When Will Russia Collapse?
Russia is dying.
And it’s not a catchphrase, but a fact.
States seem eternal, but they are not. Sure, the land on which they are located will still be there, but that’s all. The peoples inhabiting the land, the borders of the countries, and more importantly — the forms of government change.
Breakaway regions of Kievan Rus, vassal lands of the Golden Horde, the Muscovy principality, the Russian Tsardom, the Russian Empire, the Russian Republic, the USSR and the Russian Federation were all fundamentally different states.
A change in the government system almost always entails a change in elites, rights, laws, property distribution, image of the future, governance structures, political alliances — and at times, the physical destruction of the population, at least partially.
Now, we can take the date of adoption of the state’s constitution as a marker of “the birth of a state”: a state’s constitution is its genetic code, which (more or less) determines everything else.
The world’s oldest state (by the date it’s current Constitution was adopted) is the USA — its Declaration of Independence is 237 years old.
The United States Constitution was written in 1787 and became effective in 1789. It was based on 1780 Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, drafted by John Adams.
- The Russian Empire existed for 196 years.
- The USSR lasted 69 years.
- The Russian Federation is only 32 years old (like the rest of the post-Soviet states — including Ukraine).
But the Russian Federation is already dying.
What is a state, really?
States are systems.
Any system has several key characteristics that show what stage of the life cycle the system is in.
The first characteristic is structural complexity, which is determined by the number of elements of the system and the connections between them.
The structural complexity of a state is determined by the size of the population and the development of subsystems — science, education, health care, industries, services, the finance sector, non-governmental organizations, political movements, law enforcement, and so on.
In a developing state, new structures are constantly emerging: they interact with each other, create new chains of internal and external connections — and this allows the state to implement a greater number of functions.
- Primitive states had simple functions: protect their territory and collect taxes.
- Modern states provide citizens’ security and well-being, protect their rights and freedoms, ensure compliance with laws, give citizens social security — and much more.
Degrading states as systems become smaller and simpler: existing substructures disappear, connections between the remaining elements are getting destroyed.
In Russia, both the size of the population and its quality are quickly declining: the gender and age structure are deteriorating; the most economically active part of the population is fleeing the country — and is being partially replaced by migrants from less developed countries.
Many substructures of the state (political parties and citizens’ movements, public associations, NGOs, the judicial system, etc.) in Russia are diminished and replaced by dummies that do not fulfill their functions.
Russia’s economy as a whole is shrinking.
High-tech industries — aerospace, shipbuilding, mechanical engineering, microelectronics — had been hit especially hard.
Health care, science and education (especially professional education) are also shrinking.
Since the year 2000 when Vladimir Putin became the president, almost 50% of existing hospitals, 40% of schools, and 30% of kindergartens had been closed down, for the sake of “efficiency”.
Due to the war with Ukraine unleashed by Russia’s leadership, foreign policy ties and alliances created over centuries had been almost completely destroyed.
Russia’s “allies and partners” of today are mostly the outcasts — the likes of North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan. (China is Russia’s master, not a partner or ally by any means. China still has the eyes on Vladivostok and other China’s lands occupied by Russia since mid-1800s).
Russia’s trade, scientific and financial ties with the most developed countries of the world had been severed.
Domestic policy had regressed to the level of feudalism, and the management system is represented either by gerontocrats or appointees selected for obedience rather than talent, which makes it extremely ineffective.
There is no positive image of the future: Western images of the future had been abandoned; communist ones had discredited themselves,; and the idea of “staples” such as Orthodoxy and serfdom (in the 21st century) are genuinely embraced by very few.
In general, by all indications, the structural complexity of Russia as a state is rapidly declining.
Let's have a look at the second characteristic of the system: the efficiency of the use of the state’s resources.
A developing system creates more resources and spends more of the resources on consumption, maintenance, and development.
States obtain resources through the extraction of minerals, agriculture, industrial production, know-how innovative industries, transportation, and tourism.
In Russia, things were satisfactory with the extraction of minerals — but not so good with everything else.
Russia’s GDP (in dollar equivalent) is now at the level of 2008, so we can’t talk about sustainable growth.
Russia’s funds from the sale of mineral resources were: partially frozen in the foreign banks, partially burned in (mostly useless) “national projects”, partially stolen by the officials and “The Boss” (you know whom).
The maintenance and development of the resource industry were grossly neglected for years (“why fix what’s not broken?” logic).
Over the past 15 years, the level of depreciation of fixed assets has been steadily increasing. In 2022, Rosstat changed its methodology (I reported on that before) — and suddenly, the rosy picture of pre-2014 levels was supplied to the public. But it was a big lie.
Russia’s expenses had increased sharply due to the war in Ukraine going wrong (no “Kyiv in 3 days” parade-ready triumph whatsoever) and the ensuing sanctions. Oil and gas revenues had dropped by at least 30%.
This means that the level of degradation of Russia’s production capacities and infrastructure is now rapidly accelerating. It is already visible in the aviation industry with Russian planes breaking in the air or unable to take off every other day.
All these consequences are not due to uncontrollable circumstances (natural disasters, changes in market conditions, etc.), but rather the result of planned actions of the country’s political leadership, which created a crisis entirely of its own volition.
The behavior of the system in a crisis is its third important characteristic.
Developing systems use the crisis as an opportunity to become stronger: to increase their structural complexity and efficiency of the use of resources.
Developing countries are emerging from crises with an economy freed from the ballast, an updated legislation, new vectors of development and the skill of solving several problems at once.
Degrading states, in an attempt to solve one crisis, generate several new crises. The frequency of crises is increasing, they are are stacked on top of each other; the crises are drawing on the resources faster, threatening the system’s stability.
We are now exactly at this stage, when the decline in Russia’s leader’s ratings is attempted to be rectified up by a war and internal terror; failure at the war is attempted to be rectified by mobilization of civilian reservists and release of violent offenders from prisons, and the loss of markets is attempted to be resolved by becoming a raw resources appendage to China.
But that’s not all.
Having exhausted the reserve of stability, states reduce their complexity, returning to archaic forms of social organization and reducing the size of the population.
A state can be destroyed by a shock, when a large-scale crisis develops faster than the state can adapt to, a systemic collapse, when several crises merge into one continuous chain, and due to absorption by another state.
The absorption of Russia by force with the loss of sovereignty is rather unlikely (due to the possession of a nuclear arsenal), but a major military defeat could provoke a crisis, as has already happened in the case of Prigozhin’s mutiny.
The lack of visible success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive reduced the likelihood of such a development of events — but if the West (accidentally or intentionally) floods Ukraine with weapons, thus could possibly happen again in May 2024.
Wars are unpredictable things.
System collapse caused by critical deterioration of infrastructure, degradation of industry and depletion of reserves, before the start of the war, could have occurred in Russia by 2036–2040.
Now it’s going to happen much sooner.
The weakest point of the Russian state at the moment is its management system, which depends on the capacity and health of one elderly man, failing which a large-scale crisis is inevitable.
No one becomes healthier or smarter with age, so a long-awaited obituary (or another brilliant solution) will become the most likely start of a crisis, which can lead to the collapse of the Russian state.
As you can appreciate, in conditions where all scenarios are probabilistic in nature, it is impossible to accurately predict the final date.
But it’s obvious that sooner or later one of these scenarios will inevitably come true.
That’s why Russia is now a kind of Schrödinger’s state: it seems to have been on its last legs for a while, but it still hasn’t died.
But there is no doubt: it will.
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