Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 12 – In words that
recalled Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 warning to the Soviet leaders that in a conflict
with China, “only the very first” Soviet soldiers would be ready to die because
“the sacred truth” is on one page of Lenin rather than another, a Russian
activist argues that the Russian Federation needs ethnic nationalism as well as
civic if it is to survive.
In a lengthy commentary on the
Russian Federation’s nationality strategy concept adopted in December 2012,
Yevgeny Belyayev, a leader of the ethnic Russian community in Bashkortostan,
argues that Moscow can’t afford to sacrifice ethnic nationalism in its pursuit
of a civic one (rb21vek.com/ideologyandpolitics/719-strategiya-gosudarstvennoy-nacionalnoy-politiki-2012-kritika-konceptualnyh-osnovaniy.html).
Instead,
he says, the Russian government must revise its strategy in this area and seek
to promote rather than repress a healthy ethnic nationalism among Russians and
others, lest either or both take on dangerous forms, even as the center uses
the resources at its disposal to promote a more general civic patriotism as an
over-arching identity.
But
instead or promoting that, the Russian government under the terms of the nationality
strategy seems more committed to substituting civic identity for ethnic
identity among the Russians, an approach that deforms Russian nationalism by
denigrating Russians and that in turn generates anti-Russian attitudes among
non-Russians.
Far
less than any other nationality, the Russians “turned out to be unprepared for the
destruction of the matrix of Soviet identity” and felt the end of the Soviet
Union as a loss rather than a victory. Not surprisingly, some Russians have
taken extreme positions, and the repressive response of the state has only made
their situation worse.
Moreover,
many Russians are angry, Belyayev says, by the approach of the state to the
non-Russians. On the one hand, Moscow backs “traditional” non-Russian
approaches to rule even when this means as it does in parts of the North Caucasus “mafi-like forms of
self-organization.”
And
on the other, Moscow ignores the critical role that ethnic Russians play in the
non-Russian regions and republics of the country, catering instead to the ethnocratic
regimes that dominate these places and that, as 1991 proved, are less loyal to
Russia as a whole than they are to their own communities.
Because
of Moscow’s approach to the non-Russian regions and republics, he continues,
increasingly “the ethnic Rsusian population of a region is beginning to be viewed
as’the descendents of occupiers’” rather than as fellow citizens who have
played a key role in the development of the economy and society there.
To
overcome those divisions, Belyayev argues, the central government needs to
promote, in ways that parallel what the Soviet regime did, “a national mass
culture” that includes all groups and that makes use of “Hollywood”-type
technologies to promote a common patriotic identity that includes ethnic
identities as well.
What
is on offer to date, “non-ethnic Russian ‘constitutional patriotism,’ simply
does not have the ability to “mobilize”the population. Russian “constitutional tradtions are weak,” the
existing constitution “is too young,” and the way it was adopted can hardly be
described “as a heroic episode of Russian history.”
The
role of the ethnic Russians needs to be elevated, he argues, suggesting that
Russia adopt a new constitution in which the preamble would declare that “We,
the ethnic Russian people and all fraternal [non-ethnic] Russian peoples” on
the basis of their centuries-long history form “a single People of Russia” (http://rusrand.ru/doklad/Maket_konstit_new.pdf
“Precisely
through such a combination of [non-ethnic] Russiannness and [ethnic]
Russianness,” Belyayev concludes, “we will be able to achieve a meaningful
nationality policy based on a civic community and not on feudal suzerainty and
the social exclusiveness of quasi-ethnic strata.”
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