Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 24 – Russia’s
liberals played a key role in pushing through the economic reforms which made a
return to communism impossible, but they failed to help the country to make the
transition from an empire to a nation and thus must bear part of the blame for
continuing strength of Moscow’s imperialist impulses, according to Kirill
Rodionov.
In an article in today’s “Nezavisimaya
gazeta,” Rodionov, who is a researcher at the Gaidar Institute of Economic
Policy, argues that this is because “liberals of the 1990s were not able to
re-imagine Russia as an [ethnic] Russian nation state” and thus unintentionally
opened the way for imperialist “nostalgia” (ng.ru/ideas/2013-06-24/9_democracy.html).
Under the stewardship of the
liberals, “the imperial identity of the country was not subjected to revision,”
the economist writes. “Russia remained a metropolis which having offered
independence to the colonies sought at any price to compensate for their loss”
with all kinds of largely ineffective “neo-imperial projects.”
Russia’s liberals in the 1990s did
even more to open the way for such an outcome. They rejected anything that
appeared to reflect ethnic Russian nationalism, an understandable but
unfortunate attitude that reflected the fact that “in the first years of an
independent Russia, supporters of restoring the communist order predominated
among Russian nationalists.”
In October 1993, Rodionov points
out, “liberals and nationalists were on different sides of the barricades in
the course of [what was in effect] a civil war in the central streets of
Moscow.”
However, this opposition is in one
way quite surprising, he continues, because the 1991 revolution itself was to a
large extent nationalistic.” Yeltsin
acted “as a Russian nationalist” both when he sought Russia’s withdrawal from
the USSR and when he proposed creating ethnic Russian national republics
“inside the federation” in order to equalize the status of Russians.
But Rodionov continues, Yeltsin
changed course when he “encountered the problem of separatism from the
autonomous soviet socialist republics and so dropped any idea of forming ethnic
Russian national republics. As a result, inter-ethnic relations in the Russian
Federation were arranged on old imperialist principles.
That reality was reflected in the
1993 Constitution whose preamble began with the word “’We, the multi-national
people of the Russian Federation,’” a phenomenon, Rodionov says, that “does not
exist in nature” because “a nation is an ethno-cultural community” and in the
Russian Federation there are many of them.
This imperialist principle also
explains much of Russia’s problems with the North Caucasus, “the most unstable
region of Russia,” problems that were exacerbated by what Rodionov calls “the
genocide” of Russians there in the early 1990s, military intervention and more
recently massive assistance in an effort to buy loyalty.
In the mid-1990s, he continues “Russian
society was not prepared for the separation of Chechnya from Russia,” fearful
that such a step would lead to the departure of other subjects of the
Federation. That explains why most Russians backed what Yeltsin did there in
1994, and why anti-war demonstrations attracted so few people.
But two brutal wars and the high
cost of trying to keep the North Caucasus part of Russia through assistance
have shown that the only alternative to these failed policies is independence
of the North Caucasus republics, the withdrawal of ethnic Russians, and “the
introduction of a tough visa regime and a firm prohibition against dual
citizenship with the Russian Federation.”
Other
subjects of the Russian Federation are unlikely to follow because “outside of
the North Caucasus,” Rodionov says, there is only one republic, Tuva, where
Russians form a significant minority (16.3 percent). And consequently, “the separation of Tuva” at
some in the future cannot be ruled out.
Ethnic Russians in the Russian
Federation, in contrast to the non-Russians, are “a people without land. On the
one hand, Moscow “denies” that “Russia is the motherland of the [ethnic]
Russian people,” and ethnic Russians living abroad who would like to return
“cannot receive Russian Federation citizenship automatically.”
And on the other hand, “there are
no [ethnic] Russian regions in Russia.
The Tatars have Tatarstan. The Yakuts have Yakutia, and the Kalmyks have
Kalmykia.” But the Russians do not have
any place that they can call their own.
There are only two ways out of this
“asymmetry,” Rodionov says, either “the complete liquidation of national
republics, a step that “is not only unrealistic from a technical point of view
but also unjust” or -- and this is the
better choice -- “the creation of [ethnic] Russian national republics by
combining krays and oblasts where the Russian population predominates.”
The National Democratic Alliance
proposed exactly this in 2011. If adopted, Russia would have seven new ethnic
Russian republics – Central Russia, the Russian North, the Volga Region, South
Russia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East – alongside “22 [non-Russian]
republics that would be fully equal in rights.”
To make this work, Rodionov adds, it
would be necessary to “decentralize” budgetary arrangements because “the
regions must have an essentially larger tax base than they do at the present
time.” And Moscow must adopt a law that would grant citizenship to ethnic
Russians living outside the borders of the Russian Federation who want to
return.
If all this is done and it should be,
the economist argues, Russia will “ease to be a state in which [ethnic] Russian
elites seek imperial expansion at the expense of the rights, freedoms and
well-being of the [ethnic] Russian people.” Such “full and final” turning away
from “a neo-imperialist Eurasian project is the duty of any responsible powers
before the Russian people.”
That is all the more so, Rodionov
concludes, because Russia’s only chance for a future is “rapprochement with the
developed countries of the Western world.
“The strengthening of China and the establishment of anti-Western
regimes in the Near East create the preconditions” for exactly that.’’
The possibility of establishing “a zone
of freedom from San Francisco to Vladivostok” is real but to achieve it, Russia
and Russia’s liberals “must support the ethno-cultural rights of the [ethnic]
Russian people,” stop “the Islamization of Russian cities as a result of
immigration, and “stop being afraid to speak aloud about the problems of
inter-ethnic relations.”
If those things don’t happen, he
concludes, “Russia as a country of the [ethnic] Russians will come to an end.”
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