Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 10 – Russians
living in areas of the country their co-ethnics only recently settled such as
Siberia, the Far East, and the Far North have very different values than those
who remained at the center, and the return of the former could have a
significant impact on the values of the center and hence of the Russian
Federation as a whole.
That is just one of the intriguing
possibilities suggested by an ongoing research effort to apply the ideas of
American historian Frederick Jackson Turner to the study of the contemporary
Russian life. (The reference to “back-trailers” comes not from that study but rather
from the title of the concluding volume of Hamlin Garland’s “Middle Border”
series in the 1920s.)
Yesterday, the “Open Economy”
journal of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics published a summary of the
recent work of Anna Nemirovskya who is a researcher at that institution and
Roberto Foa, a Harvard doctoral student, with whom she is collaborating (opec.ru/1640860.html).
As the journal points out, new
communications and transportation technologies “are reducing the significance
of the distribution and geographic border among people, but Russians living in
central Russia and those on territories distant from the center remain carriers
of different mentalities and values.”
This variation, Nemirovskaya and Foa
find, drawing on Turner’s ideas but applying a sociological rather than
historical approach, reflects “not only of how close or far people are from the
capital or the influence of western and eastern civilizations but also how
these [different] Russian territories were initially settled.”
Their working hypothesis, the “Open Economy”
article says, is that the way in which new territories were absorbed and
populated continues to have an impact “on the psychological and socio-cultural
characteristics in various countries.
They have made a detailed comparison
of the differences between the center and the frontier in Russia, the United
States, Canada and Brazil but have devoted particular attention to Russia. And that is what the “Open Economy” article
focuses on.
Nemirovskaya and Foa designate as
“the frontier of Russia” those regions of Eastern Siberia, the Far East, and
the Russian North “which were settled in large numbers [by ethnic Russians]
only in the 20th century.” And they compared those regions with the
center on the basis of the World Values studies conducted between 1981 and
2013.
According to the
two scholars, in all the countries they studied, “residents of the frontier, in
contrast to residents of the center were more often inclined to trust those
around them and more open to other ethnic communities and cultures but at the
same time more conservative in relationship to the norms of their own culture.”
Their research
helps explain tensions between the center and periphery in countries like
Russia. “The ruling elites in the capital and the population of the center of
the country identify themselves with a ‘European’ and more modernized
population while the residents of the internal territories ... consider
themselves ‘an indigenous population’ and the real masters of a country which
has absorbed enormous areas,” Nemirovskaya says.
These
differences in turn, the two scholars found, often lead to conflict “between
the cosmopolitan, liberal and refined norms” of people in the center and “isolationist,
politically conservative” but “economically liberal values of those living on
the frontier who also tend to believe more than those in the center that people
should rely on themselves rather than the state.
As a result, those on the frontier in most
countries are inclined to organize and engage in political activities,
including protest movements. Polls show
that Russians in the frontier areas say they are more inclined to do so than
Russians at the center, the researchers say, but in fact, Russians in frontier
areas so far have been less likely to take such actions.
But the scholars say that in fact,
Russians on the frontier may be engaging in “a special kind” of protest: “voting
with their feet” by moving away from the frontier back to the center to take
advantage of opportunities there, a reflection of the fact that people on the frontier
tend to be more active and adaptive and “ready for change.”
By going back to the center as it
were, those from the frontier effectively challenge and change the culture of those
at the center. That has happened in many
countries which have both a center and frontiers, Nemirovskaya and Foa point out;
it is entirely possible that it will in time happen in Russia as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment