It's not the first time that I encounter this question actively asked by various people in the West on the public discussion platforms as well as in usual discussions related to Russia: "Is Russia likely to disintegrate like the Soviet Union?"
It seems more than a few people want an answer to the question of stability of Russia in the 21st century, asking if disintegration of Russia is possible.
The short answer is emphatically no*.
Not only is such disintegration unlikely, but it’s practically impossible, and to put it into relative perspective, the likelihood of such a development - disintegration of Russia - is probably orders of magnitude lower than disintegration of the EU, the UK and even the US (which is by no means to say that the disintegration of the US is likely in absolute terms).
Yet this is not a senseless question, though, despite the fact that very often such kind of questions are asked under the influence of the geo-political & ideological confrontations/wars in an attempt to find some reasonable hope or confirmation for an expected result, not in search of certain scientific and historic truth.
Sometimes, I’d imagine, some people in the collective West, especially in the Anglo-West, irritated by the reality of Russia owning 1/7 of the dry land of the planet and the greatest chunk of Eurasia with all its infinite resources, try to extrapolate the disintegration of the USSR to the future and self-placatingly imagine that the collapse of the Soviet Union was just a point in the general trajectory that’s making Russia weaker and weaker, and this chunk of Eurasia more and more liable to the ownership by the West.
Yet other people ask this people in a very straightforward quest for historical truth and understanding. In short, the answer is Russia is as stable as stable can be, and the question about the stability of Belgium, the UK, even Spain and Italy, let alone the EU as a supranational block, could be reasonably asked much ahead of Russia in terms of topicality.
Why is Russia pretty darn stable? Well, if the Western academics in the 21st century hadn’t cowardly and "politically correctly" shrugged under the carpet studies of the phenomenon and forces of nationalism to the point of nihilism and infantilized "ostrich behavior", probably this question wouldn’t have popped up at all.
1. Russia is a natural autarky - probably the brightest text book example thereof. It doesn’t mean that Russia is an actual autarky, it means that it can be actual autarky if need be: it has unlimited resources of A) WATER B) ENERGY C) FOOD (this also explains why sanctions against Russia hit Europe much more than Russia, and actually stimulates Russian economic development even in the directions that were previously unreachable for the Russian State to stimulate).
On top of that, Russia not only doesn’t have any geo-trading problems, but have the best “match made in heaven” with countries like China and India, who are stumbling upon each other in their race to woo Russia for its resources/food and give Russia the fruits of their own manufacturing and technology.
This was also true of the USSR, but USSR collapsed not because of this condition, but for the other two below.
2. Russia is by and large ethnically cohesive country it is a Nation-State, with one Nation.
Yes, this is true that within the territory of Russia there are many various nationalities/ethnic communities, and that the streams of immigration from Central Asia into Russia are relatively high. However, by and large, this 1/7th of the planet's dry land is dominated by far mostly by Russian ethnical identity, Russian language and mainstream Russian culture.
Not only that, most of the minority ethnic groups/territories that exist in Russia, have been living within Russia for a very long time, and most of them and ethnic Russians have accumulated centuries of experience of living together, and a “semi-assimilation” or “quasi-assimilation" (including linguistic assimilation) has taken place pretty successfully in the majority of cases.
To put it short, Russia knows these ethnic groups and these ethnic groups know Russia and co-own Russia, and they have had centuries of experience of learning to live with each other and culturally intertwine with each other and include each other partially in the body of their respective cultural identities. Actually there’s more than meets the eye for the West to learn from Russia in terms of multiethnicity and successful co-existence of different religious and ethnic groups.
Yes, Russia has inside its body nationalities different from that of Russians, but NOT NATIONS, and there is a big difference between these two. By and large, Russia is culturally cohesive and monolithic enough (not totally, but sufficiently), so is its national identity.
This WAS NOT the case in the USSR. USSR was a classic EMPIRE, that included different nations of their own, with their history and with their separate histories and identities vastly different from the national identity of Russia proper. It’s important to remember that the USSR has cracked up and fell apart mostly along the national borders and fault lines within the USSR itself (formally, the final nail into the coffin of the USSR was driven by the split of Ukraine, that is definitely a different nation).
Our Western narratives mostly don’t pay to much attention to this fact - that USSR collapsed along the geographical fault lines between different nations within its territory - as if it had been just an accidental corollary and hadn't had anything to do with the cause of the USSR instability. But in fact it had everything to do with the critical instability of USSR, just like it had everything to do with the collapse of so many other empires before, including, not least, the Roman Empire.
3. Russia is a market economy, it is capitalism and in many ways it’s more of capitalism than the US (for those who want to compare, check Russian taxes, including taxes on gains the property market, income taxes, their business regulations and the proportion of the State budget expenses to the total volume of the Russian economy - GDP - it’s pretty self-explanatory, nowadays the US in many ways is much more “socialistic” than Russia). This is a BIG difference from the USSR, because apart from the previous item, this was another fundamental cause that made possible the collapse of the USSR - the total absence of market economy. That’s far from being the case in the modern Russia. On top of that it’s worthy of note that not only is Russia a market economy, but it’s pretty much integrated in the system of market type of relations globally with other regions, blocks and countries. This has nothing to do with sanctions (that, as I mentioned, create the greatest damage to their authors, but it’s about Russia knowing how to use and using the market relations with other economies.
4. The external military force. Russia is more than well protected by its nuclear shield and conventional weapons against any forces that would have liked to lay claim to this huge chunk of the planet and Eurasia if Russia hadn’t taken care of protecting itself. And there is reasonable confidence that there wouldn't be any lack of such forces and attempts had Russia not had its military shield.
To recap, now Russia ain’t going anywhere, whether we like it or not in the West, and seeing as Russia is not a neighbor of the US, but it is the neighbor of Europe, the latter should learn how to live with and build sustainable and secure relationship with Russia. It's not Washington that should do it for Europe. This is especially so taking into account, that, unlike Russia, Europe is not a “natural autarky” in the sense that it has long lacked natural mineral and energy resources to feed its economy, and, on the other hand, Russia has all of these in unlimited plenty.
*All the expressed statements, conclusions represent the views of the author, except, of course, those statements that reflect what is common knowledge at this point of time.
See also:
The US Doesn't Want a Hot War With China, It Wants Cold War II: the US provokes wars between China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine for same reason https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-us-doesnt-want-hot-war-with-china.html
THE GOAL OF RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR FOR THE US: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE! https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/05/goal-of-russian-ukrainian-war-for-us-it.html
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