Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 14 – Russian have
lost the will to integrate the North Caucasus into a common Russian social and
political space, according to a Lezgin analyst, and some officials in the
Russian force structures, she says, are even now seeking to demonize the North
Caucasians and drive them into the status of impoverished “satellites” of
Moscow much like South Osetia.
In a 1500-word article on the
website of the Federation of the Lezgin National Cultural Autonomies of the
Russian Federation, Alina Manafova makes these and other claims and offers what
she suggests is evidence for them (flnka.ru/obshestvo/1259-zagnat-kavkaz-v-dikost.html as well as on more
general Caucasian sites such as www.kavkasion.ru).
The Lezgin journalist begins her
article by noting that high profile dismissals and even arrests of North
Caucasians from senior posts has led “a number of Caucasus experts” to suggest
that “a broad campaign has begun in Russia to drive out Caucasians from all
spheres of public life, from business, from science and from government
service.”
These firings and arrests, Manafova
continues, suggest further that “the process of tearing away the Caucasus by
definite forces has begun in Russia.” And she suggests that various observers
believe that these processes began when Vladiimir Kolokoltsev became Russian
interior minister and established a program to fight “’ethnic crime.’”
Arrests for such crimes and the dismissals
of senior people from the Caucasus are only the tip of the iceberg of this
program, she argues, and she reports that many more junior officials in Moscow
who are from the Caucasus have lost their jobs and that young people have been
unable to join those institutions or even serve in the military.
“Our sources assert,” Manafova says,
“that there exist in the [Russian] force structures lists of influential people
from the Caucasus whom the siloviki are ‘following’ and ready to detain” with
as much media attention as possible.
Moreover, “noisy campaigns” like
those saying it is time to stop “feeding” the Caucasus or that “Stavropol is
Not the Caucasus” which were “launched by marginal figures” not only are
spreading to the general population but also being fanned by articles and
programs in the Moscow media.
She continues that “forces
antagonistic to Russia” -- whom she implies imply include some Russian
officials as well as foreign groups -- want to leave in the North Caucasus
Federal District only the Caucasus republics and by so doing cut them off from
the rest of the country.” And these unnamed “forces” want to arrange things so
that as Taymuraz Mamsurov, the head of North Osetia, put it last week, “when
the Caucasus falls away, no one scream that the process of the disintegration
of Russia has begun” (region15.ru/blogs/salbiev/2013/02/06/poka-ne-vymerli-mamontovy/
and glava.rso-a.ru/main-news/1660/).
Moreover, Ruslan Kurbanov, a Lezgin
commentator who speaks and writes frequently for the Moscow media, has, as
Manafova points out, “often written that the will to the deeper integration of
the North Caucasus in the all-Russian cultural and civic field is dying among
the Russian political elite.”
That death, she suggests, is the
result among other things of “the powerful process of the nationalization of
Russian consciousness.” According to a
Russian intellectual who prefers to remain anonymous, she says, this
development is “ever more clearly manifested” in declines in the willingness of
Russian elites to “integrate” the Caucasus.
With Russian nationalism effectively
killing any desire for “a super-national ideology or super-national projects”
after the cataclysms of the 20th century, this Russian commentator
says, Russians for the first time “feel themselves simply as a people rather
than tied to such super-state tasks.”
Today, he says, “Russians feel a
centuries-old tiredness to carry out a great mission” or spending additional
efforts to deal with “the nationality borderlands.” And Manafova adds that
Aleksandr Prokhanov, the chief editor of “Zavtra,” agrees. He says that “the
will to life has disappeared among the Russians” since they had “the great
state which they had built over a millennium taken away from them after 1991.”
Prokhanov adds, Manafova continues, that
Russians are “divided,” that they have taken “a defensive” position and that
their “nationalist consciousness is the result of a deep depression.”
In addition, the Lezgin analyst says,
Russians have been encouraged to think that they are weak by both forces within
the country and by foreigners, including the Americans. The latter, she suggests, call the North
Caucasus “Russia’s abroad and Stavropol a Russian Kosovo,” implying that it
might be taken away from Moscow in a similar way
That suggestion, which she does not note
originated in a Russian commentary, is “a provocation,” Manafova’s Russian
interlocutor says, one intended as part of “a program being carried out by Western
countries for delinking the peoples of the North Caucasus” with the rest of
Russia.
Some Russians are involved as
well, the Lezgin analyst says, and often in ridiculous but dangerous ways. Thus, she continues, some Russian media
outlets have suggested that the Lezginka, “the national dance of the Caucasus
peoles,’ is “a threat to the Russian people” and must be suppressed.
Such attitudes and actions,
including recently those of Cossack groups in Stavropol kray, “have [only] one
goal, and that goal is the ever greater separation of the Caucasus and the Caucasian
peoples from the Russian people and from Russia.”
What will that mean for the
Caucasians should this happen? According to her Russian source, Manafova says,
these forces “are preparing for the Caucasian republics the fate of South Osetia
and Abkhazia … that is, these forces are preparing to transfer the republics of
the North Caucasus to the status of semi-satellites of Russia,” to cut them off
from all modernization, and to throw them back “to the level of the developing
world.”
Thus, this ongoing campaign to split
the North Caucasus off from Russia has as its purpose the additional goal of “blocking
the access of the Caucasians to education, to the achievement of the heights in
science, business and state service” and thus degrading them from their current
status as one of the most educated and ambitious communities of our country”
into a collection of “uneducated wild tribes.”
Manafova’s article itself, of
course, may be a kind of provocation by some in Moscow or elsewhere who want to
help form opinion in the North Caucasus or elsewhere, but whether it is that or
not, her words do reflect the perceptions of at least some in both the Russian
center and in that region. And those
perceptions are likely to color ever more deeply how each sees the other.
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