Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 13 – Moscow’s
decision to make Crimean Tatara state language even though it is written in
Latin script, a violation of Russia’s language law, should open the way for
Karelian, which is also written in Latin script, to gain that status, according
to Aleksey Tsykaryev, deputy chairman of UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of
Indigenous Languages.
At the present time, Karelia is the
only republic within the borders of the Russian Federation, the titular
language of which does not have that status, Tskaryov, who is also a member of
the Council of the Nuroi Karjal (“Young Karelia”) organization, points out in
comments to Vadim Shtepa (rufabula.com/articles/2015/01/12/karelia-or-petrozavodsk-region).
Shtepa, a major advocate of
regionalism and federalism in Russia, cites Tsykaryov’s remarks in the course
of discussing the current linguistic and political situation in Karelia, one
that has attracted some attention recently because of charges by a republic
LDPR deputy that shadowy “’separatist forces’” have emerged and seek to break
off that republic from Russia.
The deputy, Sergey Pirozhnikov, made
those charges on the basis of his misreading of a portal which has not advanced
any separatist ideas but simply asked “why of all the republics of the Russian
Federation does Karelia remain the only one in which the local language does
not have state status” and requested that this situation be corrected by the
wider use of Karelian.
Clearly, Shtepa writes, “what is
permitted to the Tatars, the Yakuts, and the Komis is not permitted to the Karelians,”
and any request for equal treatment will be denounced as “’nationalist’” and “’separatist,’”
likely because Karelia unlike the others is located on the border of Russia and
has a complicated history.
“Of all the current Russian
republics,” Shtepa, who lives in Petrozavodsk, says, “Karelia has almost the
most unusual history.” It came into existence as a result of the 1920 Treaty of
Tartu between the RSFSR and Finland in which Russia was obligated to provide
self-administration to Eastern Karelia.”
In 1920, the Karelian Labor commune
was created and then in 1923, a Karelian Autonomous Republic established. From 1940 to 1956, it was elevated to the
status of a union republic, something which “has left a special trace in
regional consciousness” even though Stalin did that in hopes of absorbing
Finland via the Winter War.
Some Karelian writers in the 1990s, Shtepa recalls, even
talked about “an alternative history,” one where “if the Karelo-Finnish SSR had
survived until the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it would automatically
have become an independent state as did all the other union republics.”
But in reality, Shtepa continues, there were no
separatist attitudes in that “semi-legendary ‘16th republic’” because
it was dominated by “’Red Finns’” who had lost the war in Finland and had “no
particular desire to unite with a country which they considered as their
political opponent.”
“Nevertheless,”
as many recall, from the 1950s to the 1980s, much of the union then autonomous
republic gave the impression of being “half if not more” Finnish. At that time,
in fact, “even Soviet passports in Karelia were bilingual – in Russian and in
Finnish,” something that led some Russians to view Karelians “almost as ‘foreigners.’”
Finnish was
widely distributed, Shtepa says, because “it was understood by representatives
of the various Karelian dialects.” Efforts by Moscow to promote “a single
Karelian language” and even more to shift it to the Cyrillic script “were not
crowned with success.” Instead, “the literary language remained Finnish.”
But since 1991,
despite the adoption a year earlier of a Declaration of State Sovereignty of
Karelia, “which guaranteed ‘the rebirth of the national uniqueness of the indigenous
peoples,” Finnish language signs and Finnish in passports disappeared. In 2006,
the republic adopted a law calling for the use of the language, but it did not
have much effect either.
In 2012, Shtepa
notes, “many national organizations of Karelia welcomed the appointment of
Aleksandr Khudailenen from Leningrad oblast as head of the republic – but they
received an unhappy surprise.” While he was the first Finn to head the republic
since Kuusinen, he has pursued a thoroughgoing policy of Russification.
He closed the
only Baltic-Finnic faculty in a Russian university. He reorganized the Karelian
State Pedagogical Academy so that there are no longer any higher educational
institutions in the republic which bear its name. And he reduced the number of
issues of the only Finnish language journal in Russia, “Carelia,” from 12 to
two a year.
Those are the actions which have prompted Tsykaryev and
others to look to the Crimean Tatar case with hope and to seek the revival of
Finnish in Karelia. All of them point out that concern about “the status of a
state language is in no way about separatism but rather about the possibility of
preserving and developing the language of the [titular] people.”
“The
chief argument” against that position is demographic: only 7.4 percent of the
residents of the republic called themselves Karels in the 2010 census. And that
demographic reality reflects in part the decision of many Karels to emigrate to
Finland since the 1990s, Shtepa says.
Their
emigration means that “the ethnographic balance in the republic is completely
different than it was in Soviet times,” the regionalist writer points out. But
that is irrelevant if Russia is to be a real federation as the Constitution
requires – or whether in fact the LDPR will achieve its dream of “liquidating
all Russian republics.”
“It is of course
possible to unify the state structure and rename Karelia the Petrozavodsk
oblast. But as soon as that happens, as world experience shows, really
separatist attitudes will arise precisely in those regions which the center is
trying to forcibly deprive of their face by suppressing their ethno-cultural
specifics.”
“Perhaps,”
Shtepa speculates in conclusion, “that is the secret strategy of doctor of
philosophy Zhirinovsky and his adepts?”
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