Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 5 – Under current conditions, a Moscow lawyer says, ethnic Russians
have a cruel choice if they are to defend their rights: They must either begin
to act like an ethnic minority, something many of them would find insulting, or
they must restructure the state so that they have “real” and not merely “declarative”
equality with other groups.
In an interview posted on the “Osobaya
bukva” portal yesterday, Matvey Tszen, who represents what the portal describes
as “a relatively new phenomenon for contemporary Russia, a political lawyer,”
makes that argument not only as a legal specialist but as an advocate for the
National Democratic Party and its legal defense arm, ROD (specletter.com/obcshestvo/2013-09-04/u-russkoi-galaktiki-net-granits-s-pogranichnymi-stolbami.html).
Easily identifiable at Russian
meetings because of his ethnic Chinese visage – one of his four grandparents
was Chinese – Tsven says that he is “completely Russian culturally” and
completely committed to the cause of equal rights for the ethnic Russian
community in all places in the Russian Federation.
Tsven suggests that his Chinese
visage allows him to “hear things” that someone who looks “more Russian” would
not, especially from migrant workers.
Unfortunately, he continues, most state agencies such as the E Center
and the Moscow force structures consist almost exclusively of ethnic Russians
and thus are less effective than they might be.
The advocate says that he became
conscious of his ethnicity earlier than others because he had to make a choice,
albeit it was not hard as he never felt himself to be Chinese. Asked who is a
Russian, Tsven responded that “this is an individual who is ethnically Russia
or who has a significantly ethnic Russian component, who has Russian
self-identification and who is accepted by others as a Russian.”
Pressed by the interviewer on this,
Tsven said that this means that “it is possible to be more Russian and also to
be less Russian,” at least “from the ethnic point of view.” If someone has
ethnically mixed ancestors, what matters most is his or her self-identification,
not the specifics of their background.
An ethnos, he continues, or a nation
or a people are “terms which operate not at the level of individuals; they are
based on millions and in the case of the Russian people on tens of millions.
This is an entire galaxy, in which there are many stars, millions and hundreds
of millions, billions, and in correspondence with which the galaxy objectively exists.”
Where any one star is “at the center
of the galaxy or on its periphery” is not a matter of principle relative to the
galaxy itself, Tsven argues. “Thus it is with each individual: some are closer
to the ethnic nucleus of the Russian people, some are further away, but all
together we form a Russian galaxy.”
Asked the now traditional
question “Who is Mr. Tsven?” the lawyer replies that he is by training a lawyer
and an advocate, by conviction a Russian nationalist in the broad sense and a
national democrat in the narrower one, a rights activist, and a politician who
served as a deputy in a local legislature.
This combination, he says,
“did not interfere” with his work in any one area; instead, “it helped.
Consequently, Tsven says he is very much opposed to new legislation that would
prevent lawyers from playing these multiple roles, legislation he cannot really
imagine being applied given that many senior Russian leaders are lawyers by
training. Such proposals are simply acts of intimidation.
Asked about what many
Russians see as “double standards” in the judicial system that result in
lighter sentences for non-Russians and heavier ones for Russians, Tsven
suggests that he does not think that judges and investigators in the main are
driven by the feelings that such a term suggests.
“Skinheads really do get
heavier sentences but not because they are Russians but because they are
skinheads” and thus have political views that are treated as extremist.
Caucasians, in contrast, receive lesser sentences “not because they are
Caucasians but because with a high probability, their diasporas speak on their
behalf, they have good lawyers, and broad support either corrupt or
administrative from highly placed people from their regions.”
Ethnic Russians rarely
have those advantages, Tsven says. And he suggests there are “two ways out:
either to begin to act as a minority, while being really a majority or
restructure the state in such a way that equality, not declarative but real
will be secured regardless of ethnicity.”
The first of these
variants, of course, calls for Russians to become like the North Caucasian, the
lawyer says; the second, for them to seek to have a European-style state.
Drawing on that division,
Tsven argues that one of the reasons Russians remain so divided is that their
violations of the law are defined as extremist and consequently the authorities
routinely target these political challenges and thus keep the Russian community
from uniting as the others do.
If the Russian powers that
be targeted other groups in the same way, they too would be divided and weak.
Tsven says that initially
he was a supporter of Vladimir Putin because of the latter’s effort to restore
order in Russia, but he became an opponent when he saw that Putin was not
moving the country forward or solving its most important problems but rather by
inattention or design making many of these problems worse.
The Russian nationalist
advocate said what finally led him to become an opponent of Putin was Operation
‘Successor.’ Had Putin allowed two candidates to run to replace him, say Ivanov
and Medvedev, with the former “more conservative” and the latter “more liberal,”
Russia could have moved in the direction of a two party system.
This would have been “administered
democracy, but not in the sense of being a puppet but rather in the sense of a
stable one when people could really make a choice but out of a limited circle
of possibilities.” But when Putin decided to proceed otherwise, that showed
what he was about and cost him Tsven’s support.
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