Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 8 – Most Russians
today are accustomed to think that their country is enormous and has various
regions but that the people who live in it are all the same, but that is a
recent development, one that to a large extent reflects the efforts of Stalin
and Khrushchev to fix the identity of Russians much as they fixed the
identities of other Soviet nationalities.
“Prior to the revolution,” Andrey
Merjanin writes on Rufabula.com today, “everyone in Russia has is distinctive
regional, religious and ethnic identity.” There were groups like the Sitskars,
the Polekhs, the Tudovlyans, the Pomors, the Molokans, and the Old Believers,
and those identities were primary (rufabula.com/author/andrey-merjanin/164).
The writer says that while it is
commonly assumed that all these groups have been absorbed into a single Russian
nation, a close examination of the people, languages, cultures, and history in
particular places shows that these identities have not passed away, even if
aspects of that identity such as a completely distinct language have.
He gives as an example the Sitskars,
a group which lives only 220 kilometers from Moscow in Tver oblast. They are, he says, a sub-ethnic group of
Russians of Mixed origin, with some of their ancestors being autochthonian
Finnic groups and others being Slavs who moved in and conquered the area.
They speak a distinctive dialect
still, although their separate language has died out. Their culture and
architecture is very different from their neighbors. And those who live there,
especially now that the standardized collective farms have collapsed and they
have returned to work in the forests, feel themselves different as well.
Some of
them even remember that in 1917, they created their own republic, the Breytov
Volost Republic which was
named for the central settlement and which lasted less than a year. “But the land [on which it was formed]
remained” as have its people. And those who visit it can see that even now it
and they are distinctive.
Before
this is dismissed as simply an ethnographic curiosity, one should remember that
Russian or better Muscovite writers never tire of talking about how divided
other nations in Eurasia remain and how Stalin or some other Soviet leader “created
them,” be they Ukrainians or Belarusians to cite but two of the most common
supposed products of Soviet policies.
But
few of these writers acknowledge that the same thing is true of the Russian
nation, that it is just as much or even more the product of Soviet policies and
even more that as a nation it remains more divided than many others, in part
because the impact of Russianization was very different on those Moscow viewed
as non-Russian than on those they counted as Russian.
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