Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 9 – In his
latest update on Stalinism as “effective management,” Vladimir Putin has
disbanded Russia’s regional affairs ministry, yet another sign of his drive to
further centralize the country, eliminate any serious discussion of Russia’s
regions and their problems, and thus undermine any chance that Moscow will have
an effective nationality policy.
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin disbanded
the Russian ministry for regional affairs and two other bodies responsible for
overseeing Moscow’s relations with its regions and with the non-Russian nations
who populate many of them (ng.ru/economics/2014-09-09/4_fedcenter.html, ej.ru/?a=note&id=26011 and lenta.ru/news/2014/09/08/minregion/).
At one level, of course, his move is
nothing more than the latest indication of a problem Moscow has faced since the
dawn of Soviet times: Were the Kremlin to give any one agency enough power to
deal with the multi-faceted nature of regional and ethnic issues, it would be
creating a monster that could threaten itself.
Consequently, the Soviet and Russian
governments have been reluctant to allow “nationalities ministries” to function
for very long – Stalin headed the first one from 1917 to 1922 and Putin
disbanded the post-Soviet one at the start of his rein – and have frequently
shifted responsibility from one region to another.
But this Putin initiative appears to
many to be more than that, to be instead an effort to downgrade regions and
non-Russian nations even further than he already has. As Vadim Shtepa bitterly commented on
Facebook: What Putin has done is “correct” because “in Russia there are no
regions; the slavishly obedient provinces are unworthy” of this term.
And soon, the prominent regionalist
writer said, the Kremlin will ban “the term ‘regionalism’” as well as the
agencies responsible for dealing with regions and nationalities. That would be
consistent with Putin’s Stalinist and Orwellian dispositions: no region or
nationality – no problem.
Or as Kavkazskaya politika’s Anton
Chablin put it, “the dissolution of the federal ministry marks a turning away
from a clearly defined nationality policy” toward a situation in which the
regions and non-Russians will be affected by general policies but will have
fewer chances to ensure that these policies take their needs into account (kavpolit.com/articles/zachem_ubili_minregion-9258/).
According to Chablin, the dissolution of
the regional affairs ministry and the distribution of its functions to other
ministries whose primary responsibilities are to other larger issues or only to
specific regions as in the case of the ministries overseeing the Far East, the
North Caucasus and occupied Crimea end hopes of creating a nationalities
ministry under Putin.
Instead, they suggest, he argues, that
Russia is shifting from the “Brazilian” to the “Canadian” model of regional
policies and is likely to carve out additional ministries for particular
regions rather than for all regions of the country as a whole. Russia now has
three such regional ministries; Canada has five.
Despite Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev’s promise that all the functions of the regional affairs ministry will
continue to be met albeit by offices in other ministries, many are skeptical
about that not only because the focus of these other ministries is different
and regional and national issues are thus going to be treated at a lower level
but also because of the loss of expertise.
Preserving that expertise is a major
concern of those working in the area. As
Vladimir Zorin, deputy director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology told Nazaccent.ru, however one assesses the quality of the work of
the now disbanded ministry, it contained “a literate collective of
professionals who knew well the ethno-political realities of the country” (nazaccent.ru/content/13065-glavnoe-sohranit-kadry.html).
In the new set of structures, they are likely to be lost
and with them the knowledge needed to guide Moscow through the complexities of
regional and ethnic affairs, a development that almost certainly guarantees
more errors will be made and many regional and ethnic problems that might have
been “solved” will now grow into bigger and more threatening ones.
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