Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 2 – Moscow is now
conducting its spring draft of young men for the uniformed services, one that
is highlighting class and ethnic divides among the population of the Russian
Federation, a greater willingness on the part of both sides of these divides to
speak out, and efforts by the authorities to navigate between them.
An article in a Penza newspaper last week
pointed out what many already know: those going into the Russian military today
are almost all workers and peasants rather than the children of those better
placed and who through their own efforts or those of their parents can avoid
service (tzpenza.com/news/prishla_bumazhka_s_voenkomata_rvata_mjata/2013-03-28-60).
The latter both through student
deferments and bribes given to doctors generally do not have to serve, and that
has provoked demonstrators in that central Russian city to carry signs calling
on Moscow to ensure for the first time since the war that “the children of the
bureaucrats” are taken into the ranks.
According to the paper, “the army
has acquired a class character.” There are no children of the elite but only “proletarians.” And that points to another problem, he
suggests: Those being drafted now were born in 1995, a difficult year when
proletarian parents generally decided not to have children. Those who could
afford to aren’t allowing their offspring to be called up.
Stung by such criticism, the Russian
General Staff put out the word yesterday, that university students “are ever
more frequently” leaving the classroom in order to perform their patriotic
duties. But an examination of the
numbers suggests this is just PR and won’t be believed (kommersant.ru/doc/2160181 and lawinrussia.ru/node/258217).
The high command said that last
year some 2500 students had taken this step, but that figure is only about one
percent of the total number of young people drafted. And both student activists
and experts say that there is no reason to expect that the situation has
changed dramatically this spring. Indeed, it may have even gotten worse.
At the same time, the Russian
uniformed services are facing another and perhaps even more intractable
problem, deciding what to do with young men from the Caucasus, many of whom
want to become soldiers, but who have not been allowed to do so in recent years
because of Russian opposition.
The military said at the end of last
week that it would take in more North Caucasians this time around than it has
in recent draft cycles, a response both to demands from the leaders of republics
there who are worried about the impact of their exclusion on attitudes there and
to concerns by some Russians that they are having to pay a tax that the North
Caucasians are not (nazaccent.ru/content/7284-v-armiyu-budut-bolshe-prizyvat-novobrancev.html).
But that decision has produced an
extremely negative reaction among Russian nationalists who don’t like the idea
of having North Caucasians serve alongside ethnic Russians and are very
uncertain about how the military should deal with them in order to reduce the
likelihood of clashes within the services (nazaccent.ru/content/7318-russkie-nacionalisty-obespokoeny-massovym-prizyvom-v.html).
Aleksandr Belov, one of the leaders
of Russkiye, doesn’t want them to serve but if they must, he believes they must
be kept apart from other soldiers and placed in separate units. Vladimir Tor of
the National-Democratic Party, in contrast, thinks the North Caucasians should
be distributed across the military in small groups so that they can be managed.
The Russian military has long been
wrestling with this problem, offering special training courses for its officers
on how to deal with men from other ethnic groups and creating a chaplaincy
corps that includes imams and mullahs.
But it is unlikely that these measures alone will be sufficient to
overcome this second divide that Moscow must face.
No comments:
Post a Comment