Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 9 – Support in the
city of Moscow for Vladimir Putin’s new conservative message has always seemed
“insincere,” according to a Russian commentator. But in ethnic Russian regions,
that message has been warmly echoed by the actions of national conservative
groups.
In an essay on the Svobodnaya pressa
portal yesterday, Vladislav Maltsev suggests that all too often attitudes in
Moscow are assumed be typical of the country as a whole, largely because the
central media and even the blogosphere usually ignores what is happening in
predominantly ethnic Russian regions beyond the ring road (svpressa.ru/politic/article/79980/).
On December 28, he notes, a group of
local national patriots, holding torches and carrying pictures of two Russian
soldiers killed in Chechnya, marched through Voronezh with a banner declaring
that “Russian Heroes of the Chechen War, You are Not Forgotten!” just as they
had done in March 2013.
According to Maltsev, “similar attitudes
exist in other regions [of Russia] but for some reason such actions are taking
place only in the capital of the Black Earth region, although you wouldn’t call
that place especially close to the battles in the North Caucasus.”
The occasion for the latest march, he
suggests, was Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov’s decision to erect a memorial to
those who fought against Russia in the 19th century, an action that
led to a fight in the Russian Duma between Aleksey Zhuravlev and Adam
Delimkhanov but also to anger among Russian nationalists across the country.
That anger is seldom reported in the
Russian media or blogosphere, Maltsev continues. “The last time” these outlets focused on the
region was in June 2013 when there were clashes between local people and
geologists prospecting for nickel, clashes that many in the capital wrote off
as backward or worse.
But the complaints behind that action
and subsequent ones, he says, reflect “a revolt of citizens oppressed by
capital [and] a revival of traditionalists against ideas coming from the West,”
feelings that fit at least in part with Putin’s new conservatism and the ideas
of the National Bolsheviks and AKM movement that most people had assumed had
disappeared.
“Russian conservatives in recent times
have discussed more than once the marches of the supporters of traditional
family values in France and Serbia,” Maltsev points out. “Something similar” to
those marches has “taken place on the initiative ‘from below’ in Russia as
well, again in Voronezh.”
There on November 4, 1200 people took
part in a “March of the Family” organized by “local Protestants” but open to
“all who wanted to participate.” Earlier
in the year, there were demonstrations there against sexual minorities and in
the memory of Russian soldiers who fought in Chechnya.
This combination has allowed Voronezh to
brand itself as “’the stronghold of moral and traditional values,’” Maltsev says,
but that Russian city is hardly the only place where such ideas have broad
support.
He cites a 2012 report by the Moscow
Center for Strategic Research which suggested that protests in the Russian
Federation were likely to shift from Moscow to the provinces. And he argues
that the events during 2013 in Pugachev, Arzamas and even Biryulevo confirm
that prediction.
Including Biryulevo on that list may
seem strange because it is district in Moscow. But as Stanislav Apetyan noted
correctly, Maltsev said, Biryulevo “is not really Moscow ... it is in fact
isolated from the rest of the city and more recalls a settlement of an urban
type somewhere in Ryazan oblast.”
Judging from all this, the Svobodnaya
pressa writer says, protests in 2014 especially those in Russian regions
outside of Moscow are likely to have an increasingly “national-conservative
tone.” If Putin continues this line, he could garner ever more support from
that quarter.
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