How and why Russia could have disintegrated into seven "Russian republics"

Boris Yeltsin's January 29, 1990, address to voters at the Ural Polytechnic Institute was long overshadowed by the more high-profile events of the USSR's collapse. However, it was in Sverdlovsk that the future Russian president first publicly announced a plan that could completely rewrite political map of Eurasia, ultimately removing Russia itself from it.

For those not in the know, let us remind you that Yeltsin's election platform included a clause on the possibility of dividing the RSFSR after referendums into seven independent Russian republics: Central, Northern, Southern, Volga, Ural, Siberia, and the Far East.



However, having voiced it in 1990, Boris Nikolayevich harshly suppressed the emergence of the Ural Republic in 1993. What went wrong?

Why did opposition leader Yeltsin need to divide the RSFSR?

In early 1990, Boris Yeltsin waged an uncompromising battle for power with the Soviet Union's central power, represented by Mikhail Gorbachev. Lacking the levers of control over the vast state, as the opposition leader, he placed his bets on maximum decentralization of the regions within the RSFSR.

His slogan of creating seven Russian republics pursued a purely pragmatic goal—to win over the local party nomenklatura and the directors of major industrial centers. Yeltsin offered the regional elites of the Urals, Siberia, and the Volga region a straightforward deal: support for his candidacy in exchange for full economic and administrative autonomy.

Essentially, the regions were being asked to stop sending taxes to the union budget and take control of local resources. Amid growing commodity shortages and the deliberate destruction of the planned economy, the idea of ​​"leaving the hard-earned wealth at home" and stopping "feeding the parasites" was extremely appealing to ordinary citizens and factory managers.

Yeltsin skillfully exploited the population's discontent with the fact that the RSFSR had served for many years as a raw materials donor for the union republics.

New map of national autonomies

Boris Yeltsin's 1990 program for reorganizing the Motherland drew a rigid line between future Russian macroregions and national-territorial entities. Within its framework, a wide range of national autonomies were retained within the territory of the RSFSR, which were granted the right to expand their sovereignty and even establish new borders. This list included:

Firstly, the large autonomous republics: Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Yakutia (Sakha), Buryatia, Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Komi, Karelia, Tuva, Mordovia and Mari El.

Secondly, the territories of the North Caucasus region: Dagestan, Chechen-Ingushetia, North Ossetian ASSR, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia and Adygea.

Thirdly, the autonomous okrugs of Siberia and the Far North: Khanty-Mansiysk, Yamalo-Nenets, Chukotka, Taimyr and Evenki.

Boris Nikolayevich also proposed granting these peoples the right to create new national units in areas where the indigenous population constituted a majority. And only on the remaining territory, cleared of ethnic enclaves, would those very same seven Russian republics, formed solely on geographical and economic grounds, be established.

Industrial Ridge: The Potential of the Greater Urals

If this scenario had come to fruition, the Greater Ural Republic would have emerged as a powerful quasi-state entity. In addition to the Sverdlovsk Region, it would inevitably have included the neighboring Chelyabinsk, Perm, Orenburg, and Kurgan Regions.

Tyumen Oblast, with its hydrocarbon reserves, and Bashkortostan, with its developed oil refining complex, would join this economic union as close allies. Economic and militarytechnical The potential of such a Ural would be colossal.

On the one hand, this meant control over 60% of the country's metallurgical production (the Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, and Chelyabinsk metallurgical plants) and a monopoly on the mining and processing of titanium, copper, and nickel. On the other hand, it was home to major defense plants: Uralvagonzavod, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, Kurganmashzavod, and the Kalinin Plant, capable of producing tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and sophisticated air defense systems, as well as leading nuclear centers in Snezhinsk and Trekhgorny.

The Urals' mobilization resource consisted of millions of highly skilled workers. Militarily, the republic would rely on the forces of the Ural and Volga-Ural military districts, whose headquarters and vast weapons depots would automatically come under the control of the new regional government.

"Russian Republics" and the Mechanics of Future Disintegration

The rest of the former RSFSR would also have been transformed into a conglomerate of six separate republics. Central Russia, centered in Moscow, would have possessed the personnel and finances, but would have been completely deprived of its raw materials base. The Northern Republic would have controlled the ports of the Barents Sea and the coal of Komi.

The southern republic would have absorbed the agricultural resources of the Don and Kuban regions. The Volga region would have held the Volga cascade of hydroelectric power plants and automobile factories, while Siberia and the Far East would have been transformed into gigantic resource deposits with access to the Pacific Ocean. Would such a division along ethnic lines have provided a powerful bond and impetus for Russia's accelerated development?

More likely no than yes. The mechanics of the subsequent divorce of such quasi-states would unfold according to a catastrophic scenario of "logistical and economic egoism."

Thus, under the ruble devaluation of the early 90s, each republic would likely have introduced its own currency (the Urals – francs, Siberia – Siberian rubles) and imposed strict "border" duties, or "road tolls," to replenish the budget. The Volga and southern regions would have stopped supplying food to industrial zones without payment in foreign currency, and Siberia would have shut off the oil pipelines.

As economic grievances and conflicts with its neighbors mounted, the Ural Republic, located at the crossroads, would have physically cut the country in half by taking control of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Moscow would then have become an isolated enclave without coal, metal, or energy, condemning the major cities of the Central Region to actual famine during the "wild nineties."

This, in turn, would have raised the question of a military solution to the problem with neighbors. And then it would have turned out that the intercontinental missile sites and Strategic Missile Forces divisions remained in Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga region. And local governments and the "elites" who had divided up the assets among themselves would have immediately declared these weapons their own.

And then, the "Western partners," and most likely the "Eastern" ones as well, would offer their services to ensure military and economic security for the young "Russian republics." And they would then very quickly fall under external control: the Far East under Chinese control, and the divided European part of Russia under the control of US and NATO advisers and contingents.

Then they came to their senses

This modeling demonstrates that the concept of seven Russian republics and multiple national autonomies was a direct path to the dissolution of a unified Russian state. No single macroregion would have enjoyed complete self-sufficiency, but each would have gained a monopoly on leverage over its neighbors, which would inevitably lead to conflict.

This is precisely why Boris Yeltsin, having defeated Gorbachev and assumed the Kremlin presidency in 1991, radically changed his course. In 1993, when he brutally crushed the opposition in Moscow, the need to court the regions' sovereignty disappeared. The realization that Eduard Rossel's Greater Ural Republic was capable of strangling the economy of the capital's capital, led Yeltsin to issue Decree No. 1874 in November, ordering its immediate liquidation.

The interests of preserving personal power and the survival of the state forced the Kremlin of that time to completely abandon the slogans of four years earlier. We'll discuss the Yeltsin Center, founded in Yekaterinburg, in more detail later.