Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 5 – One of the
most characteristic features of Soviet life – the requirement that citizens of
that country know and provide their ethnic nationality to officials – is now
returning to Russian life, the result of a decision by Rosstat to monitor the
nationalities of those who marry, divorce or die.
And while there is no indication yet
that this will lead to the inclusion of a nationality line in documents of all kinds or the discrimination against some
nationalities, as was the case in Soviet times, this new
officialization of ethnicity appears likely to have at least three major
consequences for the citizens of the Russian Federation.
First, it will make all Russian
citizens more conscious of their ethnicity not less, thereby promoting a kind
of identity that often stands against a civic identification with the country
as a whole and thus making the promotion of the latter which some have seen as a
necessary foundation for the unity and integrity of the country.
As censuses and sociological studies
have shown, many residents of the Russian Federation are less attached to any particular ethnic
group now than they were and give
preference to other non-ethnic identities. Requiring them to declare their
nationalities for official purposes is likely to reverse that trend.
Second, it will require both the
officialization of both a list of nationalities and a fixing of an individual
to one of them. Since Soviet times,
individuals have been able to declare on any or all occasions what they see
themselves as rather than give what used to be called their “passport
nationality.” That has allowed for the
emergence of new identities and shifts in older ones.
The Soviet government maintained an
official list of nationalities, and no one could declare himself or herself to
be a member of any other group or shift from one to another at will. The Russian authorities have not had such a
list or tied people to a birth identity. This latest official move, however,
opens the way to a return to the earlier arrangement.
And third, this innovation will
reignite the question of who benefits: members of smaller nationalities who
will have yet another support, this time official, for their identity, or the
dominant ethnic Russians who some believe may, because other identities have
eased, the “default” declaration.
If the new system ends by defending
the smaller nationalities, that will reduce the rate of assimilation of such
groups by the Russians still further. But if it leads to a perception of “Russian”
as the identity that one should choose if one is unsure of one’s
self-identification or wants to identify with the largest group, it could boost
the share of ethnic Russians.
At the end of last month, the
Russian government directed ZAGS, the state registration office, to provide
Rosstat, the state statistical committee, with data on the nationalities of
those getting married or going through other major life changes that people are
required to inform the government about (news.uralistica.com/?p=9218).
The government said that this would “allow
for an assessment of the influence of social-demographic characteristics on the
development of the population as a hole and the planning for the development
and realization of effective measures of an active demographic policy and the
program of state support for mothers and children in Russians as a whole and at
the regional level.”
Behind such dry bureaucratic
language can lie either a desire to ensure that funds flow where they are most
needed or the opening round of a kind of ethnic management intended to help
some groups at the expense of others. Not surprisingly, given the historical
record, many Russian residents are suspicious of what Moscow intends.
A blogger on the Uralistica.com
portal, for example, sees some far-reaching consequences. “Nationality or more exactly ethnic
membership as a fact of life and an identifier of the personality is returning
to Russian society and the state and being fixed by institutional instructions (uralistica.com/profiles/blogs/reifikacija-nacionalnosti).
As a result, he
says, the efforts of those like Academician Valery Tishkov, the director of the
Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, to promote a non-ethnic civic
identity have suffered a complete defeat. Instead, ethnic nationality “as in
Soviet times will be reified.” At a minimum that means that “everyone will
receive a nationality,” including “those who did not have one earlier or did
not think about this question.”
Among “the multitude of other
consequences” this will have, the blogger suggests, is this one: “all those who
say that the question of nationality for them does not have significant are
most likely to connect themselves with the largest nationality, the one viewed
as the default setting” in the absence of another ethnic group and declare
themselves ethnic Russians.
That may be what some in Moscow
would like to see happen, and it may even be true in a few cases. But requiring people to declare their
nationality on a regular basis may have just the opposite effect, leading people
to identify with their roots and to be increasingly angry with a government
that seeks to have them define themselves in ways different than they want.
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