Immigrants from Central Asia have Profoundly Affected Muslim Community in Russia, Leader Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 21 – The Muslim community, both its composition and its leadership, have been “transformed” by the influx of migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus over the last two decades, according to Muslim leaders and experts on religion and society in the Russian Federation.

            Mufti Rushan Abbyasov, the leader of the Muslim community in the suburbs of Moscow, says that 25 years ago, most Muslims in his parishes were Tatars or Bashkirs; but now, the ethnic composition not only of the believers but of their leaders is far from diverse, reflecting the influx of immigrants (profile.ru/society/prikrylis-nikabom-spor-o-religioznom-dress-kode-obnazhil-fundamentalnye-problemy-rossijskih-musulman-1551378/).

            The religious infrastructure that was set up in the 1990s and early 2000s, he continues, “turned out to be not prepared for such an influx of believers.” There are too few mosques and so many immigrants instead of attending them are forming their own “illegal prayer rooms.” That too is “a source of tension.”

Road Trip through Predominantly Ethnic Russian Regions Throws Light on How Different They are from One Another

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 22 – The predominantly ethnic Russian regions around Moscow are generally discussed as a group, one in which they share common demographic and economic problems. But last week, Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid, made a 5,000-kilometer road trip through them and found an amazing diversity.

            Viewed from his car, the blogger says, three of the federal subjects, non-Russian Tatarstan, and predominantly ethnic Russian Samara Oblast and Krasnodar Kray, looked good. Their roads were generally in good repair and facilities along them provided the services one needed (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/19598 and kasparov.ru/material.php?id=669DFCED9EDE6).

            At the other extreme was another predominantly ethnic Russian region, Voronezh Oblast, El Murid said, a place that looked as if it has already been bombed, as the Russian anecdote has it. Its roads if one can call them that are a disgrace and the services along them are sparse and of poor quality.  Other regions El Murid visited were in between.

            The blogger noted that there was no difference in the condition between paid highways and free public highways. Bringing all the roads and the services up to them is a task of 20 to 30 years; but it will never be carried out by leaders who are distracted by “nonsense like ‘we can repeat.’”

            El Murid’s point is that the leaders of the country should be focusing on those issues rather than on their aggressive plans abroad, but his road trip report is also a sign that oblasts and krays often lumped together are in fact very different from one another, the result of a variety of factors that deserve to be the object of attention. 

Children and Grandchildren of Russia’s Top Leadership Not Serving in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 22 – A major source of Soviet patriotism in World War II was the fact that the country’s top leaders, including Stalin, sent their sons and grandsons to fight; but today, members of the Russian elite successfully kept their offspring out of the military, something that is likely to offend ever more Russians as the war lengthens and combat losses mount.

            In a nearly 7,000-word article, Mira Livadina, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, documents the fact that the offspring of Russia’s president, prime minister, spokesman, other senior officials and politicians, and active supporters of Putin’s war have avoided service (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/07/22/elitnye-roda-voisk).

            At the very least, this pattern will raise questions in the minds of those who have lost a child, grandchild or husband; but more than that, it will increase the divide between the population and the Kremlin and undercut Putin’s continued effort to portray what he is doing in Ukraine as an extension of what the Soviet leaders and people did during World War II.

Since March 2022, Almost 7,000 Russians have been Fined for ‘Discrediting the Army,’ But More than 200 have Fought Back with Some Success

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 19 – Since Putin began his expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, nearly 7,000 Russians have been fined for “discrediting the Russian army,” a charge that is so elastic that the authorities have applied it widely in the hopes of repressing any signs of dissent against the Kremlin’s policies.

            But what is striking is that more than 200 Russians who have been fined on this account have fought back in the courts and even achieved some success, according to an investigation carried out by Vyorstka media and OVD-Info (verstka.media/bolshe-200-rossiyan-dobilis-peresmotra-shtrafov-za-diskreditaciyu-armii).

            Of these, 119 have successfully challenged the imposition of these finds in appellate courts, 89 have succeeded in getting the appeals courts to return their cases for rehearing to courts of first instance, and 47 have had the amount of the fines originally imposed significantly reduced, the investigation found. 

            On the one hand, those who have achieved such success are only a microscopic portion of those who have been fined. But on the other, they likely constitute a large portion of those who have chosen to appeal and thus show the way that others could follow with at least the possibility of achieving some relief – and thus limiting the Kremlin’s ability to use this repressive policy.

Biden’s 2024 Captive Nations Week Declaration Continues His Re-Invigoration of that Commemoration

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 19 -- When the US Congress passed the resolution in 1959 requiring the president to issue a proclamation on Captive Nations Week every July, this measure was viewed both by its authors and those opposed to it as directed against the repression of nations by communist regimes.

            Until the collapse of the Soviet bloc and then the USSR in 1989 and 1991, these messages served as an indicator of how the US government viewed these communist. In the years since, the messages have celebrated the freeing of nations in the former communist states and focused on nations who remain under communist rule.

            That is appropriate because of how much progress in fact has been made, but it is incomplete for two reasons. On the one hand, it ignores the fact that the Captive Nations Week resolution focused not on communism as a doctrine but communism as a practice that involved repression not limited to communist states.

            Victories over communism led to many victories, but many who proclaimed themselves as non-communists or even anti-communists have continued or revived the kind of ethno-national repression that the Soviet communists carried out in the past and that the few surviving communist regimes, China first among them, are carrying out to this day.

            And on the other hand, focusing on progress alone not only overshadows just how much evil has been and is being carried out by nominally non-communist regimes and also how much work remains to be done in countries like the Russian Federation. There, for example, two of the nations the resolution spoke of, Idel-Ural and Cossackia, remain victims of repression.

