Being Nenets or a Nenets Resident No Laughing Matter Despite Jokes about Only Region to Reject Putin Amendments

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 8 – “Lord, make me a Nenets!” Russian national democrat Sergey Sergeyev, the author of the Russian Nation or the Story of the History of Its Absence,” says in response to the Nenets Autonomous District being the only federal subject to vote against Putin’s constitutional amendments.

            Sergeyev’s humor, commentator Vadim Sidorov points out, draws on the famous remark of General Yermolov who conquered the Caucasus for Russia. On returning to St. Petersburg, he said “Lord, make me a German!” in recognition of the fact that in the Russian Empire being German was more prestigious than being Russian (region.expert/nao/).

            Another joke from the past has also been updated after the Nentsy voted as they did. It is now said by many Russians that “what is good for a Russian is death for a Nenets,” an observation like Sergeyev’s that contains more than a small dollop of truth. Indeed, a close examination of the vote in their district says far more than these anecdotes capture.

            Members of the Nenets nation form only 18 percent of the population of the Nenets Autonomous District. Most of them voted against the amendments to protest plans to eliminate their own political unit by folding it into the Arkhangelsk Oblast. But what is significant, Sidorov says, is that many non-Nenets residents voted against the amendments as well.

            The Nenets simply aren’t numerous enough to account for the result. And what it thus shows is not so much an ethnic protest but rather the rise of “a clearly expressed regional identity,” one in which even “the Slavic majority” displayed “a clear regional-political patriotism.”

            That should serve notice to both the Putin regime and its opponents that those in the republics and regions who voted against the Kremlin did so not on ethnic grounds or at least not on ethnic grounds alone. In the Nenets AD, it was “’the political Nenetsy,” Russians who supported the region, who provided the basis for the majority against Putin.

            “By insisting on the preservation of the independence of the Nenets AD, its Russian residents did not demand taking away from its name the ethnic component” that continues to offend many “’fighters against ethnocracies’” in the Russian capital and elsewhere, Sidorov suggests.

            To be sure, he continues, in the Nenets AD, “there really is no ‘oppression of ethnic Russians.” But what is more important is that they displayed no interest in but rather clear opposition to those who would homogenize the country and eliminate all ethnically defined republics and regions.