Moscow Will Learn that Releasing the Genie of Aggressive Nationalism is Easy but Putting It Back in the Bottle is Hard, Memorial Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 7 – The Putin regime has found it convenient and useful ,to release the genie of aggressive Russian nationalism, Olga Abramenko says; but it will find it far more difficult to put it back in the bottle lest it grow to such an extent that it leads to the kind of social explosion that will threaten the state.

            The expert at the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center says that her observations on this point are prompted by the chain reaction of events that have followed the brutal detention of ethnic Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg (svoboda.org/a/dzhinn-natsionalizma-oljga-abramenko-o-posledstviyah-ksenofobii/33465926.html).

            These detentions which left several people dead and seriously wounded enjoyed the support of the population, Abramenko suggests, an indication of the high level of xenophobia in Russian society as a whole. But they quickly led to a response from Azerbaijan that was anything but useful for the Kremlin.

            To limit the damage it has inflicted on itself, Moscow will have to try to put the genie of aggressive Russian nationalism back in the bottle or it will face even more problems abroad and at home, a lesson that the current regime’s predecessors learned the hard way – and that the Putin regime appears set to learn the same way again.

            Tragically, this learning process is going to be slow given that the regime’s point man on nationality policy, Igor Barinov of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs has declared that “what is good for Russians is good for everyone,” a slogan taken from Vladimir Zhirionovsky and a dangerous misconception.

            What is needed, Abramenko says, is a recognition and proclamation of something else: “if things are bad for minorities, then things will be bad for all,” including for a regime that now appears to think differently.