[WoofDog123]

i don’t think anyone is worried in the least about the potential fallout (pun intended) a decade or two down the road from successfully crushing russia now. I can only imagine attitudes were equally short-sighted in 1918.

if the powers that be have gone to such effort to brainwash their populations into canceling tschaikovsky etc., they aren’t going to go soft on a war guilt clause.

and no one sees a problem. it worked fine before.....

[Cronos]

i don’t think anyone is worried in the least about the potential fallout (pun intended) a decade or two down the road from successfully crushing russia now. I can only imagine attitudes were equally short-sighted in 1918.

That may be true about the USA and the UK and definitely for France and Germany, but Poland has had such debates for years - at the individual level, at the intellectual and think-tank level and at the governmental level

This is not 1917 when Imperial Germany used Lenin to knock Russia out of the war -- and btw, that tactic worked for Imperial Germany. If Germany had won the war, they would have had the border at the Brest-Litovsk line

But to the modern day scenario -

Russia is not "inevitably going to break up" - this was not the case under Yeltsin except for the Caucasus

• Russia north of the Caucasus and until Siberia is more or less one people and wouldn't be split up.
  
  
• However the Caucasus was conquered fairly recently and badly - there isn't much of a sense of being "Russian" there - any more than the Tibetans have a sense of being "Chinese"
  
  
• in the middle region Tatarstan, Khanty, etc. would want some degree of independence in order for their nationalities to survive and not be assimilated
  
  
• In the far east, the Yakuts would want a state and be part of the Turkic group of countries
  
  There would be a far eastern republic around Vladivostok

I suppose you mean what would happen if the nukes get out of hand? I don't know - that's a possibility

And you may mean - what if a bigger bad comes up? I would point out that the USSR was bad, but it took the elements of a secret police, of forced Russification, of a police state from the Tsardom. However in this case, there isn't a case of a bigger bad -- Russia's problem is that they think they are still an empire and they have the same "stab in the back" feeling that Germans had in 1919 -- if you get defeated economically you don't think it was as bad as being bombed and destroyed into submission