Eight Years Ago, Moscow began Shift from Promoting a Non-Ethnic Russian Nation to Building an Ethnic Russian One that Included Non-Russians, Gaponenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – In Soviet times, communist ideology required that Moscow always make publicly distinguish between an ethnic Russian nation and the supra-ethnic multi-national Soviet people, Aleksandr Gaponenko says. But in fact, he continues, the Soviets created a Soviet nation despite making that distinction.

            That might be a matter of historical curiosity, the Riga-based Russian commentator says, were it not for one thing: After some initial confusion, post-Soviet elites about eight years ago shifted from trying to create a non-ethnic Russian nation to forming an ethnic Russian one that includes the non-Russian nations as well (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=42929).

            Non-Russians have always suspected that what the Soviets actually meant when they talked about a Soviet people was in fact a Russian nation that would assimilate all the others; and they believe now that talk about a non-ethnic Russian nation is in the same way a cover for the promotion of an ethnic Russian nation to which they are doomed to assimilate.

            Now, Gaponenko has acknowledged that they are right; and that at least since 2014 when Putin carried out his Anschluss of Ukraine’s Crimea, Moscow has been actively and increasingly openly focusing on the formation of an ethnic Russian nation that is charged with assimilating all the others.

            His comments are likely to be taken by many non-Russians as a rare open admission by those close to the Kremlin that what the non-Russians have always feared is in fact government policy and to cause some of them to resist even more strongly efforts to have them identify with a non-ethnic Russian nation they now have more reason to believe is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

            Gaponenko makes two other arguments that are also going to play into the debate about collective identity in the Russian Federation. On the one hand, he insists that a nation is always built from above by elites rather than from below as the result of the recognition of a common fate by large segments of a population.

            And on the other, he says that the real possibility for the construction of an ethnic Russian nation including the non-Russians came only this past year when the Western-oriented media elite fled to the West to avoid service in Ukraine, a flight that has opened the way for the creation of a genuine Russian nation committed to absorbing everyone else.