Ethno-National Identities in Russia Intensifying as is Civic Russian Identity, Drobizheva Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 5 – Many had expected Tatar officials and scholars to make use of the 13^th Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia, held this year in Kazan, to make an impassioned defense of the rights of non-Russian peoples and of their languages. But at the plenary session at least, that did not happen.

            The closest any of the Tatar speakers at the opening of the congress came was when Ildar Gilmetdinov, chairman of the Duma’s committee on inter-ethnic relations and head of the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of the Tatars, said he was ignoring the speech that had been prepared for him and would speak from his heart (idelreal.org/a/30036752.html).

            The deputy said that officials keep promising to present a concept paper on the study of native languages but “no one has seen it yet.” The only document that has been prepared, he said, is a draft law creating a register of numerically small peoples, something the Russian Federation needs but that isn’t as critical as one about national languages.

                Valery Tishkov, former director of the Moscow Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, former Russian nationalities minister, and chief proponent of making the study of non-Russian nationalities entirely voluntary, chaired the meeting but didn’t make a speech, leaving the task of presenting Kremlin’s position to others.

            Leokadiya Drobizheva of the Moscow Institute of Sociology did that. She said that the construction of a single civic Russian nation had already been constructed and that recognition of this was simply a matter of time. Ever more residents of the Russian Federation identify as rossiyane, she said, something that reduce interethnic and interreligious tensions.

            At the same time, however, the senior scholar said that ethno-national identities are strengthening as well, as indication that in her mind at least the strengthening of the civic national identity need not come at the cost of ethnic ones as many have assumed and some have feared.

            From the point of view of non-Russian concerns, perhaps the most important speech was delivered by Marina Martynova of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology who pointed out that “the first and chief hit on national education was made in 1950 by the decree concerning the voluntary choice of the language of instruction.”

After that time, she said, “the number of those studying in non-Russian language schools had unceasingly fallen,” exactly the point many non-Russians have made about Vladimir Putin’s push to make the study of non-Russian languages voluntary while keeping the study of Russian compulsory.

Despite the upbeat remarks from the first speakers to the conference, Olga Artemova of the Moscow Institute spoke about the difficult state of ethnology in Russia as a result of the dramatic fall off and in some places elimination of ethnographic instruction in universities and of budgetary places for those where such instruction is still available.

If that trend continues, the field will inevitably age and contract; and there won’t be the experts necessary to evaluate this most sensitive area of public life. As a result, the political leadership almost certainly will make decisions with less input about the situation among the non-Russians, further tilting policy in the direction of the ethnic Russian majority.