Environmentalism and Nationalism Re-Enforce One Another, Especially Given Moscow’s Denunciation of the Former as a Manifestation of the Latter, Baranova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 2 – Environmental and national movements re-enforce one another because they are both about problems in a specific place, Vlada Baranova says. That means both that environmental activism is more likely where nationalism already exists and nationalism affects the way in which environmental movements talk about their problems.

            Those interrelationships are widely known and well-documented, the researcher who specializes in the status of minority languages in the Russian Federation says. But there is another reason the relationship between the two is especially fraught in Russia today (posle.media/ekologiya-ili-etnichnost/).

            And it is this: Moscow and regional officials often attack environmentalists as being nothing more than a branch of nationalist movements and deploy their usual repressive measures against them. But such an approach is counterproductive because is strengthens the nationalists and does nothing to keep the environmentalists from continuing their activities.

            “Ecological problems exist in the majority of the regions of Russia,” Baranova says; “and in some of them arise environmental movements and protests. But they do not find such a response everywhere and instead unite people for the resolution of the most varied problems,” including some not obviously connected with nationalism.

            However, “an important factor in the mobilization of ecological moves in the republics is ethnic nationalism in one or another forms. There, it is precisely ecological arguments which refer to our land and our people, something that makes them able to attract more people to their cause.”

            Because environmentalists use such terms, Russian officials at all levels routinely accuse them of being nationalistic and use such charges to suppress them, Baranova continues. Such accusations are “widely used in various republics by force structures to suppress or persecute all who do not agree with the powers that be.”

            But, according to Baranova, “pressure by the authorities using accusations of nationalism and the ethnicization of political or social conflicts is a vicious circle as they only strengthen one another” and weaken the position of the powers that be.