Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 1 – When Vladimir
Putin abolished the regional affairs ministry and transferred responsibility
for nationality policy to the ministry of culture, he reassigned 40 officials
from the one to the other. But now, the Russian Federation culture ministry
says it needs 30 more and a deputy minister to oversee them.
These numbers highlight Moscow’s
inattention to one of the Russian Federation’s biggest problems, but the
situation is even worse than they suggest: According to a report in
Nazaccent.ru, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky may not get even the additions
he seeks (nazaccent.ru/content/13332-medinskij-poprosil-vvesti-dolzhnost-zamministra-po.html).
On Monday, Medinsky made his request
at a meeting of the presidium of the Presidential Council on Inter-Ethnic
Relations. He said he had the support of
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, but so far there has been no agreement on
either an increase in the number of staffers working on this subject or a
deputy minister to oversee them.
Instead, there was clear opposition
from the Kremlin. Magomedsalam Magomedov, the deputy head of the Presidential
Administration, noted that the culture ministry would not be responsible for
many of the issues in this area that the regional affairs ministry had been and
thus presumably would not need as large a staff, let alone a larger one.
The minister told the group that
when the department responsible for nationality issues was in the now-disbanded
regional affairs ministry, it had ten percent of the ministry’s staff positions
but handed “30 percent of the flow of documents.” To deal with the situation, he said, the
culture ministry needs “no fewer than 70 people.”
In other comments, Medinsky signaled
that he will follow the Kremlin’s line very closely indeed. He said that his
department will put “the stress on the harmonious combination of the interests
of all the native peoples of Russia with account being taken for the
development of the [ethnic] Russian people.”
Today, Vadim Shtepa, perhaps Russia’s leading
authority on regional issues, also commented on the consequences of the demise
of the regional affairs ministry for regional and ethnic issues (nr2.com.ua/News/world_and_russia/Nashe-imya-region-81185.html).
“On
the one hand,” he says, the regional affairs ministry was “not especially
effective” and did not improve the level of development of any region in the
country over its ten years of existence. “”But on the other,” its demise
especially given the appearance of regional development ministries for the Far East, the North Caucasus and Crimea
raises the question of “how will Moscow deal with all the other regions?”
Of
course, Shtepa continues, it should be “obvious” that all ministries should be
involved in such problems and policies “because Russia consists of regions, and
if this is forgotten, then the federal bureaucrats will turn out to be in some
other dimension than the country” in which they and the population lives.
Handing
this task to the culture ministry is not a solution, he says, because “the life
and problems of numerically small indigenous peoples are not exhausted by
folkloric exhibitions.” Instead, what Moscow needs to do is to follow what “practically
every European country” has done and create “an entire network of agencies for
regional development.”
At
the very least, Moscow needs to help the regions “brand” themselves so that
they can attract more tourists and investment, and Russian officials at the center
must recognize that “local branding is a powerful instrument of integration.”
Without it, “regions become culturally similar, lose interest in one another,
and gradually are alienated from one another.”
Unfortunately,
there seems to be little appreciation of that in Moscow, Shtepa says. Instead, “the
current Russian authorities are not interested in the contemporary development
of their own territories.” Rather, “as is typical of empires, [Moscow] is
concerned only with adding new ones” to the areas under its control.
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