Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – The annexation
of Crimea is already becoming “a powerful catalyst” for serious changes in
Moscow’s nationality policy and even on the current principle of the
national-territorial division of the Russian Federation, according to Margarita
Lyange, head of the Guild of Inter-Ethnic Journalism.
In an essay on
the Nazaccent.ru portal yesterday, Lyang says that the way in which Crimea was
absorbed into the Russian Federation and the promises the Kremlin made to the
Crimean Tatars during that process are already having an impact on the
expectations and demands of a variety of non-Russian groups (nazaccent.ru/content/11218-katalizator-krym.html).
She discusses four areas where this
is already the case: the assignment of officials on the basis of ethnic quotas,
the rehabilitation of formerly repressed peoples, the status and alphabets of
various groups, and the configuration of the federation, including the
possibility of the establishment of new federal subjects.
As part of a broader effort to
generate support for the Moscow-sponsored referendum on the unification of
Crimea with the Russian Federation, the Kremlin promised the Crimean Tatars a
de jure quota of seats in the parliament and of positions in the government. De
facto such quotas exist elsewhere, but they have seldom been acknowledged so
openly.
Instead, officials have maintained
at least since Gorbachev’s time that they are choosing only the most qualified
personnel even if in reality they make sure that the most important groups and
especially the titular nationalities are represented in key or at least visible
government institutions.
Once one begins speaking openly of
quotas, Lyange notes, “it is logical to presuppose that they will somehow be
connected” with the numbers a group has in the population. But in the case of
Crimea, the Crimean Tatars who form 12 percent of the peninsula’s population
are being offered and thus will expect 20 percent of the leading posts.
That means, of course, that “the
political weight of a single Crimean Tatar citizen of Russia is one and a half
times more than that of the representatives of other peoples,” Lyange
continues, a situation that one can only hope “all the other residents of the republic
will accept philosophically.”
It may be an improvement to
acknowledge openly what is in fact current practice, but one can hardly expect
that those who are underrepresented as a result – particularly when these are
the ethnic Russians who the Kremlin regularly proclaims to be “the state
forming nation” of the country – will be entirely happy about this.
A second way in which Crimea will
affect nationality relations in the Russian Federation, Lyange continues,
concerns the future of the 12 nations who were deported by Soviet leaders.
President Vladimir Putin has promised that there will be “a full rehabilitation
of the Crimean Tatars,” and other nationalities who suffered in the past are
already asking for the same.
Since Putin’s declaration on this
point, the Ingushes have already prepared a suit seeking the return to
Ingushetia of the disputed Prigorodny district from North Osetia. The Russian
Germans have called for the restoration of their republic in the Middle Volga.
And other repressed peoples have indicated that they will now seek full
compensation as well.
A third cluster of issues sparked by
or at least intensified as a result of what is happening in Crimea concerns
languages. Moscow has promised that there will be three state languages in
Crimea – Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar. That in itself is not
unprecedented: in Daghestan, for example, there are more.
But there is a serious issue. Since
1997, Crimean Tatars have used the Latin script rather than the Cyrillic-based
one required by Russian Federation Law. Some Kazan Tatars want to change the
alphabet their nation uses to the Latin script, and they will be able to invoke
the Crimean precedent.
Elsewhere, language issues are
likely to intensify. A few days ago,
Anatoly Grigoryev, head of the Karelian Congress, called for the introduction
of three state languages – Russian, Karelian and Finnish, arguing that “the
status of the Republic of Karelia is no longer than that of the Republic of Crimea,
and we have no fewer rights.”
And the fourth way that Crimea is
likely to affect nationality policy in the Russian Federation concerns the
nature of Russian federalism as such. Up to now, those subjects have been of
two kinds: ethno-national republics which have more rights, and non-ethnic
oblasts and krays which have fewer.
But “now in our Federation has
appeared a subject with the rank of a republic but which does not have any
relation to an ethnic division,” Lyange points out. That could “transform the table o ranks of
the administrative division of the country” because the krays and oblasts “will
want to return to the issue of [their] status,” employing Crimea as a
precedent.
That could lead to moves to
eliminate the difference in the constitutional and legal status of republics,
on the one hand, and oblasts and krays, on the other, but if that appears to be
the case, the republics will certainly see this as a threat to themselves and
contest it. At the very least, this is
another way in which Crimea will heighten ethnic tensions within Russia.
Another way in which Crimea is
likely to have an impact concerns “major ethnic communities living outside of
national republics.” According to Lyange, on the basis of the Crimean
precedent, “they can aspire to the introduction in krays and oblasts of their
native language as a state language.” Tatars in Nizhny Novgorod could certainly
ask for that.
Obviously, all these things are
going to be controversial, but Lyange expresses the hope that they can be “discussed
inside the country ... quietly and without resorting to hysteria” and what she
calls “Maidan-like xenophobic terminology.”
There is little reason to think that her hopes will prove true in the
ethnically overheated Russia of today.
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