Northern Peoples View Ethnic Russians who Have Moved There as ‘Aliens,’ Rex News Agency Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – Scholars and officials in the Russian North have picked up on the popular conception there of ethnic Russians who have moved there as an “alien” people, a view that the Rex News agency says in an unsigned commentary that threatens not only inter-ethnic concord but the territorial integrity of the country.

            Last month, Modest Kolerov, editor of the Regnum news agency of which Rex is a part, even demanded that Moscow launch an investigation into such usage lest it spread and cause problems for Russia as a whole (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/09/russian-nationalist-outraged-russians.html).

            Now, the Rex agency has pointed to remarks by Mariya Zakharova, deputy head of the healthcare department of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District that “dental problems” in that republic are concentrated among Russian arrivals, a conclusion she reached on the basis of an academic study that divided its subjects into locals and aliens (iarex.ru/news/83422.html).

            On the one hand, such complaints by Russian commentators are hyperbolic: the share of native peoples in northern regions is small and generally falling, and Moscow controls the police and force structures there (as elsewhere) and can take draconian actions if anything untoward appears likely to happen.

            But on the other hand, what Zakharova and others are talking about reflects a real problem for Moscow. It suggests that ever more people in the regions of the Russian Federation divide the population between locals of whatever ethnic nationality and those sent in from the outside, typically ethnic Russians although not always.

            While Moscow may welcome this apparent diminution in the intensity of ethnic feelings, it has much to fear from an increase in the sense of division between all the people of a given region and Moscow, a division that the central authorities have themselves exacerbated by their assumption of so many of the levers of control locally.

            That may not be a huge problem in the Far North, although Kolerov and his team have always focused on it because of their view that Finno-Ugric nations pose a special threat to Russia;  but it is likely to be one elsewhere and will inevitably undermine support for the highly centralized country Vladimir Putin and his entourage prefer.