Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 17 – Members of
the Presidential Council of Inter-Ethnic Relations are preparing school textbooks to promote the Kremlin’s vision of
“a non-ethnic Russian nation,” an effort that is likely to offend both Russian
nationalists and non-Russian residents of the country and that some observers
suggest will not by itself prove effective.
Last week, the Presidential Council announced that it
will use school texts to support “the formation of the self-consciousness of
[non-ethnic] Russians as a single nation,” “Izvestiya” reported, noting that
two members of that Kremlin group, Valery Tishkov and Raamazan
Abdulatipov, have already published such
textbooks (izvestia.ru/news/541428).
Abdulatipov,
a former nationalities minister, has written a text entitled “We are the
[Non-Ethnic] Russian Nation,” and Tishkov, a member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences and the director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology, has prepared one on “The [Non-Ethnic] Russian Nation.”
Vyacheslav
Mikhaylov, the head of the Kremlin’s working group on nationalities policy,
told “Izvestiya” that it is entirely possible there will be a competition for
“the best textbook which will help the younger generation understand the common
features of the [non-ethnic] Russian people.”
Mikkhaylov
suggested that the new textbook program needs to be coordinated with the
regional policy, cultural and educational ministries so that a government
program in this subject area can be approved. That is necessarybecause
otherwise the younger generation won’t be able to see any difference between
the “Soviet people” and the”[non-ethnic] Russian one.”
Abdulatipov, who now serves as a
United Russia Duma deputy, has prepared his book in a multi-media format and
devoted many of its pages to the enormous diversity of people in the Russian
Federation, discussing their specific characteristics, their religions, and
their non-religious traditions
The emphasis of Tishkov’s book is
somewhat different. He sees his task as showing and explaining that “the
[non-ethnic] Russian people are one.” “For
20 years,” he told the daily, he has been “working on developing a concept of
the [non-ethnic] Russian people as a multi-ethnic civic nation. Even the
youngest must have a vision of their motherland as a single whole.”
Alena Arshinova, a member of the
Duma’s education committee, says that introducing such elements into the
curriculum is extremely important, “but it is important that [any such course]
be an elective and that children not be forced to study national culture” lest
that compulsion drive them away.
But many commentators are skeptical
that this program will work. Andrey
Piontkovsky, the director of the Moscow Center for Strategic Research, argues
that such “’national’” lessons “will not help correct the catastrophe which has
taken place in our country” however “theoretically based” they may be.
“Russia’s problems in this regard
have gone so far that they cannot be resolved by lessons however well-intentioned
.. As long as Caucasians and Russians do not start feeling themselves as
members not only of one country but of one community with common values,
lessons about nationality policy in the schools will not bring any results.”
Although “Izvestiya” does not
mention this, there is only one certainty.
This proposal and especially Tishkov’s association with it guarantees
public opposition. Most Russian
nationalists see the ethnographer as trying to impose an American-style society
on Russia and thus will attack this idea vigorously.
And most non-Russians will see this
measure with its stress on oneness as an attack on their cultures and political
status and a covert effort to Russianize them, whatever Tishkov or Abdulatipoc
say. As a result, this latest effort to
promote a common identity end by having just the opposite effect.
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