The country isn't doomed to repeat the past.
 | By Tim Schneider Staff Editor, Opinion |
What would Russia without Vladimir Putin look like? |
This simple question might seem like putting the cart before the horse. The war in Ukraine, after all, is far from over. In fact, in the past week it has shown signs — in the landing of missiles in Poland and the shelling of the nuclear power station in Zaporizhzhia — of dangerous escalation. A global conflagration remains horribly possible. Putin, for his part, seems to be secure. Protests have been quashed, and elite distemper, for now, appears to be under control. |
And yet the question remains: If Putin were to leave office, what would — or could — Russia become? Joy Neumeyer, a historian of Central and Eastern Europe whose guest essay we published this week, has a possible answer. It emerges from a three-day gathering of Russian opposition figures in Warsaw early in November. Under the slightly grand title of the First Congress of People's Deputies of Russia, participants set out a group of proposals for refashioning the country. |
Neumeyer, who reported from the congress, takes us through the ideas, which strike at the structure of Russia today. Taken together, they chart a path to a demilitarized, decriminalized, decentralized country — an admirable effort, as Neumeyer puts it, to "dismantle and transform the structures" of Putin's rule. |
The congress was not without its problems. There was some disagreement over how things were run, and major opposition figures — such as Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and associates of Aleksei Navalny, who remains in prison — didn't attend. Yet that doesn't take away from the energy and effort to sketch out, in impressive detail, an alternative Russia. |
"Russia is no more doomed to repeat the past than any other country," Neumeyer writes. "The time to reimagine its future is now." |
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