Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 15 – Many in
Russia and the West are celebrating Yevgeny Primakov’s argument presented at
the Mercury Club this week that hyper-centralization, a policy associated with
Vladimir Putin, is a threat to the Russian Federation and its economic recovery
and his call for devolving more powers to the regions of the country.
But few of them have paid equal
attention to his suggestion that national districts should be folded into
larger and predominantly ethnic Russian regions, a step Putin also has pushed with
some success and one that many non-Russians view as another move toward the destruction
of the national republics and the ultimate assimilation of non-Russians.
Primakov said that there is no
threat of any “color revolution” anywhere in the Russian Federation, but he
argued that “for the resolution of economic problems, the economy needs
decentralization” given that problems “can arise precisely from an
extraordinary centralization of all spheres of life, including economics” (kommersant.ru/doc/2645293).
The senior Russian leader added that
“the significance of the optimization of relations of the center with the
subjects of the Russian Federation is growing given the events in Ukraine” and
he called for greater economic decentralization – including a 50 - 50 split in
tax revenues between Moscow and the regions – but “a strengthening of the role
of the federal center which maintains the country as a single whole.”
Many leaders of the federal subjects
will welcome Primakov’s suggestion that they should receive an equal share of
tax revenues, an idea he pushed in the late 1990s when he was prime minister,
but his ideas about federalism more generally are disturbing many non-Russians
who see them as threatening the survival of their ethno-territorial units and
even their nations.
In his speech, Primakov said that he
favored unifying non-Russian districts with larger and predominantly ethnic
Russian oblasts and krays. And he even called the continued existence of the Jewish
Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan “a political anachronism” given that its
titular nationality forms only a tiny fraction of its population.
The Russian statesman said that this
process could not affect all non-Russian republics and districts but only those
in which the titular nationality was a small minority, a position that he took
to reassure major republics like Tatarstan, Bashortostan, Chechnya, and the
other republics in the North Caucasus and that Putin appears to have been
driven to as well by resistance in them to his amalgamation plans.
But Primakov’s remarks were not
reassuring to other non-Russians or even to non-Russians in these republics who
view these limited plans as the latest stage in a Moscow campaign to destroy
ethnically based federalism in the Russian Federation and ultimately to
assimilate the quarter of the population that is non-Russian into the Russian
nation.
One commentator suggested that what
Primakov was talking about would allow for “the creation of all the conditions
necessary for the final assimilation of the non-Russian peoples” now within the
borders of the Russian Federation. And
another suggested that “anti-crisis federalism” is simply the latest euphemism
for Russification (narodyrossii.com/antikrizisnye-retsepty-primakova-likvidirovat-natsionalnye-respubliki/, news.uralistica.com/?p=11167,
and asiarussia.ru/news/5768/).
That
last comment came from Buryatia, the republic and nation which has suffered
more than almost any other from amalgamation of non-Russian territories into
Russian ones. In 1922, Buryatia had two autonomous oblasts and seven officially
recognized enclaves. With Putin’s moves in the last decade, it now has a single
republic
Primakov’s proposals like those of
many Russian reformers in the past are about one kind of federalism, but
however welcome a more equitable division of resources between the center the
regions his ideas might promote, his call for eliminating more non-Russian
areas through amalgamation is certain to trigger new anger and resistance among
non-Russians, both those directly threatened and those who fear they will be.
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