Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it.
The empire is one continuous thing
We are misled by the maps and the changing flags. We speak of the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, then the Russian Federation as three different countries that happened to occupy roughly the same ground. But the deep structure never changed. What formed on the territory of northern Eurasia, beginning with the Grand Duchy of Moscow, was a particular system of power: absolute and undivided authority at the center, a population with no real agency or subjectivity, and a built-in drive toward expansion. That is the inheritance — part Horde, part a specifically Russian reading of Orthodoxy, part raw imperial appetite — and it has survived every change of name and ideology. The tsars, the Politburo, the current Kremlin: different costumes on the same body.
This is why I insist that the true metropolis of this empire is not Moscow but the Kremlin — meaning the apparatus of central power itself. Moscow the city is not the colonizer; in its own way it is as subjugated as any province, simply held closer to the center and rewarded with calm. When people ask whether the capital should be moved, whether the country’s “turn to Asia” is a Moscow problem that St. Petersburg might have avoided, I think they are debating the furniture while the house burns. The question of where the capital sits was a live one thirty years ago, when futures were still open. Now the relevant fact is that this particular historical project is reaching its end, and no rearrangement of its internal map will change that.
Collapse you cannot see yet
The standard objection is that there is nothing to collapse — that, unlike the Baltics, Russia today has no separatist movements, no centrifugal forces, no regions clamoring to leave. I think this confuses the absence of open protest with the absence of pressure. Let me offer an image from a job I once held, breaking apart large blocks of granite and other stone with a sledgehammer. Some pieces split on the first blow. Others absorb dozens, even hundreds of strikes with no visible effect — and then, on some indistinguishable hit, the whole mass falls apart. What was happening in between? With each blow, fractures were forming inside the stone, most of them too fine to see. The structure was failing long before it broke.
That is what I believe is happening now. The fractures are real but largely invisible, because the penalties for voicing them — prison terms for “calls to violate territorial integrity” — keep them underground, smoldering like a peat fire beneath the surface. To say there are no centrifugal forces is to mistake suppression for non-existence. Remember that the Soviet Union, too, had almost no open separatism outside the Baltic republics. No one in the leadership of Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan or even Ukraine was demanding to leave; the competition was over status and resources, not exits. And yet the Union dissolved with astonishing speed once the coercive grip loosened. It did not take a war or a foreign army. It took the gutting of one article of the constitution — the clause guaranteeing the Communist Party’s monopoly. Loosen the binding agent and the whole thing unbinds. Russia had its own foretaste of this in the early 1990s: a “parade of sovereignties,” a Tatarstan referendum in which an overwhelming majority — ethnic Russians included — voted for effective independence, a Urals Republic that went so far as to design its own currency, regions whose local laws claimed precedence over federal ones. Those forces were not abolished. They were crushed. And crushed forces are not gone; they are waiting.
The illusory threat of a reborn empire
A second objection comes from those who fear the cure more than the disease: if Russia fragments, will the pieces not simply reassemble into a new and angrier empire? I find this fear largely groundless. When a center loses its gravitational hold, its fragments do not drift back toward the void it left; they drift toward whatever real gravity is nearest. A western successor entity would feel the pull of Europe. The Far East would orient toward China or Japan; the south toward Turkey and the Turkic world. Re-merging into a revived Moscow-led empire is the least likely of all the directions on offer, precisely because the thing that once forced them together — central coercion — would be the thing that had failed. We were told the same alarmist story when the Baltics left: you will starve, no one will buy your goods, you cannot survive outside the Union. They left with what they had, and some built democracies and some built autocracies, and none of them came crawling back. The myth that the center feeds and holds everyone together is exactly that — a myth that serves the center.
Why the Russian core must collapse too
Here, though, I have to make the argument that unsettles even people who agree with everything so far. It is not enough for the colonized peripheries to break away while the ethnic Russian core remains intact. If Tatarstan, Chechnya, Yakutia and the rest secede but a “Muscovy” survives whole, nothing essential will have changed. The imperial code lives in the core, not in the colonies. Preserve the core and you preserve the absolutism, the chauvinism, the expansionist reflex — all of it. The dragon will have shrunk, but it will still be a dragon, and dragons grow back.
