Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 1 –
Representatives of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation, under
the leadership of Tatarstan, this week spoke out against the Kremlin’s plans to
restart Vladimir Putin’s regional amalgamation program and to legally
institutionalize “Russian cultural dominance” in the country.
At a meeting of the working group
preparing the Nationality Policy Strategy document on Monday, they blocked the
Kremlin on both points, and as a result, the draft that emerged is “a paper
monster,” whose impact will depend on whether the Russian government will fund
it, according to Moscow commentator Oleg Gorbunov (politcom.ru/14763.html).
While
the non-Russians appear to have taken the lead in blocking the inclusion of
language calling for state support of Russian cultural “dominance,” the
Politcom.ru writer suggests, they were joined by representatives of
predominantly ethnic Russian regions in opposing a restart for Vladimir Putin’s
regional amalgamation plans.
Those plans, launched in Putin’s
first term, were quietly put on hold when Dmitry Medvedev was president. And as a result, Gorbunov says, “the
formation of the federal districts which informally unite subjects of the
Federation into macro-districts did not reach its logical conclusion” in terms
of intra-state borders.
One of the reasons for this outcome, he notes,
is that wealthy regions did not want to be weighted down by poorer ones. But
another is that with the restoration of elections for regional heads, the
latter “understood that they are becoming ever more independent from the center
on the political plane.”
That
is especially the case in non-Russian regions in the Middle Volga and the North
Caucasus, Gorbunov writes, and “their elites fear that amalgamation would lead
to attempts to take from them their special national status” and that its loss
would lead to a change in their “budgetary relations with the center.”
Thus,
the commentator concludes, with this document, “the federal center has not been
able to resolve its main task” but instead has been limited to “the
preservation of the current unstable balance among the various nationalities,”
with neither the non-Russians nor the Russian nationalists getting the kind of
support they want.
The
Kremlin “bureaucrats,” he writes, “prefer to move back and forth among various
ideological trends, not giving any one of them priority” for long. But “the growth of national
self-consciousness of ‘the generation of the 1990s’ in the national republics
is leading to the radicalization of the general political situation … and to
the appearance of local but still unregistered ethno-national parties.”
This factor is
manifesting itself in public only “from time to time” now, Gorbunov observes,
but “already by the next parliamentary elections in 2016, it could become a
factor of the political struggle” that the Kremlin will have no choice but to
take even more seriously than it does now.
But there are
reasons to believe the situation may heat up far sooner than that. Today’s “Izvestiya” reports that Duma deputy
Aleksey Zhuravlev has called for the development of a “treaty” among all the
nationalities living in Russia and its adoption by a country-wide referendum (izvestia.ru/news/538838).
The
preparation of such a document after the approval of the Nationalities Policy
Strategy document by Vladimir Putin in December in itself would spark more
debates about the direction the country should take and a referendum would
almost certainly exacerbate the situation still further.
In
addition to the ideas mentioned above, this debate, “Izvestiya” suggests, would
include controversies over whether to prevent any reference to ethnicity in
media reporting about crime and migration, the restoration of the nationality
line in Russian passports, and the creation of a Ministry for Nationality Affairs
and the establishment of a plenipotentiary for nationality issues.
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