Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 11 –President
Vladimir Putin said yesterday he had restored the indirect election of heads of
republics in the North Caucasus “not so much out of a need to guarantee
security or to resolve other questions” but “as a result of the particular
features of the ethnic composition [of those republics and because] this is a tradition
of ethnic culture.”
Putin is correct such indirect election, where
parliaments not people, choose the top leaders reflects “the poly-confessional,
multi-national, and particular ethnic composition of these regions.” But he is
wrong, even arrogantly so, in insisting that this is part of the “tradition of
the ethnic culture” there. He even said the republics had asked for this change.
Instead, this “tradition” is not so
much an ethnic one as a Soviet-imposed arrangement on the multi-national
republics of the region. After Stalin drew the borders in the North Caucasus,
these republics all had significant ethnic minorities and sometimes lacked a
single ethnic majority (nazaccent.ru/content/9018-putin-obyasnil-neobhodimost-nepryamyh-vyborov-na.html).
Had genuine elections been held for
all top posts – republic president, speaker of the parliament, and head of
government – the largest group likely would have swept all three, something that
would inevitably have angered members of the other groups and positively
triggered violent resistance.
There were two possibilities to
escape that outcome: either the ethnic groups could be encouraged to work
together and agree on a mixed slate, much as what happens in American cities
and an inevitably messy but ultimately negotiated and democratic process, or
Moscow could impose a Lebanon-style division of the top posts among the larger
ethnic groups.
Until Gorbachev’s time, all Soviet
leaders opted for the latter. Mikhail Gorbachev, however, at least talked about
moving toward popular elections of all posts, even though given the high level
of ethnic self-identification and hostility to other groups that the Soviet
system had institutionalized, that shift opened the way to violent clashes.
This trend was made worse because of
two demographic developments: the departure of most of the ethnic Russians and
other Slavs from the region beginning in the 1970s and nearly completed in the
1990s and differential growth rates of the indigenous nationalities, with their
ranking in the population, as in Daghestan, changing markedly overtime.
Many Soviet and post-Soviet
commentators on the North Caucasus in general and Daghestan in particular
criticized Gorbachev’s move as extremely dangerous and called for the return of
the Soviet-era Lebanon-style division of posts.
And that is what Vladimir Putin has done – and in a way that minimizes
any democratic element in the selection process.
As Russian news agencies reported,
Ramazan Abdulatipov, the Kremlin’s candidate to head Daghestan, received 86 of
88 votes in the republic parliament, and Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, also hand-picked
by Moscow, received 25 of 27. Not quite
Soviet unanimity but close enough for present purposes.
At the same time, however, the ideal
of democracy is so widely and highly valued even in a region where Putin thinks
it is not part of the local “tradition,” the day after the vote, Abdulatipov
suggested that the next time around, he or his successor could be elected by
popular vote – perhaps, if Putin gets his way, in one also organized along
Soviet lines.
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