Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 20 – Three small
developments on Russia’s nationality front this week – resistance by a small ethnos
to a oil giant, the Moscow Patriarchate’s hiring of Central Asian Muslims to
build churches, and an official acknowledgement that gastarbeiters now live in
the center of Moscow – will have far greater consequences than a first glance
might suggest.
First, in the Khanty-Mansiisk
Autonomous District, LUKOIL wants to expand its drilling on areas that members
of the local nationalitie have used for pasture from time immemorial. The oil giant, however, has encountered
unexpected resistance: a Khanty family has hired a lawyer, says it won’t be
pushed around, and is demanding compensation from the company (12online.ru/blog/bunt-hantov-1
and znak.com/hmao/articles/13-11-20-20/101490.html).
As one report puts it, this appears
to be simply “a small local problem,” but only for the present because many of the
28,000 Khanty are tired of being pushed around by Russian officials and big oil
companies and say that they are ready to press their case first in Russian
courts and then at the UN Conference on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
In the past, the companies used vodka not cash
to get their way, and they drilled wherever they wanted, confident that
officials would back them up. “The system worked,” the report says, “but now it
doesn’t work.” The local people realize
that their land is valuable, and they have heard Russians say that “Russia is
for the Russians.”
If Russia is for the Russians, the
Khanty have concluded, why isn’t Khanty-Mansiisk for the Khanty and Mansi? But they aren’t stopping there: What about “the
Sakha and Sakha”? Or the Karels and Karelia?
If Russians have “a home,” why don’t the Sakha or the Karlians? And why
don’t the Russians drill for oil under Moscow? “Why do we need Moscow Oblast?”
“We are all sick of Moscow-centrism,”
the commentator continues. “We do not understand what processes are going on in
the enormous spaces of our country where live various unfashionable peoples
like the Khanty.” There is some talk
about the North Caucasus, but the issues are far broader and include “Russian”
areas like Siberia and the Kuban.
Despite its emotional tone, this
development is fascinating in two respects. On the one hand, it shows that
Russian nationalism is having an impact even on the smallest non-Russian
groups. And on the other, it is thus an
example, albeit a less dramatic one, of the kind of northern activism Edward
Topol described in his 1980s novel, “Red Snow.”
Second, Russians are now focusing on
an issue they couldn’t even imagine existed a few years ago. It turns out that the Moscow Patriarchate of
the Russian Orthodox Church is hiring massive numbers of Muslim workers from
Central Asia and the Caucasus to build churches in the Russian Federation (dallol.ru/news-i517.html).
Church leaders say they are doing so
because they can’t find enough workers among the Russians, but given that the
Church offers itself as a defender of all things Russian and it is getting ever
more money from the state (rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/20131118205003.shtml),
many Russians are outraged.
An informal poll conducted by
Newsland.com found that nearly two-thirds of those responding said this was an
outrage, with the remainder being divided between those who thought it was “normal”
and those who were indifferent to it. But the blogosphere has been filled with sharp
criticism.
One blogger who said he was an
atheist complained, for example, that allowing Muslims to build a church in which
they would not be welcome was both unpleasant and unwelcome, especially since
it carried with it the implication that the Russians themselves “do not want to
work” on such projects” because wages are low.
Clearly, the Moscow Patriarchate
will find it increasingly difficult to present itself as the embodiment of
Russianness if it is engaged in a practice that is increasingly triggering
anger among Russians. That could limit the church’s authority and influence and
open the way for even more radical and extreme forms of Russian nationalism.
And third, the Moscow city
administration of the Federal Migration Service this week published statistics
on the number of gastarbeiters in various parts of the Russian capital. Two
aspects of its report stand out: On the one hand, Biryulevo where clashes took
place this fall is not a place where migrants form a large part of the
population (rus-obr.ru/days/27788).
On the other, in many cases,
migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus are far more numerous in regions
near the city center, a pattern that makes them more noticeable than they would
be if they lived mostly on the outskirts and one that many ethnic Russians
likely view as unacceptable.
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