Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 8 – Under Vladimir Putin, the various nations living within the current borders of the Russian Federation implicitly fall into one of four groups, descending from “the most white” to “the least white,” according to Aleksandra Biktimirova and Anastasya Karkotskaya say.
In an article on why Tatars promote the idea that Kazan is a uniquely monocultural space but have in fact undercut that model by their actions regarding immigrants, the two researchers who earlier lived in the Kazan capital offer some more general ideas about Russian nationality policy (beda.media/special/tatarstan-supergud-politika-multikulturalizma-v-respublike).
(They do so, Biktimirova and Karkotskaya say, both to counter the notion widespread in the early 1990s that Kazan was a criminal capital and to curry favor with Moscow given the republic leader’s pursuit of a more independent line on a variety of other issues.)
Their most provocative idea is that the nationality policy that has taken shape under Putin presupposes “a four-level” hierarchy where “at the top is ‘the state-forming nation’” consisting of ethnic Russians and those who identify with it and below that are other ‘recognized’ [that is, having their own statehood] who look and be counted as ‘Slavic’ or ‘European.’”
In third place, are those residents of the country whose physiognomy and behavior marks them as “’non-Russians.’” And “at the very bottom are the migrants ‘non-ethnic Russian non-non-ethnic Russians’” at one and the same time. This ethnic hierarchy “from ‘the more white’ to ‘the less white’” was implicit or sometimes even explicit in tsarist and Soviet times.
Such a vision of the ethnic composition of the population does nothing to promote goodneighborliness or integration,” the two scholars says. It “doesn’t create links but destroys them.” And unless it is challenged and changed, it will increasingly drive them apart rather than bring them together.
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