Suppose young democrats come to power in the RF—they don’t want it to be “like Somalia,” but in principle, they are curious about various forms of organizing a free country. Is it possible to establish an experimental minarchist state in one of the protectorates—for example, South Ossetia (assuming some agreement is reached with Georgia—after all, we are now like Sweden, and she doesn’t fight over Aland, and neither will you)—? We appoint Misha/Yarik/you as the head, abolish taxes, declare freedom of business/substances/weapons/ideas, and welcome visiting global businessmen with open arms; we write the NAP and freedom into the constitution. From the state, we leave only a minimal police force for the first period (protection against “the air of freedom tickled me” and “Somalia”), social medicine, and a business entity in a competitive market (it is free to conduct business however it likes, but is obliged to spend profits on charity, and essentially on social welfare). Then, as success grows, we abolish the rudimenting state bodies, moving toward full ancap. Meanwhile, Ancapistan remains a protectorate for now, so the USA won’t attack it because of a nest of hackers and drug dealers there, and the PRB itself will protect itself from them in a market-based way—by paying for them to refrain from working in our market.
Katsist
Two related questions have been successfully combined, and if for the previous question—about ancap in an enclave against the backdrop of collapsed Putinism—I answered with a fairy tale, then here I am forced to state clearly: no, it is impossible.
What is the difference between the Sakhalin scenario and the one you proposed? The difference is that your scenario assumes that the RF retains the ability to influence its current protectorates after the end of Putin. But at what price can the rise to power of these very young democrats be achieved without the collapse of the RF? A simple change of government to people with pleasant faces is not enough. These young democrats would have to launch a process of denazification and demilitarization of Russia, publicly repent for all the sins of Putinism, pay reparations to at least Georgia and Ukraine, hand over a mass of criminals to them and international bodies for trial, withdraw troops from all annexed territories, from foreign military bases, and from those very protectorates.
There is some chance that they might simultaneously launch serious reforms within the RF itself: make the High Court in London the supreme judicial authority in the RF, and fine their own judges for every instance where their verdict is overturned in this appellate instance; return the lion’s share of taxes to the regions and even slightly reduce the overall tax burden; purge the criminal and administrative codes of a bunch of stupid Putinist articles; privatize a huge number of Putinist state corporations once again; completely abandon conscription, the navy, 80% of nuclear warheads; dissolve the FSB and Rosgvardia; radically rewrite the regulations of the antimonopoly service, and so on and so forth. But all of this would concern Russia directly. Meanwhile, the protectorates would have to somehow negotiate their return to their former metropoles, because without the help of the RF they would be unable to avoid this fate, and the RF would state something like “yes, yes, guys, of course, take it, it’s yours; sorry we are returning it in such a terrible state, here is some compensation.”
On the other hand, after the neutralization of the RF as an exporter of authoritarianism, a return to the trajectory from which it veered under Ivanishvili is quite likely in Georgia; and if so, the aforementioned South Ossetia does indeed have a chance for all these reforms, but not as a Russian protectorate, but as a Georgian one. But here I don’t even need to fantasize much; this is roughly the same course the region followed before 2008.
