"Having given the latter independence, Russia with a delay of 30 years did just what the other European powers had done” except somewhat more thoroughly. What took place in 1991 was "the only real decolonization in history: the metropolitan center shamefully and traitorously” left its fellow citizens to their fate rather than take them back.
Living standards in "such new countries as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan fell six to eight times, and practically all the new states adopted authoritarian (frequently even hereditary) forms of rule” which as international experience shows can be displaced only by means of civil wars or "bloody internal conflicts.”
Consequently, Russians "should not regret the loss of the dependent territories,” which can only stand on their own by stressing just how different they are from the former metropolitan center. But there are three simple conclusions that Moscow should draw from this process, Inozemtsev continues.
First, it is "senseless” for Russia to try to prevent the continuing "archaization” of the Central Asian states. Second, it is "unproductive” to try to find some kind of basis for a new union with them. And third, it is "immoral” for Moscow to continue to restrict the return to Russia of the Russian speakers in these countries.
But at the same time, the commentator continues, Russia needs to focus on "the real Russian colony” – Siberia. Siberia currently provides more than 70 percent of Russia’s exports and more than 50 percent of the money for the federal budget, a unique situation in which a colony is so much more economically significant than the metropolitan center.
Moscow must revise its policy toward that region and give it a greater voice in running the country and in devising its foreign policy "if [the center] does not want in the case of a possible weakening of the center [to see] a repetition in the future of events which took plae in North America in the 1770s or in South America in the 1820s.”
For Russia, even more than for Britain or Spain, "the loss of that colony would be incomparably more dangerous than the loss of the dependent territories,” Inozemtsev concludes, and says that Russians need to recognize this and respond accordingly "as quickly as possible” lest it come to pass.