Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 11 – Few Moscow specialists
on ethnicity are more disliked by non-Russians than Academician Valery Tishkov,
former nationalities minister and a close advisor to Vladimir Putin (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/09/tishkov-continues-his-campaign-against.html).
But Tishkov along with other senior
specialists on nationality issues apparently were not involved in the preparation
of the constitutional changes Putin is currently promoting (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/03/nationality-specialists-not-behind.html).
And now Tishkov has expressed his anger and concern about what some of the
changes may mean.
Non-Russians are unlikely to view
Tishkov as their ally after reading his declaration, but they will may view him
as someone who is not rushing nearly as headlong toward defining the Russian
Federation as an ethnic Russian nation state as some of those behind the
changes seem committed to doing.
In an open letter disseminated last
week, Tishkov discusses the complex relationship between ethnic Russian (russky)
and civic or state-defined Russian (rossiisky) and argues that some of
the language now slated to be included in the Russian Constitution ignores
these complexities and opens the way to danger (materik.ru/rubric/detail.php?ID=103216).
(Because Tishkov’s letter focuses on
the differences between these two terms, they are given in the Russian below
where he uses them.)
For the past 30 years, the
academician writes, he has focused on “the development and affirmation of the
national rossiisky project.” The essence of that project, he says, is “that
after the drama of the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, the rossiisky
people established a sovereign state under the name Russia (Rossiiskaya Federation).”
“In all respects,” he continues, this
state became “one of the most important nation-states with all the attributes
characteristic for the largest nations of the world. Among these attributes are
an existence under a single sovereign power, a solid sense of shared
citizenship with a common historical memory, culture, values, [and] legal
norms.”
And all these things existed within “an
historically existing multi-ethnic and poly-confessional nature.”
“Over the course of these 30 years, rossiiskaya
identity replaced the Soviet, squeezed out ethnic particularism and in
recent years became among rossikiye people the primary identity among
all the other forms,” Tishkov says. “The term rossiisky people became a
restoration ofhte pre-revolutionary name and at the same time was an extension
of the Soviet people, despite the large losses with the disintegration of the
Soviet people.”
“The russky component
retained a dominant position in it was had been the case over the course of all
of the fatherland’s history.” According to Tishkov, “thanks to common
intellectual searches with the support of the authorities and the approval of the
institutes of civil society, a formula for the preservation of ethno-cultural
multiplicity within the assertion of all-rossiisky unity and an
understanding of the rossiisky people as a poly-ethnic civic nation was
born.”
But not everyone accepted this, and “often
the terms ‘rossiisky people’ and ‘rossiyane’ were treated as euphemisms
like ‘Martians.’” This led to some truly absurd outcomes. For example, for some
who favored russky nationalism, “russkiye lads in the NATO armies
of Latvia and Estonia could be representatives of ‘one people,’ but soldiers
from among the Tuvins, Chechens, or Bashkirs who were defending rossiiskye borders
were viewed as ‘civilizationally different’ peoples.”
And as a result, he continues, “all-rossiisky
patriotism on which our country rested and rests often was sacrificed to semi-mythic
‘worlds’ Slavic, Turkic or Finno-Ugric in nature.” And escaping from this for
many was made difficult by outdated ideas about the nature of ethnicity and
nationality.
Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have
done much to overcome these problems because they understand that “civic political
nations today form the international community, and they will varying degrees
of success resolve the problems of stability and the development of multi-ethnic
and poly-confessional communities.”
“Nation states have not left the
historical arena and remain the most powerful forms of human collectives,”
Tishkov says. “Russia does not have a different variant now just as it did not in
the past.”
“The russky and rossiisky
always went hand in hand as two forms of identity which do not exclude one another
of the basic population of the country. It is clear that without russkiy,
there is no rossiisky, for russkiye are not only the demographic
majority but russky language and russkaya culture are the core
and dominant component of the rossiisky.”
But “this is only one side of the issue,”
the academician says. “The other side is that without Rossiya, there will
not be the russkiye as a people, and possibly its language and culture as
well. And he quotes with approval philosopher Georgy Fedotov’s conclusion that “Rossiya
is not Rus [and] if the russkiye will ignore [the others] … Rossiya will not
exist.”
In the revised
text of the constitution, Tishkov regrets, “there is no reference to the ‘rossiisky
people’ or the ‘rossiskaya nation.’” Nor is there, he acknowledges any “category
‘russky people.’” Instead what is found is murky and indefinite language which
will lead to confused politics, especially if the document should last 30 to 50
years as Putin has suggested.
That should be remedied, the academician
suggests, but he clearly does so with the fear that that will not happen and
that those who want to speak about “the language of the state forming people,”
the russkiye, have a different and potentially disastrous agenda for the
future.
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