The exiled activists who dream of dismantling the Russian empire

There is a dream called the Republic of Ingermanlandia. This republic’s values will be European, its borders will be open and it will prosper like its neighbour Estonia on the back of a booming digital economy. For the moment Ingermanlandia is better known as Russia’s Leningrad Region, and its capital as St Petersburg. But soon, promises Maxim Kuzakhmetov, a leader of the Ingria Without Borders independence movement, Russia will suffer ‘catastrophic defeat in Ukraine and will collapse like the USSR, or like all the empires who lost the first world war’ and disintegrate into its constituent regions.

This week in London and Paris, exiled activists from more than 40 regions of Russia will gather for the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. They will include independence campaigners from the North Caucasus, from Turkic republics of the Middle Volga, the descendants of Finnic peoples in the Russian far north and ethnically Asian Buddhists from southern Siberia and the Urals. The activists have a wide variety of backgrounds, but their agenda for the meeting is clear enough: to plan for a post-imperial Russia where all their nations, as well as the various regions of central Russia itself, will be independent and free.

On one level, the idea of dismantling the Russian empire as a punishment for Putin’s imperial overreach in Ukraine carries the satisfying smack of karmic justice. Imperial hubris will be followed by post-imperial nemesis – and the decolonising of the hearts and minds of millions of Russian citizens. ‘The Russian empire, the Soviet empire, Putin’s empire – all have been terribly evil and must be dismembered so that they can’t attack anyone any more,’ says Kuzakhmetov, a 54-year-old native of St Petersburg who worked for the liberal Echo Moskvy radio station before he fled Russia with his family in March last year.