Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 27 – The much-delayed new edition of Moscow’s “Strategy for the State
Nationality Policy of the Russian Federation” that was presented to Vladimir
Putin yesterday opens the way to both the growth of great power chauvinism and
a new attack on Russian federalism, according to two of the country’s most
distinguished specialists.
The
document, which Putin asked for more than two years ago and which was supposed
to lead to a law defining the non-ethnic Russian nation but hasn’t, at least
not yet, has attracted most attention from Russians and non-Russians for its
elaboration of two controversial concepts, the non-ethnic Russian nation and
the state-forming role of the ethnic Russian one.
Those
remain extremely controversial. Both ethnic Russians and non-Russians see the
notion of a non-ethnic Russian nation as a threat, in the first case because
they believe that it dilutes the special nature of the Russian ethnic nation
and in the second because they see it as opening the way to a new wave of mass
assimilation directed against them.
And
the document’s support for the ethnic Russians as the state-forming nation at
the same time raises problems as well. On the one hand, it appears to
contradict the notion of a supra-national non-ethnic Russian nation; and on the
other, it certainly formalizes a hierarchy of nations within the Russian
Federation with the Russians at the top and the others below.
Many
Russian nationalists are welcoming the new document, describing it as opening
the way to “a new order” in Moscow’s nationality policy (m.fontanka.ru/2018/10/24/068/,
http://nazaccent.ru/content/28507-strategiya-2-0.html and topwar.ru/148881-sensacija-v-rossii-pojavjatsja-russkie.html “new
order.”
And
for exactly the reasons they are, both non-Russians and specialists on ethnic
conflict are expressing concern about what it will mean both to everyone who
isn’t an ethnic Russian and to the structures and laws that have provided the
non-Russians with at least a minimal defense against the centralizing and Russian-nationalizing
impulses of the center.
Lyailya Mustafina
of Radio Svoboda’s IdelReal portal interviewed three of the most
important. Margarita Lyange, head of the
Guild of Inter-Ethnic Journalism, said the reason the strategy document had not
been finished before now is that Russian nationalists wanted it to tilt even
more in their direction than it does (idelreal.org/a/29565691.html).
Emil Pain, an ethno-sociologist who
is perhaps Russia’s most distinguished specialists on ethnic conflict, said
that the document was “extraordinarily eclectic,” simultaneously drawing ideas
from the theories of civic nationhood and invoking others that have a direct
relationship to “the idea of an imperial organization of society and a
hierarchy of ethnic groups.”
The latter appears to be the more
important in terms of what Moscow is likely to do next, the ethnic conflict specialist
says, and reflects a victory for Russian nationalists, “both pro-Kremlin and
anti-Kremlin,” who have “struggled for several generations” to declare the
ethnic Russians the state-forming and dominant nation.
The authorities, Pain continues, had
tried to avoid making this concession in the past, but over the last year,
Kremlin decisions and especially the elimination of the requirement that
students in the non-Russian republics study the language of the titular
nationality, show the direction the wind is blowing in Moscow.
A third expert, Sergey Arutyunov, an
ethnographer who specializes on the North Caucasus, says that the new strategy document
strengthens the already requite strong “unitarist tendencies” in Russian
society and points to a further degradation of what remains of federalism. According to him, this will lead to “a dead
end” and “nothing good.”
The three Russian experts are almost
certainly right on all points; but it should be kept in mind that strategy
documents in the Russian system are not laws and are typically crafted in such
a way that leaders can pick and choose what portions of them they will in fact
insist on and what ones they will ignore.
That makes the comments of Putin and
two others directly involved with the preparation of this document especially
important. First, Putin himself indicated in accepting the document that he
would show far more understanding to ethnic Russian concerns than to any
non-Russian ones (lenta.ru/news/2018/10/26/gipsy/).
The Kremlin leader
suggested that it was entirely understandable why ethnic Russians don’t want to
live near Roma encampments because the latter are centers of crime and the drug
trade, an ethnic slur that almost certainly will be read by some Russians as an
indication that hostility to non-Russians will be defended at the highest
levels.
Second, Oleg Melnichenko, head of
the Federation Council committee on federalism, said that the new document
needed to be revised even before it is finally confirmed because it does not
correspond to the requirements of the already approved Strategy on the Special
Development of Russia (nazaccent.ru/content/28510-chleny-soveta-po-mezhnacionalnym-otnosheniyam-predstavili.html).
Academic Valery Tishkov,
a former nationalities minister and head of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology
and Anthropology and a leading proponent of civic Russian national identity,
agreed and extended Melnichenko’s words to suggest Moscow should stop deferring
to the titular nationalities of non-Russian republics on appointments but
select the best people regardless of ethnicity.
That may sound
neutral and anodyne, but it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s moves in that direction,
declared even before he became CPSU leader, that triggered violence in Kazakhstan
when he replaced an ethnic Kazakh with an ethnic Russian in December 1986 and were
a significant contributing factor to the disintegration of the USSR.
And third, Tishkov himself suggested
that the new strategy document should lead Moscow to change the way it handles
nationality and language in the upcoming 2020 all-Russian census (nazaccent.ru/content/28509-prezidentu-predlozhili-obnovit-etnicheskuyu-chast-vserossijskoj.html).
He said that “it is necessary to
shift from the practice of requiring respondents to indicate their nationality
only according to one of their parents and their native language as the
language of the corresponding nationality.”
That too may sound neutral and even
respectable, but it has some potentially negative consequences for non-Russians
first of all and ethnic Russians as well. On the one hand, it will muddy the waters
as to what nation an individual belongs to, weaken that attachment and allow
officials to decide even more than now which one he or she is a member of.
And on the other, it will almost
certainly be used by those who think as Tishkov does to water down the share of
non-Russians in the non-Russian republics and thus provide a superficially
plausible justification for doing away with such republics by combining them
with predominantly ethnic Russian regions.
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