Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 23 – Approximately
1,000 Russian villages are dying out each year, experts say. That is bad enough
for those who believe that with their end so too ends an important part of
Russian cultural life. But still worse
from their point of view, the villages which do survive are increasingly
populated by Central Asian workers and their families.
And their arrival, Aleksey Toporov
says, is changing the cultural landscape in dramatic ways. Mosques are going up
even as Orthodox churches are closing. Schools are dominated by Central Asian
children. And worst of all, the Central Asians are often backed by local
Russian officials (stockinfocus.ru/2018/01/23/nuzhny-li-nam-aziatskie-kishlaki-vmesto-russkix-dereven).
Rais Suleymanov, a specialist on
Islam at the Institute of National Strategy who is viewed by many Muslims as an
opponent, says that what is occurring in many rural regions of the Russian
Federation is “a kind of process of colonization” in which “the local
population is beginning to be replaced by those culturally different people
coming from the outside.”
On the one hand, he says, “the
government is interested in ensuring that the rural population continues to
exist.” But on the other, it is not supporting the kind of infrastructure which
will keep villagers from deciding they have no choice but to flee to the
cities. That forms “a vacuum” and people
from the outside are filling it.
“In Central Russia, the Volga region
and the Urals,” these outsiders are “migrants from Central Asia. In the Far East, the [replacement] population
is coming from China.” As a result, in two decades of so, “we may encounter a
situation when the villages which historically were Russian become Tajik and
Uzbek.”
Suleymanov says he wants “to stress
that the migrants as a rule try to come on a legal basis. They purchase homes
from the villagers who are moving to the cities. They settle with their
families, marry and have children, and invite their relatives to join
them.” But over time, as the ethnic
balance in the villages change so too do the attitudes of the new arrivals.
They may come with the intention of
integrating, but later, the difference in culture may lead to conflicts between
those who have come and those who still remain.” And in those conflicts, not only do officials
typically take the side of the new arrivals but those who lose these fights,
generally the indigenous Russians, then choose to leave even more rapidly.
Officials insist on describing these
conflicts as being simply day to day clashes, Suleymanov says; but in fact, “in
practice” they “always have some kind of ethnic or religious component.” And they will continue to arise, driving ever
more Russians out and leaving the countryside ever less Russian, all the more because
of the high birthrate of the Central Asians.
Over the last year, Yevgeny
Cherninn, a demographer at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, say that
official figures suggest the number of Central Asians living in previously
Russian villages went up from 120,000 to 145,000 but that the real figures and
the increase are much larger than those.
Those numbers are only a small
fraction of the approximately 14 million gastarbeiters who entered Russia last
year, but the numbers are enormous when one is talking about declining villages
which have in many cases fewer than 100 residents each.
It is time, Toporov says, for Russians
to start thinking “about their own and prevent the emergence of ethnic and religious
“enclaves” which may become breeding grounds for “extremists of all kinds as
Aleksey Grishin of the Religion and Society Center has pointed out many times.
Russians may be pleased that they
have lived “shoulder to shoulder” with Muslims for many years, Toporov
concludes, but they are not going to like it if over villagers there arise not
restored churches with gold-plated crosses but instead “crescent moons and “instead
of the sound of bells, the calls of the muezzins.”
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