Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 9 – It will take “at
a minimum two generations” for the various identities in the Russian Federation
to come together to form a united civic nation, a process that will be all the
more prolonged because except in the major cities, the country does not have a
civil society, according to Aleksey Malashenko.
The Moscow Carnegie Center scholar says
that at present “it is impossible to say” just what “this substrate” of “[non-ethnic]
Russian identity will look like.” But “we don’t live in the clouds or behind an
iron curtain,” and therefore it will reflect not only domestic but various
international trends (ng.ru/ng_politics/2013-10-08/9_identity.html).
In a commentary published in “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” yesterday, Malashenko discusses several of them, pointing out that many
writers and officials spend so much time talking about how unique Russia is and
will be that they fail to consider how it actually is and what it might
actually become.
It is said, he points out, “the USSR
fell apart because Tajikistan and Estonia could not have a common flag. Can the
Far East and Chechnya perhaps have one?”
More than half of Russians do not currently think that Chechnya and
Daghestan are really part of Russia, and more than one in four say the same thing about
Tatarstan.
There is some common identity among non-ethnic
Russians, but it is quite thin. Consequently, the Moscow scholar says, he is
quite skeptical about the prospects for the term “rossiyane,” the Russian term
for those who identify as Russians but not only or not at all in ethnic terms.
Whether a Soviet people existed is
something, he says, he is not prepared to say, although far more was done by
the Soviet state and the CPSU to impose it than is currently being contemplated
by the Russian authorities now.
Instead, the latter say that “civic
values must unite us.” But those “can
arise only where there is a civil society.” It exists in part in Moscow and the
major cities but where else? Instead, “everyone living in our country which
only recently appeared on the map is occupied with the formation of his own
identity, the identity of his family and of his children.”
Some people in Russia today are
pushing a Eurasian identity. But “ask a Russian, a Tatar or an Avar if he considers
himself to be an Asian or a Euro-Asian.”
“Hardly anyone will answer ‘yes’ definitively.” People understand Europe
and Asia, “but a ‘Eurasian perestroika’ is not understandable a priori.” Instead, there is in it “something false.”
Almost the same thing can be said
about attempts to push an imperial identity.
For many, the empire is equivalent to the borders of the USSR. But that state did not last very long, and
consequently it cannot provide the basis for a new identity within the Russian
Federation’s current borders.
Malashenko argues that “Russia is a
country of regions just as America is a country of states.” And while the residents of some US states don’t
like the residents of other states, the existence of the states holds the
country together precisely because of their diversity. But “in Russia, its regions divide” the
country because Moscow does not want to recognize the diversity.
“What do Russia’s regions want? That
they be allowed to live as they want. They want that they be respected and
taken into consideration. It is awful to
think but they want to choose their own governors.” In short, Malashenko says, “the
regions want normal relations” wth the center they want the federalism that is
enshrined in the constitution.
But the central authorities “fear
federalism.” They offer assistance in
exchange for loyalty, and they are unwilling to divide authority. “It is not easy” to do that, Malashenko
continues, “but without it, Russia will not correspond to its official name,
the Russian Federation.”
The reason the central authorities
fear federalism is not so much that they think there will be a new “parade of
sovereignties” about which so much ink has been spilled but rather “the authorities
are afraid that under federalism they will remain without power,” that
federalism with its clear division of powers will prevent them from exercising
hands’ on power.
Consequently, Moscow refuses to cede
any powers, and over time, “local self-consciousness intensifies in the
regions, and ethno-religious self-consciousness intensifies in the national
republics.” That wouldn’t be a problem
if the vectors of both paralleled that of the country as a whole. But in Russia today, that is often not the case.
Islamic self-identification doesn’t
correspond to a civic Russian one, the Moscow scholar continues. It “exists
independently and is linked more closely to processes taking place in the world’s
Islamic umma.” But that is something that
is “completely explicable.”
“Much more challenging” is “the
aggressive self-identification of [ethnic] Russian regions, including the
so-called resource rich ones.” This phenomenon includes a Siberian identity “with
its slogan of ‘stop feeding Moscow.’”
Moreover, there is a Kaliningrad identity, a Far Eastern identity, and “even”
a St. Petersburg identity.
This list could be extended because
it reflects a survival from the recent demise of the Soviet Union. After 1991, people asked who should be
feeding whom, an indication that they no longer felt a common
responsibility. But it is important,
Malashenko continues, not to “exaggerate” this.
That regions are focusing on themselves
in the first instance “not separatism. It is only to put it more politely
[their] sense of being ‘not Russia.’ The regions live separately from the
capital.” They may or may not be going anywhere, but “Russia as before bears
the burden of its unnaturally enormous space, which alas is half destroyed.”
This space can be “knitted together”
again only by forming “for all parts of the country a mutually rewarding from
the point of view of economic interests and political demands path of
development.” If that doesn’t happen, the Moscow scholar says, then instead,
there will “immediately appear several paths – Siberian, Kaliningrader,
Muscovite – and if you look out still further, Orthodox and Islamic.”
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