The Shnyakin Doctrine - a concept put forward by an elderly senator from Nizhny Novgorod Oblast who trained at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, first voiced in October 2013 and anticipating a supposed "mass resettlement of able-bodied Ukrainians" from Ukraine. According to the senator's thinking, this wave of resettlers was to be taken in by New Moscow.

Original source text

« By my forecast, within the next 2-3 years a large outflow of highly skilled personnel will begin from Ukraine. Our task is to intercept them before the West does, so they don't go there. After all, Ukrainians have nothing to trade but their own labor - God willing they'll have enough salo for themselves. So we must prepare to take them in, must create the conditions for them. And income-generating housing here is a good option.
»


Conspiratorial interpretation

It is not hard to notice that the Nizhny Novgorod senator anticipated the appearance of able-bodied Ukrainian refugees well before the strange refusal of pro-Russian president Yanukovych to join the Customs Union, followed by his no less strange consent and subsequent flight.

This gave rise to a theory according to which high-ranking security officials, involved in the appropriation of part of the oil revenues along the "power vertical," decided to repeat their "success in Chechnya" (

  1. weak position of the Russian economy on the markets -
  2. the appearance of "anti-Russian" "radicals" in an unstable region -
  3. a "triumphant" military operation disposing of nationalist "imperialists" -
  4. Western protests against "excessive use of force" -
  5. an inflow of investment.

)

At the new turn of this same strategy, according to the thinking of the conspiracy theorists, it was supposed to lead either to the full unification ("reunification") of Ukraine with Russia (had Ukrainian society more or less accepted the idea of the "Russian world"), or to a de facto protectorate of Moscow over Ukraine, with a "triumphant" signing in Kyiv of an agreement on "the return of Crimea to Russia in gratitude for liberation from fascism."

The senator's error

The idea that Ukrainians - or more precisely, mass Ukrainian labor migrants - would inevitably orient themselves toward Moscow (while the West would grumble and fall silent, everyone inside the Russian Federation would perceive this strange strategy as "the road to success" or be relegated to the category of traitors, and the inhabitants of the post-Soviet space would "become convinced of the greatness of the Russian state"), betrays the weaknesses of the centralized oil elite, whose strategies bring to mind a provincial elite street-racer who behaves on the road as if the other traffic participants were, by comparison, bowling pins that ought to freeze in place while the center of the universe performs its "brilliant" maneuvers. Meanwhile, reality is nearly the opposite. The maneuvers of participants not resource-based keep constantly changing, while our hero remains stuck in the timelessness of his own "greatness," dictated only by a monopoly position on the domestic market and the indulgence of some part of those around him.

Of interest

Federation Council member of the Federal Assembly of Russia from Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Valery Nikolaevich Shnyakin is one of the first state and military-patriotic figures to have had anti-Russian sanctions imposed on him.

See also