Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 11 – Fighting
separatism by “liquidating” the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation
is “equivalent to fighting fire with gasoline,” a Eurasian theorist says,
because the separatist threat those republics present is far less than the ones
now posed by predominantly ethnic Russian regions.
In a 6,000-word article, Rustem
Vakhitov, an expert at the Lev Gumilyev Center, says that “the stereotype” that
those committed to the survival of the Russian state in its current borders
back the idea of eliminating the non-Russian republics and that the only ones
who support such republics are members of the titular nationalities.
But that view is wrong, he says,
because state-thinking people who have studied the subject most closely
recognize that “the liquidation of the national republics and their replacement
by extra-territorial ethnic subjects anytime soon would be dangerous and
absurd” (rb21vek.com/ideologyandpolitics/682-bpochemu-nelzya-likvidirovat-nacionalnye-respubliki-v-sostave-rf-vzglyad-derzhavnikab.html).
That is because, Vakhitov argues,
such “an operation” would have just the reverse effect that its backers hope
for: It would lead to an intensification of separatist movements not only among
the non-Russians who would have lost something but among ethnic Russians in the
regions who would see this as a chance to gain even more.
Last fall, Mikhail Prokhorov’s
suggestion that Moscow should do away with the non-Russian republics provoked a
firestorm on the internet, and this had not ended when on January 22, Valery
Korovin, “the right-hand” man of neo-Eurasianist leader Aleksandr Dugin, made a
similar proposal (club-rf.ru/exclusive/valeriy-korovin-natsionalnye-respubliki-dolzhny-vlivatsya-v-ukrupnennye-subekty-rf/).
In fact, Korovin
was proposing something else entirely, Vakhitov says. He argued that “after the liquidation of the
national republics, the indigenous non-Russian peoples of Russia” would be
allowed to form extra-territorial organizations a la the Austro-Marxist Otto
Bauer to protect their ethnic identities and heritages in ways that would not
promote separatism.
(Few noticed,
Vakhitov points out in an aside, that Dugin himself had made a similar proposal
the month before in an interview he gave to the Sakha portal “Zemlya Olonkho” (tengrifund.ru/aleksandr-dugin-o-desuverenizacii-respublik.html).)
Vakhitov dissents from the position of
both of his Eurasian colleagues because he says that “national republics within
the Russian Federation not only do not present a great danger with regard to
nationalism and separatism but on the contrary, [these republics] were created
and function as instruments to restraint the nationalism and separatism of
their titular nationalities.”
Vakhitov begins
by examining the arguments of Korovin and Dugin. He says the two “do not notice that they are
contradicting themselves.” They think that elimininating the non-Russian
republics would reduce the number of federal subjects but in fact, their approach
would increase the number from 83 to 199, with 57 territorial subjects and 142
extra-territorial ones.
The new system
would strain the budget and create a whole series of new controversies between
Moscow and the nationalities directly which would promote rather than limit
nationalist and separatist movements among those losing republic status because
they would feel deprived of something they had and would believe that they were
threatened with “ethnocide.”
As Vitaly
Kamyshev has pointed out in his essay “Will the Russian Federation Survive
Until 2014?” Vakhitov says, this trend can already be seen in the case of
Buryats who are angry that the Ust-Orda and Agin districts have been folded
into predominantly ethnic Russian regions and thus cut off from Buryatia (www.apn.ru/publications/article17435.htm).
Problems with
this system would begin even before it was fully put in place, Vakhitov
continues. Moscow couldn’t do it all at
once, and consequently, those nationalities who were not yet its victims would
draw some obvious and invidious conclusions about the center’s intentions from
what happens to those who were.
Moreover, the
elimination of non-Russian republics would lead to a sharp increase in the flow
of migrants to Moscow and other major cities and probably involve the Russian
Federation in disputes with foreign countries and international organizations
of one kind or another (nazdem.info/texts/356).
But the “main”
thesis of Dugin and Korovin is elsewhere: They hold that “the national
republics are pre-eminent sources of separatism.” That is simply false, as Russian history
shows. Whenever the center has been weakened, “separatism breaks out not only
in the national republics” but in purely Russian ones. And there is reason to believe that could
happen again.
Thus, Vakhitov
argues, “separatism and autonomism are not equivalent to nationalism” and far
closer to separation are those regions where the population is able to form a
common identity, regardless of whether it is “ethnic or simply” regional.
Russian regions are often more able to do that than are the internally divided
along ethnic lines non-Russian republics as the research of Leokadiya
Drobizheva has shown (www.isras.ru/files/File/Socis/2010-12/Drobizheva.pdf).
The Soviet authorities appreciated the dangers
in both. In Russian areas, Moscow
controlled the situation by controlling population flows and parachuting in
leaders so that they would not promote regional identities. And in non-Russian
republics, the center put a Russian in second place in the local power
structure and Russians in the population to control the situation.
But Gorbachev’s
perestroika largely destroyed these levers and now the center lacks the
mechanisms of control it had in both cases.
These “mechanisms,” Vakhito argues, need to be “renewed,” because that
will offer far better protection against separatism than the elimination of the
non-Russian republics which would almost certainly have the opposite effect.
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