Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 18 – Three newly
released statistics – one on births in Kazakhstan, a second on how Russians
understand events in Ukraine, and a third on where websites of the .ru domain are
hosted – say more about where the Russian Federation is heading than do more
prominent declarations of Moscow political leaders.
At the very least, they highlight
some underlying realities with which the Russian authorities are going to have
to cope especially given that the capacity of Moscow to change any of them is
far more limited than many either in the Russian capital or elsewhere appear to
believe.
The first, reported from Astana yesterday,
is that 91 percent of the growth of the population is the result of births of
ethnic Kazakhs and that combined with migration patterns 97 percent of the population
growth of that Central Asian country as a whole consists of ethnic Kazakhs (rosbalt.ru/exussr/2014/02/17/1234317.html).
That pattern reflects the age
structure of the population – far more ethnic Kazakhs are in the prime
childrearing age cohorts than are the ethnic Russians there – as well as far
higher fertility rates among the ethnic Kazakhs than among the ethnic Russians
and means that Kazakhstan like the other former Soviet republics will become
increasingly non-Russian.
This development has at a minimum
three serious consequences. First, it means that these countries will be ever
more distinct with Moscow having less leverage as a result. Second, it means
that for many Russians in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan will be a less
attractive partner than it was when there were nearly as many ethnic Russians
there as ethnic Kazakhs.
And third, it means that Kazakhstan
will increasingly play the role of a Central Asian country rather than as one
between Central Asia and Russia. In
Soviet times, Russian writers always referred to the region as “Central Asia
and Kazakhstan.” That is no longer true,
and it opens the way to a far more complicated geopolitics than the one Moscow
has faced.
(This development is important to
Moscow in yet another way: It highlights a similar pattern inside the Russian
Federation as well, where as a result of differences in fertility rates and
migration, the non-Russian republics are increasingly non-Russian, a
recapitulation of the pattern that characterized the end of the Soviet period
and contributed to the demise of the USSR.)
The second, reported last week by
VTsIOM, is that 46 percent of Russians believe that the Ukrainian protests are
the work of Western intelligence services and another 30 percent believe they
are the result of the struggle of political clans within the leadership of
Ukraine (nr2.ru/kiev/484011.html).
At
one level, of course, this is little more than an indication that the image of
Ukraine that Russian state television has promoted has been accepted by the
Russian population. But at another, deeper level, it is one that calls
attention to an aspect of Russian society that most do not want to highlight.
These
figures suggest that Russians view political activities as the work of others
rather than something the citizenry can get involved in, a confession as it
were by the population of its own political impotence and of its willingness to
be ruled by elites because of its belief that that is the way the world works.
While
the Kremlin may be pleased that Russians believe that and thus will not
challenge the regime, such attitudes profoundly limit the ability of the
authorities to mobilize the population for anything short of repelling an
invasion. Consequently, what Russians say they believe about Ukraine may be
more important as a statement about themselves.
And
third, as “Izvestiya” reported today, 35 percent of the .ru domain websites are
now hosted abroad. Of the 3.54 million
working .ru sites, 2.31 million are hosted in the Russian Federation, 671,000
in Germany, and 211,000 in the United State. Dot ru in Cyrillic sites, in
contrast, are more often hosted inside Russia (izvestia.ru/news/566024).
Some
of the reasons for this pattern are historical – hosting companies abroad
developed earlier and faster than those in Russia – while others have to do
with price and service – foreign hosting companies have lower rates and faster
service. But a major factor is that
those sites hosted abroad are less susceptible to state control.
That
is underscored by the fact that, as the experts with whom the Moscow paper
talked, “after the appearance of laws about black lists [of websites], the number
of resources which migrated to the West, grew” because “for a number of sites
it was more secure to be located beyond the jurisdiction of Russia.”
On
the one hand, this pattern highlights the now-familiar ways in which the
Internet remains far more independent of any state than do other forms of media
which have to be based on a specific territory. But on the other, it may mean
that despite the fact that the Cyrillic dot ru domain has not taken off, Moscow
may again start pushing it in the name of national loyalty.
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