSB) officer posted to Kyzyl told the reporter he did not bring his wife and children because "I did not want to shudder from fear for them every night."

It hasn't reached such anti-Russian outrage in Yakutia (also known as Sakha) yet, but it's growing.  Putin recently appointed yet another Russian, Mikhail Nikolaev, to be governor, not an ethnic Sakha (also known as Yakut).

This has bitterly disappointed the Sakha people, who form a clear majority of Yakutia's population.  Calls for independence are now heard in the capital of Yakutsk, especially at student demonstrations at the university.

Imagine a place the size of India – 1.2 million square miles – with less than one million inhabitants.  A place that's impossibly rich in every natural resource imaginable, oil, coal, minerals, endless forests, endless hydroelectric potential, all the water dried-up China could dream of.

For right next door, in just the three provinces of Northeast China (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) bordering Siberia live 107 million Chinese.  And Nikolaev is inviting them in as "guest workers," infuriating the Sakha.

When I had dinner with Albanian Prime Minster Sali Berisha last week, he told me he had discussed Russia's weaknesses with many other world leaders (he had just returned, for example, from seeing German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin the night before).

It was a consensus among them that one of Russia's greatest problems is maintaining sovereignty over Siberia.

"They (the Russians) cannot keep it," Berisha said.  "Once you get past the Russian population centers like Yekaterinburg just east of the Urals, you have an area of over 10 million square kilometers, bigger than the entire United States including Alaska, with only 20 million Russians in it.  And most of them are drunk and dying young – at least the men.  The women are marrying Chinese or Moslem men because they are not drunks."

Matt Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia agrees.  He's here in Tbilisi attending an economic conference that I'm at (along with TTP's Richard Rahn).  "Oh, yes, Jack," he told me, "it is impossible for Russia to keep Siberia from the Chinese for much longer.  That's why the Sakha people of Yakutia want to be an independent country like Mongolia, and not a part of Russia, before China can take it over."

We discussed this over a glass (okay, more than one) of a wonderful Georgian red while overlooking this beautiful city, with huge medieval castles on the hills above and the tree-lined Kura river flowing through it.  Georgia is one of the world's oldest nations (it was known as Colchis – the Land of the Golden Fleece – to the ancient Greeks), and one of the first to embrace Christianity, renamed after St. George (fl. 400 AD).

Through centuries of fighting off foreign invaders – Romans, Persians, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, the hordes of Tamerlane, Safarid Persians, Ottoman Turks, and finally the Russians who annexed Georgia in 1801 – they never surrendered their Christian faith or their desire for freedom.

They've been struggling against Russian imperialism for over 200 years.  In the face of the latest Russian effort to destroy them, they remain confident.  "Georgia is many, many centuries older than Russia, and will be here for centuries after Russia is gone," Paata Sheshelidze informed me.

Paata is head of the New Economic School of Georgia, and a key leader of Georgia's young intellectual elite.  He tells me, "Behind all the Russian bluster and bullying, they are very frustrated that their invasion did not cause our collapse or surrender to them.  That's because Russians never learn anything from history."

"Russia opened a Pandora's Box by invading us," he continued.  "By ‘liberating' South Ossetia, it has encouraged the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, and other places to liberate themselves from Moscow.  Georgia will not disintegrate.  But Russia will, and soon."

I'll drink a glass of Georgian Khakaveti wine to that.