25A025 Imagine a Free Russia by Jim Davies, 6/25/2025

The War of Russian Independence grinds on, despite the best efforts of Team Trump to broker peace; the obstacle I did not foresee is that the heavyweights in NATO (UK, France, Germany) have governments that have given Ukraine enough hope to keep going despite crippling losses, even though Trump's America no longer does. There seems now to be no alternative but for Russian forces to conquer the whole country and instal a less irrational government in Kiev.

But suppose instead that Russia had turned anarchist; that no rulers had operated in the Kremlin since, say, 1990. It could not really have taken place, because the prerequisite is missing; namely, that everyone in the society learns that government is parasitic and needless and so declines to work for it; and in the run-up to 1990 there was no school of any kind that was teaching those truths. But bear with me; imagine that it happened anyway, perhaps by magic. How would Russians have fared, in the last 35 years?

The first big difference would have been that the vast State monopolies in the fossil fuel industries would have been unable to recover their employees until shares in each were distributed widely instead of being transferred to a small cabal of "oligarchs" who had been their previous managers. The market for those shares would have provided diverse ownership in free-market form, wealth would have increased and been much more widely enjoyed.

Simultaneously other industries like agriculture would have taken the form of firms competing in excellence, innovation and pricing. But the creaking old Communist military apparatus, and the sinister secret police, and the huge armies of useless apparatchiks, would have vanished altogether, rather than being replaced by milder versions.

Defense? - perhaps companies would have arisen (eg Prighozin's Wagner Group) to provide defense services under contract, but predominantly individual Russians would have equipped themselves with collections of small arms for their households, ready to repel anyone who attempted to re-impose forceful control. For example NATO might have doubled its membership to threaten Russia rather like the claws of a lobster (as they did in fact) but had their agents ever set boot on a Russians' property they would have died from lead poisoning.

What, then, of neighboring Ukraine? - in five of its provinces most folk were ethnically Russian and did not wish to be ruled from Kiev, so (as actually happened) they would have seceded. The UkeGov would have refused to accept that and tried to bomb them into submission (as in fact it did.) At that point, some time in the 2000s, some of them would have pulled up sticks and moved North, to take part in the already free Russian society. Others would have enlarged that anarchist society by behaving within Crimea, Luhansk etc in the same way; agents of the Uke régime would have been shot had they persisted in trying to keep control.

It doesn't seem to me likely that by 2022 the Ukrainian government would still be trying to suppress them; that porcupine defense would have shown how futile was the attempt. In any case there would have been no call for any Russian to start a "Special Military Operation" against it, nor any centrally directed army to wage one; so the present war would never have begun. Some NATO governments would perhaps contemplate invading, but would count the formidable cost of trying to overcome that porcupine defense and instead let ordinary trade exchanges acquire such Russian resources as were desired, for agreed prices. So quite probably, Nord Stream pipes would be busy delivering low-priced oil and gas to buyers in Germany, in exchange for good money; which is to say, gold.

Russians are highly talented and cultured people and, liberated at last from centuries of tight government control, would have developed a rich free-market society rapidly during these 35 years. By now they would be prospering more that any other society, in Europe or elsewhere, and setting a fine example for others to follow.