Paul Goble
Staunton,
April 3 – Vladimir Putin has chosen a Duma deputy from Sverdlovsk with an FSB
background and service in the notorious Alpha Group during his Chechen wars to
be the head of the new Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, an indication of
how the Kremlin leader intends to use this new tool and why Igor Barinov may be
just the man to do it.
When
Putin called for the creation of the new agency last month, many were skeptical
it would amount to more than a new arrangement of bureaucratic chairs,
especially given that Putin disbanded the nationalities ministry more than a
decade ago and that for such an agency to deal with ethnic issues generally
would require more power than he would be willing to cede.
Putin has given
a clear indication of what he expects the agency to do by his appointment of
the former FSB officer, one that Barinov himself has reinforced in his first
interview since his appointment (ura.ru/articles/1036264473).
Barinov,
a native of the North Caucasus, will be working with other North Caucasians now
in Moscow on ethnic issues, including Magomedsalam Magomedov, the former
Daghestani president who serves as a nationalities advisor to Putin, Gadzhimet
Safraliyev, who chairs the Duma’s nationalities committee, and Ilyas Umakhanov,
vice speaker of the Federation Council.
But
Barinov, an ethnic Russian (something many Russian commentators argued was an
absolute necessity for this position), denied that he would be spending “80
percent” of his time on the North Caucasus. Instead, he said, his focus will be
“above all” on not allowing pogroms like those which broke out in Moscow’s
Biryulevo area to occur. (On the Biryulevo one, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/10/window-on-eurasia-biryulevo-violence.html.)
To do
that, Barinov said, he will “monitor inter-ethnic conflicts” in order to be in
a position to intervene in a timely fashion and prevent them from becoming
explosive. He added that it is still too
soon to say exactly how that will be done given that as yet “there is no
agency, no building and no staff.”
Asked by URA.ru whether he had taken his views on
nationality policy arose from his service in Chechnya, Barinov replied “not
only then. Let us begin with the fact that I was born in the North Caucasus, in
Novocherkassk.” Moreover, during various jobs, he said he had gotten to know
the local population in many places of the country.
“We [in
Russia],” he argued, “have many centuries of experience with a successful
nationality policy.” If that is what he
believes and if he sees himself more as a policeman than anything else, the
future of nationalities policy under Putin is likely to prove even more
repressive and thus dangerously explosive than the present.
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