Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 25 – The flow of
ethnic Russian refugees from Ukraine is giving Russia “a truly historical
opportunity to restore the ethnic balance in the North Caucasus Federal
District” by reversing the decline in the share of the Slavic population there
over recent years and thus defending Russia against the Muslim south, according
to Vladislav Maltsev.
In an article on the Svobodnaya
pressa portal, Maltsev says that this is because many of the Russian refugees who
have come from Ukraine “do not intend to return” and thus should be settled in
Stavropol, “on the fruitful lands which have been deserted in the last decades
by the local Slavic population” (svpressa.ru/blogs/article/96169/).
Ten days ago, Russian Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev issued a directive according to which Stavropol is to take in “compatriots
from abroad” and that Moscow will pay for this. His order followed a statement
on July 11 by Aleksey Kirichenko, head of the inter-ethnic affairs department
of the Ministry for Regional Development that the ethnic mix in that kray could
be improve by settling refugees from Ukraine and Semireche Cossacks from
Kyrgyzstan.
That government program is now being carried
out. On August 19, Irina Kuvaldina, the
deputy chairman of the Stavropol government said that some 5972 people in
these two categories would be settled “primarily”
in the eastern districts of the kray, an area which has seen an outflow of
ethnic Russians and an influx of North Caucasians in recent years.
In
the implementation of this project, Maltsev says, “the Russian Orthodox Church
has played an important role.” Patriarch
Kirill last December noted that the outflow of Slavs from Stavropol “threatens
the way of life in Stavropol and the republics of the North Caucasus,” stressing
that ethnic Russians are “the bulwark of peace” in the region.
The
Stavropol eparchate and the Synod Department for Work with Cossacks have been
actively involved as well, the Moscow commentator says. The only question now
is the scale of the program. The number
of Slavs coming in is far smaller than those who have left. “For the effective
solution of the situation,” he writes, the latter must be increased “many
times.”
But that may be difficult. The
number of refugees from southeastern Ukraine is large – Georgy Fedorov, a
member of the coordinating council to help them, says they number more than
730,000 -- problems in directing them and the cost of their support are
beginning to turn some local people against them (nazaccent.ru/content/12891-chrezvychajnaya-situaciya.html).
Most of the refugees are in Rostov
oblast, and officials are concerned about how to house them given the approach
of winter. Distribution still appears to
be haphazard and more at the initiative of officials from various regions than
the result of a carefully developed and applied central Russian policy.
According to a report in
Nazaccent.ru today, “various regions of the Russian Federation are sending the
government of Rostov oblast information” concerning the numbers they are
prepared to take, how they plan to settle and employ them, and so on. In many
cases, this system is working but not in all.
Russian sociologists have already
noted that indigenous Russians are unhappy with the fact that Moscow seems to
be more concerned with helping refugees coming into Russia than it is with
helping its own citizens. As Sergey
Bondarev, deputy governor of Rostov, put it, they are asking why Moscow is
helping others before it helps its own.
But most Russian officials,
Nazaccent.ru reports, say that such objections are still rare and that most
Russians are quite ready to bear the burden of taking into refugees and seeing
them settled in areas where they can be integrated into Russian society. Stavropol is likely to be a test case of this
in the coming months.
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