Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – One of the major
complaints Russian nationalists have is that some non-Russians have national
republics within the Russian Federation but that the ethnic Russians do not.
Instead, they live primarily in predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays
that Moscow defines as “non-ethnic.”
The center’s reasons for doing so
were suggested by the late Russian émigré historian Ivan Kurganov in his 1961
book, The Nations of the USSR and the
Russian Question. Were such regions declared ethnic Russian places, he argued,
that could tear the country apart (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-small-but-significant-sign-russian.html).
As a result, the government of the
Russian Federation for all its deference to the ethnic Russian majority in
practice has been unwilling to take that step. But now the Russian nationalists
have found a powerful new ally and that could trip the balance, complicating
Moscow’s problems and triggering more nationalism among Russia’s non-Russians.
The Moscow Patriarchate of the
Russian Orthodox Church announced its change of position on this issue in a
most unusual way. Abbess Kseniya, the head
of the patriarchate’s legal affairs office, made it in the course of commenting
on Chechnya’s decision to permit pupils to wear the hijab in schools (rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=77707).
The Russian Orthodox Church, she
said, is “against anyone violating the secular character of Russian education but
considers completely permissible taking into account the traditions and customs
of each specific region of the Russian Federation,” Chechen in Chechnya and
Russian in predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays.
From a legal point of view, the
abbess continued, “federal legislation does not give students and teachers in
Russian schools the right to wear religious dress, and in this sense, the
decision of the Chechen parliament goes beyond the limits” of the law. But that
is not the end of the question, she said.
The law allows federal subjects to
take into consideration “popular traditions and beliefs” in arranging their educational
programs. Thus, while “in ethnic Russian regions, the wearing of the hijab in
school would be a clear violation of the secular principle of general
education, in Chechnya, this is completely permissible as a popular tradition.”
The implications of this for Russia
as a whole are enormous: it opens the door not only for non-Russians to insist
on their national traditions being taken into account, but it lays the
foundation for a claim by predominantly ethnic Russian regions to act as ethnic
Russian entities in this regard, twin developments that will feed off each
other.
And it means that the country’s
common legal space, in which Vladimir Putin put so much effort to restore a
decade or more ago, is now at risk once again, first and foremost not by
non-Russians but by ethnic Russians who under the terms of Abbess Kseniya’s
argument are likely to demand that their values inform what oblast and kray
governments do.
That has the potential to create
problems not only between ethnic Russian and non-Russian federal subjects and between
each of these groups as a whole and Moscow but also within them because many of
the predominantly ethnic Russian regions, like many of the non-Russian areas,
are ethnically mixed in complex ways (rufabula.com/author/cyprian_d/1561).
The Kremlin is certain
to oppose Kseniya’s position, but the fact that she has articulated it is
equally certain to energize a new kind of Russian nationalist discourse – and a
new level of non-Russian nationalist discourse as well, something the central
authorities will find it increasingly difficult to suppress.
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