We have already run this experiment once. When the Soviet Union fell, the imperial syndrome did not evaporate. It was spread, in different proportions, across all the republics — and then it concentrated, distilled itself, in the surviving Russian core, where over the following decades it grew more aggressive, not less. Post-Soviet Russia did not become gentler as it lost territory; it became the angriest fragment of all. There is every reason to expect a preserved residual Russia to repeat this — to grow more fascist and revanchist as compensation for what it lost, nursing the grievance of amputation into a new mission of reconquest. That is why the genuine cure requires the collapse to run through the Russian regions themselves: a Siberian Republic, a Urals Republic, a Far Eastern Republic, a Free Ingria, a Muscovy, perhaps a Kuban confederation — successor entities in which the very precondition for empire, an undivided imperial center, no longer exists. Only when there is no brain center left to issue the imperial command does the syndrome have nowhere to live.
And I want to be clear that this is not a verdict on the people. The talk of Russians as “genetic slaves,” congenitally incapable of freedom, is itself a form of racism, indistinguishable in its structure from the doctrines it claims to oppose. A child is not born a slave or a chauvinist; a child is born, and then thrown into a set of socio-cultural conditions that shape what it becomes. Put any child — Russian, Ukrainian, French, American — into the machinery of the Stalinist state and it grows up fearful and obedient. The degradation we see is the product of centuries of a particular system, not of blood. Which is exactly why the system, and not the bloodline, is what must go. Break the structure that manufactures the imperial subject, and in the successor spaces — a Urals or a Siberian republic, even a Muscovy — ordinary, livable politics becomes possible at last. Maybe not beautiful, maybe not at first decent, but no longer a threat to the neighbors. Even if some unpleasant figure wins an election there, it will be a dragon without poison in its teeth, and the people will sort it out among themselves.
Why forced democratization is a dead end
This is also why I distrust the popular proposal that democracy must be introduced into Russia by force — installed and policed from above for as long as it takes. The first question I always ask is the one its advocates never answer: who, exactly, is to do the forcing? Picture the external power that will occupy and re-educate a nuclear state spanning northern Eurasia. It does not exist and will not be conscripted. So in practice the “forcer” turns out to be domestic — which means you must keep the very instruments of coercion that made the country what it is. You preserve a state television to hammer the right ideas into people’s heads; you keep the security service, perhaps under a new acronym; you cancel honest elections, because heaven knows whom the people might choose. This was precisely the trap that helped slam the window of opportunity shut in the 1990s — the dream of a benevolent Russian Pinochet who would impose freedom with the apparatus of unfreedom. It is a contradiction that eats itself. And the alternative everyone gestures toward — that an external army will simply impose democracy as if onto a blank slate — we have watched fail in country after country. Russia’s real trajectory is not forced reform from the top. It is disintegration from within. The right policy is not to manufacture that collapse and not to obstruct it.
The territories return when the empire ends
Finally, this frame answers the question that haunts everyone who supports Ukraine: how do the occupied lands come home? The honest answer is that pure military liberation, against a nuclear-armed empire defending what it has written into its own constitution, is brutally hard — possible, but only under conditions the West has shown no will to create. The more reliable path is the one every empire has eventually walked. Germany was shattered and split, half of it held under Soviet domination for decades — and then it reunited, not because one half reconquered the other, but because the system holding them apart collapsed. The Baltic states were annexed, deported, repressed, and they regained their independence the same way. The occupied Ukrainian territories will most likely return by this route: refuse to recognize the annexation, ensure the democratic world refuses too, and wait for the empire to do what empires do. When Russia ceases to be an empire — when the center that seized those lands no longer exists — the lands come back. There is, in the end, no other durable way.
So when people ask me to help design the beautiful Russia of the future, I decline, not out of pessimism but out of realism. I am not interested in choosing a new tsar for an empire that is ending. I am interested in the spaces that come after it — the republics where, for the first time in the long history of that absolute and undivided power, a person might be born into conditions that let them grow up free. That future does not run through a reformed Russia. It runs through the end of one.