            Two years ago, President Joe Biden corrected this trend and returned to the principles underlying the original resolution’s concerns about the victims of imperialist oppression regardless of what those carrying it out call themselves (whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/07/15/a-proclamation-on-captive-nations-week-2022/).

             Biden made three key points: First, Captive Nations Week is not about anti-communism per se but rather about repression, regardless of what the states carrying it out call themselves. Only three of the regimes he lists among the world’s most repressive are communist – Cuba, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

            The other six are either former communist countries or have never been communist – Russia, Iran, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – and it is no accident that the US president listed Russia first among all these countries, not because of its communist roots but because of its continuing imperialist behavior.

            Second, Biden was explicit that governments which repress their peoples at home as all nine of these countries do seek to repress others abroad through various kinds of aggression abroad. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only the most obvious case of this; and it is no surprise in the current environment that the American president focused on that.

            And third, and this may be the most important aspect of the Captive Nations Week resolution this week, Biden makes clear that Americans can’t remain unconcerned about such repressive be it within countries or between them and their neighbors. They must “stand in solidarity with the brave human rights and pro-democracy advocates around the world.”

            The US leader concludes with the following words: “May Captive Nations Week reinvigorate our efforts to live up to our ideals by championing justice, dignity and freedom for all,” words that apply not only to communist countries, post-communist countries, countries that have never been communist and the US as well.

            In his just-released proclamation of Captive Nations Week this year, Biden continues the course toward a broader understanding of what this memorial day is all about at a time, when as he says, “the struggle between dictatorship and freedom continues” (whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/07/19/a-proclamation-on-captive-nations-week-2024/).

            The American president highlights the fact that “Russia is waging an illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.  For 2 years, the Ukrainian people have fought with extraordinary courage and bravery ... The autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine and if we will let this illegal aggression go unchecked.” 

“We cannot let that happen,” Biden continues, but he adds that “we support the equal and inalienable rights of all people everywhere,” including the oft-violated rights of women, indigenous groups, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and those wrongfully detained around the world.

All this represents an expansion of the ideals that lay behind the original Captive National Week congressional resolution in 1959, but all are consistent with it. And this year, faced with challenges to democracy within the United States, Biden adds an especially important but equally consistent point: “we must continue to secure our freedom and democracy here at home.”

Kremlin’s Failure to Focus on Nationality Problems Threatens Survival of Russian Federation, Fetisov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 19 – For 20 years, the Kremlin has failed to address nationality issues in the Russian Federation and worked hard to keep the systemic parties from doing so; but as a result, now that the issue of migrants has risen to the top, the country finds itself at risk of moving along a path like the one that led to the demise of the USSR, Dmitry Fetisov says.

            The political scientist who is a frequent commentator for the Club of the Regions portal says that the issue of immigrants has been “artificially” exacerbated by the media and would never have gotten so serious had it not been for the Kremlin’s insistence that the systemic parties not talk about it earlier (club-rf.ru/theme/591 ).

            In the Kremlin itself, Fetisov continues, there are both supporters and opponents of toughening policies regulating immigration. “But the parties have not been addressing this problem.” The last to do so was Rodina in the 2005 Moscow city elections; and after that, the Putin regime ordered the systemic parties not to touch this issue lest it spark inter-ethnic conflict.

            But now that the issue of immigrants has captured the minds of so many Russians, the failure of the parliamentary parties to address it seriously means that there is a danger that the Russian people will turn to extra-systemic parties and that there may arise “large protest actins which we have not seen for a long time,” the political scientist says.

            Indeed, he argues, “this is a dangerous situation as it actually was one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union.” When officials failed to address problems agitating the people, the people turned to others. Addressing the migrant issue requires the cooperation of all branches of government, but the legislative one, under pressure from the Kremlin, isn’t involved.

            According to Fetisov, Putin’s decision to disband the ministry for nationality affairs was “one of the major mistakes” he has made because it allowed those not focused on the issue of ethnic conflicts to take actions, such as lobbyists for the construction industry, who want to have cheap labor, to take actions that now threaten the country.

Islam's Rise in the Middle Volga Major Defense of Tatar Ethnic Identity, Kazan Scholars Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 19 – Over the last decade, surveys show, ever more Tatars and especially those who are younger have become practicing Muslims; but the rest, who are still in the majority among the Tatar community who have not become more Muslim have been more subject to assimilation into a non-religious “neo-Soviet people.”

            What that means, the Tatar-Bashkir service suggests in a survey of these polls published so far only in Tatar, is that the survival of the Tatar nation likely depends on whether more Tatars turn to Islam fast enough to counter the assimilatory pressures that Moscow hopes will reduce the salience of nationality for them (azatliq.org/a/33030820.html).

            While the article did not discuss whether this pattern holds in other non-Russian nations that historically have professed Islam, the likelihood is high that it does. And that helps to explain what Ruslan Aysin says is Moscow’s decision to try to solve its ethnic problems by portraying Islam as extremist (idelreal.org/a/vystroennaya-strategiya-borby-so-vsem-nerusskim-musulmanskim-ruslan-aysin-o-sobytiyah-poslednih-mesyatsev/33042598.html).

            The Tatar analyst describes how Moscow propagandists in recent weeks have played up a statement by a Kazan Muslim leader saying that men have the right to beat their wives. While that isn’t anathema to Putin and his traditional values, it is something likely to alienate those on the fence in the Muslim republics.

            If Aysin is correct in his analysis, Russia is likely to see a new campaign against Islam featuring any statements by Muslim leaders that Moscow propagandists and other officials can present as extremist in the hope that many nominal Muslims will decide not to become more Islamic and thus remove one of the chief props that has been holding up their ethnic identities.