The map of post-Putin Russia might undergo other changes. The country inherited a complicated federal structure from the Soviet Union: It contains 83 republics, regions and administrative districts — or 85, according to Russian law, including annexed Crimea, which alone counts for two — all of them with different formal rights relative to the government in Moscow. Since Mr. Putin took power in 1999, members of the Russian Federation have lost most of their autonomy: They can no longer elect their governors, and they control only a tiny portion of the taxes collected on their territories. But even as Moscow has exerted ever-greater control, the centrifugal pull on the regions has increased.
Parts of the Far East have forged stronger economic ties with China and South Korea, and Moscow has had to expend both brutal force and extravagant investment to keep Chechnya and other republics of the North Caucasus in line. Participants in October’s Free Russia Forum generally took it as a given that in the event of regime change, Moscow’s relationship with the other 82 regions will have to be renegotiated — and that the chances of those negotiations being peaceful, and of Russia retaining its current borders, were slim. [...]
The transition will require a wide-ranging public discussion. But what will be the language of a post-Putin Russia? That is, where will the Russian words for a new country be found? Key concepts have been distorted by misuse and discredited by decades of Soviet and then Putin-era propaganda. “Democrat” has become an insult; “freedom of speech” is invoked to legitimize hate speech even while people are being jailed for expressing their political views. The corruption of language reflects a general lack of trust in democratic mechanisms and widespread dismissal of democratic values.
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