Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 12 – Because the
Soviet Union fell apart on ethnic lines, most Russian commentators speculating
about the future have suggested that the West is pursuing a similar strategy in
order to break up the Russian Federation. But two this week have suggested that
the West is focusing on regional rather than ethnic issues to achieve that end.
This is intriguing not because it is
true but because it suggests that at least some in Moscow are more worried
about regionalism and regionalist movements than they are about ethno-national
ones and may be about to repress any expressions of regionalist ideas among
ethnic Russians.
Vladimir Solovyev, a Moscow radio
and television commentator, is explicit on this point. He told the audience of
his Vesti FM show, “Full Contact” that “separatist attitudes are strong in the
Urals” and that “these must be suppressed” before they can damage the integrity
of the country (ura.ru/news/1052264225).
His words provoked
this response from a listener who texted that “Urals separatism is based on
social injustice: 12,000 works at the factory there live like trash while those
running the company from Moscow receive the profit, giving high salaries to 300
employees and paying taxes in Moscow but not in the Urals. And there’s no money
to build roads in the Urals.”
The Urals news agency, URA.ru, asked
Solovyev for comments about that reaction to his words. The commentator said that “Urals patriotism
is constantly being pushed in many speeches of Russian opposition figures and
actively promoted as well by internet accounts … backed by countries that are
counting on the possibility of exploding Russia from the inside.:
Such people focus on the Urals
because in the 1990s there was a Urals Republic, and consequently, Solovyev
said, such people think there is a basis for what they are doing. He added that “strikes will be directed at
the Urals, the Far East, and Kaliningrad,” because “these are the hottest
spots.”
The people who live in the Urals are
not to blame for this, the Moscow commentator continued. “This is the typical
political technology of people who receive much financing, including from the
West in order to do everything possible for the breaking apart of Russia into
parts.”
A second story, one that reflects
this same notion, is offered by Aleksandr Artishchenko on the Moscow portal, “Nasha
Versiya.” He says that the Ukrainian
government is seeking to break Russia apart by “financing separatists of ‘Cossackia’
and ‘the Siberian State Union’” (versia.ru/ukraina-finansiruet-separatistov-kazakii-i-sibirskogo-derzhavnogo-soyuza).
According to Artishchenko, last
weekend the Presidential Administration of Ukraine convened a conference of
separatists from the Urals, Siberia and Krasnodar kray that was attended on the
Ukrainian side by radical Oleg Lyashko, through whose party Kyiv wants to
finance “’Cossackia’” and “’the Siberian State Union.
Journalists weren’t invited, the
Russian commentator says; but he said he was able to learn that Ukrainian
officials proposed that the regionalists from Russia introduce their own
currency and thus be in a better position to insist that not all the wealth of
their regions ends up in Moscow’s hands.
One of the ideas floated at the meeting,
Artishchenko continues, was “the creation of ‘a Union of Russian Lands’ without
Moscow.” Real Russians would thus have their own country that would instantly
become wealthier, and Moscow would have its own state, albeit much smaller and much
poorer.
Suggestions that Kyiv is now
focusing on regional rather than ethnic issues in the Russian Federation are
especially intriguing given that Ukrainians historically and especially since
perestroika times have focused primarily on the areas inside Russia’s borders
that are populated by ethnic Ukrainians, the so called “wedges.”
For background on how these
Ukrainian regions in Russia came to be, how Russian officials have treated them,
and how Moscow commentators are worried about them, see
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