Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 26 – The Russian tricolor has been so discredited by Putin’s actions in Ukraine that the non-systemic Russian opposition in emigration has called for the use of a new Russian flag with roots in medieval Novgorod. That appeal has attracted some attention (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/03/russia-having-bloodied-tricolor-in.html).
But a more important development has been the promotion of new-old national flags among the non-Russian peoples inside the current borders of the Russian Federation, flags that have deeper and more anti-imperial meanings, according to Prague-based Russian commentator Kharun Sidorov (idelreal.org/a/31770274.html).
Sidorov focuses on the appeal of the Bashkir National Political Center, which is based abroad, that calls on Bashkirs opposed to Putin’s war in Ukraine and Moscow’s imperial policies more generally to stop using the current Bashkortostan flag and raise instead the Bashkir flag promoted a century ago by Zaki-Validi Togan (t.me/bashnacional/6647).
The arguments of the Bashkir émigré opposition “are almost identical to those of the foreign centers of the Russian opposition, he says; but any Russian flag has associations with the empire and thus does not have the immediate support that the Bashkir flag of Togan does as a symbol of resistance to that empire.
In Bashkortostan, the national movement has been divided between those prepared to go along with Moscow in order to benefit their own people and those who believe that they must oppose the imperial center to achieve that end, Sidorov argues. Now, after Putin’s war in Ukraine, it has become impossible for them to march under the same flag.
“The war in Ukraine radically changed this situation,” he says, “because it has become more than a war with Ukraine. In fact, it is now a dividing line between supporters of two world orders” which had uneasily coexisted but which now cannot do so any longer. And so the anti-imperial Bashkir nationalists have turned to the flag Togan raised.
That not only distinguishes them from the collaborationist nationalists who continue to fly the flag the Bashkirs have been using for the last 30 years but also sets them on a collision course with Moscow while providing a model for other non-Russians unhappy about their fate within Russia.
"Of course,” Sidorov says, “it will seem to many that all this is no more than some virtual games. But if they were not important, the Kremlin and its ideologues would not devote so much importance to symbolic politics,” to ensuring that symbols from the past cannot return to haunt the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
The importance of such symbols in struggles for political change can be seen elsewhere in the former Soviet space. In both Georgia and Belarus, those opposed to the imperial past and its collaborators early on chose to raise new national flags also rooted in the history of their two peoples.
Something similar has been happening among non-Russians within the Russian Federation. Consider what has happened in the Komi Republic, Sidorov says. There, the authorities at Moscow’s apparent insistence, adopted the Togan flag of Bashkortostan as their own precisely so the much larger Bashkir republic couldn’t do so.
In response, the independent Komi national movement has rejected that flag and insisted on using one that takes as its origin Scandinavian banners, including with a Scandinavian cross. That means that in the future, a very interesting and “symmetrical” development is possible, Sidorov says.
If the national movements of the Komi Republic and Bashkortostan succeed, he suggests, then “the current Komi flag will again become the flag of Bashkortostan, and the flag of Komi itself instead of that will become a flag with a Scandinavian cross.” No wonder Moscow is concerned.
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