Paul Goble
Staunton,
Oct. 25 – Many assume that Vladimir Putin’s drive to recentralize the country
is going from victory to victory, but in the non-Russian republics, Vladimir
Lepekhin says, people believe that Moscow is in fact growing weaker and that
separatism is an increasingly viable option.
They
have been encouraged in this by Tatarstan’s resistance to the renaming of the
title of its leader and by the support they are receiving from Turkey and other
foreign powers, the director of the Institute for the Eurasian Economic
Community says; and Moscow must respond harshly now lest the situation get out
of hand (svpressa.ru/politic/article/314213/).
Moscow
has resources it can use in this direction that it has not fully exploited,
including redrawing regional borders, installing ethnic Russians as heads of
the non-Russian republics, and promoting “Russian national great power
consciousness,” another Moscow commentator, Fyodor Biryukov of the Institute of
Freedom says.
How
widespread and strong such revanchist attitudes are is uncertain, but their
appearance now suggests that there is growing sentiment in the Russian capital
to punish the Tatars for their opposition to the law on local and regional
administration in order to send a message to all non-Russian republics that no
resistance will be tolerated.
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