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.