Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 21 – By annexing
Crimea, Vladimir Putin has created “the only ethnic Russian republic” within
the Russian Federation, an ethnicization of political life ithere that
will begin by threatening the Crimean Tatars with a new round of repression
and end by threatening more of Russia’s neighbors and Russia itself, according
to Rashit Akhmetov.
In a lead article in the new issue
of “Zvezda Povolzhya,” Akhmetov calls attention to an aspect of the Crimean
crisis that few have underlined. By the actions he has taken, Putin has set up “the
only ethnic Russian republic” [“yedinstvennaya russkaya revolyutsiya”] within
the Russian Federation (“Zvezda Povolzhya, no. 10 (690), 20-26 March 2014, p.
1).
“Today,” the Kazan editor writes, “the
Crimean Tatars face a difficult choice.”
They can either decide to take Russian Federation citizenship or refuse
to do so and become, within 30 days, foreigners on their own land, a status
that he points out could allow Moscow to deal with them as it can with any
other “migrants.”
The Milli Mejlis,”did not
participate in the referendum, boycotted it, consider it illegal, and
consequently it is more probable that the Crimean Tatars” will choose the latter
status, Akhmetov says. If they do, then that will vitiate the meaning of Moscow’s
offer of a reservation of 20 percent of the seats in the new Crimean parliament
for the Crimean Tatars and of its declaration that Crimean Tatar will be the third
official language on the peninsula.
Already, he notes, “certain leaders
of Crimea have begun to say that the lands which the Crimean Tatars had
obtained by unilateral action will be returned to their owners at the time of
the re-registration of such acts on the basis of Russian legislation.” How the
Crimean Tatars would react to that is not difficult to predict.
Moscow thus faces a choice of two
options concerning what to do. Either it
can make maximum concessions to the Crimean Tatars in the hopes of winning them
over or at least dissuading them from resistance – concessions Russian
nationalists would not like – or it can begin “a policy of ‘soft’
deportation,” one that would involve sending the Crimean Tatars to neighboring Kherson
oblast.
If it chooses the latter course, Akhmetov
argues, that will contribute to yet another stage in the international
isolation of the Russian Federation because then what Putin would be doing
would recall for too many “a rebirth of Stalin’s deportation policy.” And to
sustain that would require the rebirth of Stalinism in Russia itself.
The Crimean Tatar issue is complicated,
the Kazan editor says, but it is significant that many Ukrainians, feeling that
the West has not insisted that Moscow live according to the 1994 Budapest
Agreement, are beginning to suggest that Kyiv’s decision to give up the nuclear
weapons on its territory was “a mistake.”
But the most frightening thing of
all is that there is no clear indication that Putin is going to stop with
Crimea, however much he says that
he will or however much many in the West hope that will prove true. Transdnestria
is yet another target, and reaching it would require Moscow to absorb more of
Ukraine.
“The process of ‘the ingathering of
Russian lands’” that Putin loves to talk about is under current circumstances “a
process of taking them away from [the
Russian Federation’s] neighbors,” he writes. And there is a danger that once launched,
there is no going back for Putin and his regime.
“The narcotic of great power
chauvinism requires ever-larger doses,” something that will ultimately under
Putin’s vaunted “power vertical” and the country. And that in turn forces the
Kremlin to erect a new “iron curtain” around itself lest “its propaganda
bubbles” about the defense of ethnic Russians “begin to burst” around it.
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