Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 7 – In Soviet times,
Moscow’s nationality policy was based on the idea that the non-Russian nations
should be “national in form but Soviet in content,” a goal intended to
Sovietize them by playing up common social ideas and playing down the varieties
of their cultures and one that many non-Russians saw as a threat to their
futures as distinct communities.
But now the
Russian government of Vladimir Putin is seeking something different and very
much more threatening. It wants to
reduce the role of the non-Russian nationalities still further by making them “national
in form but Russian in content,” an arrangement that would Byurchmake
nationality into little more than a decoration and tourist attraction.
The reason for this move, according
to Badma Byurchiyev, a commentator for Kavpolit.com, is that the Putin regime
wants to make the population “’mentally unified’” because it is “easier to make
such a one-dimensional mass loyal to the authorities” (kavpolit.com/articles/natsionalnaja_politika_na_litso_vse_raznye_russkie-6843/).
The thrust of this new, more
assimilationist policy was outlined at a meeting of the Presidential Council on
Inter-Ethnic Relations last Thursday.
Vladimir Putin took the lead by arguing that the promotion of a new and
tighter unity of the population was a precondition for the successful fight
against “Nazism.”
And such unity, he suggested, could best
be promoted by the elaboration of a monitoring system across the country to
identify possible sources of conflicts among ethnic groups and thus to take
prophylactic measures to prevent them from erupting into serious clashes that
could undermine the unity of the country.
The homogenizing implications of Putin’s
words were underscored by Vladimir Medynsky, Russia’s culture minister. Not only did he suggest that non-Russians
should devote less time to learning their national languages and more time to
studying Russian, but he argued that learning non-Russian history and culture
should only be a stepping stone to learning Russian history and culture.
Medynsky presented two ideas which at a
superficial level contradict one another.
On the one hand, he called for reducing the amount of time non-Russians
will spend studying their own languages and cultures. But on the other, he said
they must “deeply study the traditions of their own people … from popular
military arts to national cuisine.”
But the contradiction between these two
ideas is only apparent, Byurchiyev says, because what Medynsky wants is to
reduce national identity to a decoration, something others can view as an
entertaining diversion rather than a set of values and ideals that hold such a
community together.
In his draft on cultural policy,
Medynsky asserted that “Russia … must be considered as a unique civilization
incomparable to the West or to the East” and that “the enrichment of Russian
culture in its interaction with the cultures of other peoples is permissible
only to the extent that this does not undermine the basic value core of our
culture … [in which] the Russian people was and is ‘the state-forming one.’”
In the course of the discussion of this
document, those specific lines were in fact removed, Byurchiyev notes, but he
insists that the underlying “tone was maintained: the people must be led to ‘mental
unity’ because a one-dimensional mass is easier to make loyal to the authorities.”
If Medynsky and those who think as he
does get their way, non-Russian nations will be reduced to “a decoration” and
there will “finally appear a ‘mentally-unified’ people,” centered on the notion of “’an individual of
the [ethnic] Russian world’” rather than “a faceless [non-ethnic] Russian.”
“It is not hard to guess” what this will
mean, Byurchiyev continues. “People on the surface may all be varied, but they
will be [ethnic] Russians inside.” Numerically small nations will have their
own exotic cuisine or fighting styles, but they will be deprived of the culture
out of which these spring.
And in this brave new world, any step to
the left or to the right will be punished.
In recent days, the Russian authorities have banned a film about Stalin’s
deportation of peoples, cut funding to regions which are supposed to help
non-Russians, and held that Tuvans are not a nationality and so no one declaring
himself to be one can have a Russian passport.
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