Internal Control over an Empire’s Population and Resources

Internal Control over an Empire’s Population and Resources.

Moscow’s inherited empire is so large that population groups in one region may know little about conditions elsewhere until violence brings those realities into view. An authoritarian empire can control both the quantity and the quality of information far more effectively than a liberal democracy. In the present case, the Kremlin possesses what may be one of the most sophisticated systems of psychological information warfare ever developed, using it both to control information within the federation and to shape or distort perceptions beyond it. This system is central to the Kremlin’s ability to maintain control over population groups and the resources on which the federation depends. The late American senator John McCain famously quipped that the federation is a “gas station masquerading as a state,” while others have described it as an empire masquerading as a federation.

Since the creation of Soviet Russia in 1917, there has been a persistent “tension between empire and national” that the project of Homo sovieticus did little to resolve. The resource map in Figure 13 illustrates how the natural resources that sustain the federation’s extractive economy are distributed, with most located in the indigenous homelands of the captive republics. The population map in Figure 12 shows the distribution of the federation’s population and highlights Moscow’s challenge in maintaining control across fourteen time zones. Despite its vast territory, the federation is not densely populated. With approximately 145 million inhabitants, it ranks only ninth by population among states, behind Bangladesh, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, the United States, China, and India.

The population of the Russian Federation is heavily concentrated in and around the western Federal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the southwest, the densely populated republics of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay Cherkessia, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, and Chechnya border the independent states of Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, all former Soviet republics. In the north, Karelia is less densely populated.

The Republics of Mordovia, Mari El, Chuvashia, Udmurtia, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan are as densely populated as the oblasts south of Moscow. Bashkortostan in the south and Komi in the north sit at the edge of the Siberian frontier and the beginning of the Asian continent. Nearly all the Siberian republics, krais, okrugs, and oblasts were, and remain, the homelands of hundreds of indigenous peoples who have so far survived the homogenising efforts of the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the current federation-empire.

Moscow’s continuing attempts to erase the ethnic identities of the peoples under its control extend the Soviet project of creating a universal “Soviet person” stripped of language, phenotype, and cultural expression. In place of Soviet personhood, Moscow now promotes “Russian personhood” as an ideological instrument of control over its 145 million inhabitants distributed across 80 federal subjects. As discussed in previous report,

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this process of homogenisation is reinforced through the generational concentration of ethnic Russians in positions of economic, political, security, and administrative power, alongside the penalisation of communities that resist cultural assimilation. The methods, practices, and ideology by which the Russian Federation controls its population are central to assessing the survivability of different population groups, the returnability of dissenters, and the likelihood of severe violence in the near future. The core research question—how fragile Moscow’s control over its population groups really is—helps reveal the level of coercive effort the regime must devote to population control in order to remain in power.