Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 10 – Three new
Moscow policy initiatives are having unintended and, from the center’s point of
view, unwanted consequences among the non-Russian population of the country,
exacerbating existing divisions within the Russian Federation rather than
promoting country-wide unity.
First, the Kremlin has called for
the introduction of school uniforms as of this fall, at least in part to avoid
more conflicts between Russians and Muslim groups over the hijab. But in the Middle Volga and the North
Caucasus, religious officials have called for “a special school uniform” that
will include the hijab for girls (vestikavkaza.ru/news/V-Rossii-mozhet-poyavitsya-shkolnaya-forma-dlya-musulman.html).
Although
government officials in Tatarstan have followed Moscow in opposing the hijab in
schools, some teachers there are continuing to wear it, and the republic mufti,
Kamil Samigullin, has called for the elaboration of a special school uniform
that would include the hijab, “Vestnik Kavkaza” reported this week.
On
the one hand, such actions represent a kind of civil disobedience that the
authorities both local and central are likely to find difficult to counter. And
on the other, by opposing the hijab, Moscow has not only politicized the issue
but promoted unity among the Muslims of Russia rather than the ethnic divisions
it has used to divide and rule the country.
Indeed,
the Kremlin’s policy on the hijab means that despite Moscow’s own interests,
the Russian Federation is increasingly divided not among these nationalities
but rather along religious lines, a trend that will enhance the power and
influence of Muslims as a community at least as compared to the many much
smaller nationalities within the umma.
Second,
in response to Moscow’s response to the US Magnitsky list, the American law
that will block those Russian officials involved in the businessman’s death, activists
in several non-Russian republics, including Udmurtia and Chuvashia in the
Middle Volga are coming up with their own lists – which are also directed at
Russian officials.
In
Chuvashia, work on such a list has gone the furthest. Dmmitry Karuyev, a Drugaya Rossiya member,
has called for the compilation of a list of MVD, FSB, FSIN, and FSKN officials
who have violated “human rights in Chuvashia,” circulated a petition on this
and even asked the population for additional names (irekle.org/news/i869.html and protest21.ru/spisok).
This idea is unlikely to receive
official sanction from republic authorities, and it is unclear just how
Chuvashia, a republic in the middle of the Russian Federation, would go about
enforcing it. But the proposal by itself clearly highlights the anger of at
least some people there about what members of the Russian force structures have
been doing.
And third, in response to Vladimir
Putin’s call for a single school history textbook, some non-Russians are using
this occasion to demand that any such text exclude negative references to the
pasts of their people, however widespread such understandings may be among
Russians (3rm.info/34466-tatary-trebuyut-isklyuchit-iz-uchebnikov-ponyatiya-tatarskoe-igo-i-poganyy-tatarin.html).
Speaking
to a Duma roundtable on “Ethical Problems of Treating Inter-Ethnic Themes in
the Russian Media” last week, Nazif Mirikhanov, the permanent representative of
the Republic of Tatarstan to the Russian central government, said that the
Tatars want any reference to “the Tatar yoke” of Mongol times dropped from all
new textbooks.
“We
are convinced that if we will not have a common past, we will not have a common
present in the conditions of a democratic society. Under conditions of the
empire, this coud take place, but now it must not. The representatives of all peoples must feel
themselves patriots of their own country,” Mirikhanov stressed.
Historians
have shown that what Russians invariably call “the Tatar yoke” was in fact
Mongol rule, but most Russians continue to talk about that period using the
incorrect term. Proposals like Mirikhanov’s thus put Moscow in a difficult
position: the center will either offend Russians or continue to offend the
Tatars.
Finally,
and this is less a response to Russian government policy than to an increasing
feature of Russian life in the capital, Muslims in Stavropol kray have created
a special website to help young Muslim men and women find another Muslim to
date and possibly marry (islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusnews/26953/
and file-rf.ru/news/13148).
Mukhammad Rakhimov, the head of the
Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Stavropol, said that “parishioners often
turn to imams for help in finding a good man or woman so that they can
establish a family. The more such
requests have come in, the more we thought about how we could find a solution.” The new personals site is the result
Such ethnically-based sites have a
long history in the Russian Federation.
Indeed, the first one known to this author was a computerized list of
Armenians in Moscow set up by the permanent representation of that republic in
Gorbachev’s time, a list that was pointedly advertised as one that would allow
Armenians to meet and marry other Armenians rather than going beyond the
confines of that ethnic community.
Lists like that one and even more
sites like the one the Stavropol MSD has now established may help Vladimir
Putin to achieve his goal of boosting birthrates among the indigenous
populations of the Russian Federation – but only at the cost of deepening
rather than overcoming ethnic divisions.
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