Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 5 – On the
influential Eurasian portal, Valery Korovin says that “Ukraine is an example of
what happens with a society that consists of a multitude of identities in the
event it creates a civic political nation” and that that should be enough of a
warning to keep Russians from pursuing the same goal.
The director of the Moscow Center
for Geopolitical Expertise who is a member of the Russian Social Chamber says
that the current project of creating a civic Russian nation “is the path which
has led Ukraine to bloody chaos, collapse and the loss of sovereignty” and
which is leading in response to the collapse of the EU and European states (evrazia.org/article/2881).
What makes Korovin’s argument
potentially so important is that he is speaking a language which most Russians
and especially in the Kremlin will find congenial and convincing and
consequently may result, after much ballyhooed discussion, to the quiet
shelving of the civic Russian nation prospect.
Korovin argues that “the subject of
such an all-Russian political identity is the atomized individual, an
individual who is cleansed from all types of organic identity be they ethnic,
cultural, or linguistic if one is speaking about the languages of numerically
small peoples as well as other types of identity.”
All identities, “except the
all-Russian civic identity” are to be eliminated; and what that means is that Russian
society is to be thrown into a melting pot and to dissolve into a single common
and otherwise faceless collection of people, some liberal theorists in the West
and in Russia in fact welcome.
“Such a model, of course, is
destructive for the multiplicity of Russia … [it] is full of conflict … [and
it] has not worked even in the US.” Moreover, it has failed in Europe, in the format
of the EU … and it has provoked a reverse process, the sharpened and insistent
restoration of identities” that it tried to destroy.
If Russia were to adopt it by legal
fiat, Korovin continues, that would “transform Russia into a territory of chaos
for all this is an absolutely irresponsible and bestial liberal experiment,”
one that violates the organic growth of collective identities and their
all-Russian consolidation, something very much to be desired.
Europe should not be a model for
Russia. Rather it should be a warning against the wrong path to take. But there is a closer and more obvious
example, the analyst argues, and that is Ukraine where the government is
seeking to create a single Ukrainian political nation in place of the multitude
of ethnic and religious communities that have existed there.
But even worse, it has plunged
Ukraine into “a civil war, chaos, mutual anger, and self-destruction.” Can
anyone who loves Russia want that to happen to her? That is the question that
should be addressed to and asked about any who call for the creation of a civic
Russian nation in Russia because it would have exactly the same effects there.
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