Russia is rapidly losing internal cohesion, with national and anti-Moscow sentiment rising among the federation’s peoples. The Kremlin is responding nervously, clamping down on languages, culture and any form of autonomy.
According to Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Kremlin is seriously worried about the “decolonization” of Russia - a process that could see the country splinter into national republics, as the USSR once did.
Despite official declarations of “multinational unity,” a crisis is brewing from the Caucasus to Siberia. Many ethnic communities say they feel marginalized, deprived of rights and a political voice.
Some experts argue Russia is less a cohesive state than a patchwork of disparate republics held together by force and FSB repression.
Putin publicly calls Russia a “multinational state,” but in practice, Moscow weeds out expressions of national identity. Instruction in native languages has been cut to one hour a week, young people are losing ties to their ancestral cultures, and new “Peoples of Russia” holidays merely mask assimilation.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin confronted a new phenomenon: the awakening of national movements. Non-Russian regions have borne some of the heaviest losses at the front — Buryats, Dagestanis, Tatars, Yakuts — communities that critics say Moscow has long used as cannon fodder. More people now believe their nations are fighting not for themselves but for someone else’s imperial ambitions.
Researchers say the regime fears that a spark could be lit by any local conflict, and is crushing national movements accordingly. In spring 2024, prosecutors even banned a “nonexistent anti-Russian separatist movement,” they say, simply to create a legal pretext for repression.
With each passing year, Russia looks less like a federation and more like a tightly centralized dictatorship, where talk of independence is treated as a crime. Scholars and rights advocates say authorities are pursuing a deliberate policy of “linguistic suicide” for smaller peoples, turning them into decorative symbols in the shop window of a “multinational Russia.”
Officials believe non-Russian languages should be squeezed out of daily life. New holidays only reinforce a trend of turning minorities into exhibits.
The most prominent example is Chechnya. In the early 1990s, it twice tried to leave Russia. Moscow responded with two bloody wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and leveled Grozny. Today, the region is formally under Kremlin control but effectively lives by its own rules.
