Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 4 – The rising
tide of emigration from the Russian Federation as a whole has attracted
significant attention in Moscow and the West, but this flow has generally been
presented, with a few notable political exceptions, as a search by citizens of
that country for greater economic opportunity.
That makes this “fourth Putin wave” in
many ways very different from the so-called “third wave” in the last decades of
USSR when most of those who left, Jews and Germans, did so for reasons related
to the ways in which their communities were treated by the Soviet authorities.
But there are exceptions to that
explanation, involving those suffering because of who and what they are. As Yevgeniya Baltatarova and Mariya
Khankhunova pointa out in Buryatia’s “Respublika,” “national minorities, gays,
journalists and activists are [now] a major part of the political emigration of
the Putin wave” (respnews.ru/news/specreportazh/bezhency-21-veka).
They do not provide statistics, but
they do suggest that while gays, journalists and activists who leave have
attracted a great deal of notice, members of non-Russian nationalities
generally have not, something they say should be corrected because ever more of
the latter are moving abroad and willing to talk about the repression that
drove them there.
In a 2,000-word article, the two
journalists provide examples from the growing Buryat diaspora not only in the
United States but elsewhere and provide information on which countries offer
the easiest path to asylum, information that may lead even more Buryats to
consider leaving as well.
The kinds of repression that the
Buryat emigres describe to them will be familiar to anyone who tracks developments
among them and other non-Russians: attacks and loss of jobs and income because
of views and actions that the Russian authorities consider unacceptable such as
insisting that their nations were absorbed by Russia in anything but a
voluntary way.
But one aspect of this situation
that Baltatarova and Khankhunova do not mention may be especially important:
The Russian government may be especially pleased to see such activists go
because it lowers the temperature in and the organizational potential of
nationalist movements in the non-Russian republics.
That in turn should lead analysts in
the West to view the non-Russian emigres as an important source of information
about what is going on outside Moscow’s ring road. The testimony of such people
already suggests that at least in some places, nationalism is again growing,
and that Moscow, however much it denies the fact, is frightened by it.
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