Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 26 – Russia will
not be able to build a functioning democracy or even survive in its current borders
unless it overcomes what Kiril Rodionov says is “the de facto taboo” on “the
cultural expansion of migrants from Central Asia and the North Caucasus
republics” and recognizes how important it is that such people adopt Russian
values.
In an article in “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” yesterday, Rodionov, a scholar at the Presidential Academy of Economics
and State Service, challenges not just that taboo but several widely held views
about how Russia is different from the USSR and from the countries of Western
Europe when it comes to immigration (ng.ru/ideas/2013-09-25/5_tabu.html).
Arguing
that multi-culturalism is “incompatible with democracy,” Rodionov says that
Russian citizens must deal with the reality that “that which is acceptable in
Gudermes and Makhachkala is not the norm in Krasnodar and Rostov-na-Donu” and
either force migrants to adapt or face the prospect that Russia will never be a
democracy or even survive as a country.
“Present-day
Russia,” he argues, “is a country which has still not completed the transition
from empire to a nation state. If the key task of an empire is the holding
together of various nations in a single fraternal yoke, then the main goal of a
nation state is the preservation and development of one nation.”
In
Soviet times, the regime used the propiska system to limit migration, thus
keeping most non-Russians in their national homelands and keeping a significant
number of ethnic Russians there as well. But with the collapse of the USSR and
of that system, Russians have fled non-Russian areas, allowing those to become
more distinctly non-Russian, and non-Russians have come to Russian areas but
insisted on retaining their identities when they do.
According
to Rodionov, “a cultural community is a precondition of the unity of a
political-legal space, and the absence of cultural ties between this or that
region is often a precondition for the collapse of the country.” The Soviet
Union’s demise is a clear example of this.
In
the 1970s and 1980s, Moscow “did not completely control what was taking place
in the Trans-Caucasus and Central Asia.” Instead, it backed “the dictatorial
regimes” of communist first secretaries there, providing them with massive assistance
in exchange for loyalty and the maintenance of order.
That
same approach has guided the central Russian government more recently,
particularly in the North Caucasus where the same exchange is going on, with
one major exception: Given Russian flight, the republics there are far less
acculturated to Russian norms than they were, and more of their residents are
nonetheless coming to Russian cities.
Whatever
some liberals believe, the institutions of a democratic legal state, Rodionov
insists, cannot rest on economic and political “unification alone.” Instead,
they require shared cultural values. Where those are absent, the state will not
be democratic and will face disintegration.
Russia
over the last two decades has repeated the mistakes of the migration policies
of Western Europe: it has allowed people from its former colonies to enter
almost at will and to form “ethnic enclaves” in major cities in which these
non-Russian migrants live their own lives according to their own rules.
The
mistaken notion that multiculturalism will work in Russia, Rodionov continues,
rests on “the values of Soviet internationalism, which were deeply rooted in
the time of the USSR and up to now have a definite weight in society, especially
among the intelligentsia and the political elite,” who see nothing wrong with
ethnic lobbying and even play to it.
All
migrants “must live in the cultural field of a state that is new for them,” and
they must bear the costs of adapting.” If the receiving state doesn’t insist on
this, then the receiving society will have to pay the costs, a situation that
Rodionov says is “not natural” because a migrant can always leave while a
native cannot.
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