Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 31 – Russia’s
Anschluss of Crimea and Moscow’s various declarations about the right of
nations – or at least some of them – to self-determination continue to echo
through the Russian Federation, most recently among the Russian Germans who
viewing the Crimean events want rehabilitation and the possible restoration of
their republic.
On Friday, the International Union
of German Culture and the German Youth Organization met in Moscow to discuss
the implications of Moscow’s policies in Crimea for themselves. Heinrich Marten, president of the Federation
of the National Cultural Autonomies of the Russian Germans, made this link
clear.
He said that Vladimir Putin’s
decision to talk about the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars “means that the
state has again returned to the problem of rehabilitation” more generally,
including among the Russian Germans whose “wounds have not yet healed.” For them too, “rehabilitation is not a closed
issue” (nazaccent.ru/content/11143-glyadya-na-krymskih-tatar-rossijskie-nemcy.html).
Over the last two weeks, Russian
Germans have been working on a package of documents concerning this issue and
have formed a working group consisting of the leaders of the national cultural
autonomies, experts in state administration, historians, political scientists
and sociologists.
This group has had “more than 15
meetings and discussions” with senior officials in the Presidential
Administration, the Council of the Federation, the regional development
ministry, and the foreign ministry. And as a result, there is now a draft
program “on the rehabilitation of Russian Germans.”
The document itself has sparked
discussion and dispute within the Russian German community with some
complaining that it does not insist on the restoration of a German Republic in
the Middle Volga but others saying that it is right to focus on German national
districts in Omsk, and the Altay, and still a third group calling for “extra-territorial’
autonomy.
The
Volga German Autonomous Republic existed between 1924 and 1941, when Stalin,
following Hitler’s invasion of the USSR disbanded it and exiled the 350,000
ethnic Germans there to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The Russian Germans were
rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time, but their republic was never restored. Many
left to go to Germany.
Any German demand for the
restoration of the republic poses some serious problems for Moscow in addition
to those associated with restoring a people and its institutions to land now
occupied by someone else. On the one
hand, given the continuing centrality of World War II in Russian political
thinking, it is difficult to imagine how this could be done without offending
many Russian nationalists.
And on the other, given Putin’s
interest in dividing Europe and especially Germany from the United States, it
is almost equally difficult to imagine that the Kremlin leader would see as a
step that would win him additional support in Berlin something he would want to
reject in any public way.
That suggests
that the most likely outcome of this new upsurge in Russian German
activism in the wake of Crimea will be
greater Moscow support for that community but no move to allow them to restore
their republic. But the genie is out of
the bottle , yet another unintended and for Moscow unwelcome consequence of
what it has done in Ukraine.
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