Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 3 – “The strong ‘kulak’
or entrepreneur whom the Bolsheviks did not like and whom their spiritual heirs
now hate has greater influence in the Koenigsberg oblast than in other regions
of the Russian Federation and its interests are the ones that the federal
authorities and their local representatives neglect in the first instance,”
according to Koenigsberg activists.
As a result, they say, this middle
class is increasingly opposing the oblast authorities and “basing itself on the
ideas of regionalism,” leading to the rebirth of the kind of regionalist or
even secessionist thought that was widespread in that Russian exclave in the
early 1990s but that had receded almost to the vanishing point after the coming
to power of Vladimir Putin.
On the website of Koenigsberg
activists, “The Baltic Avant Garde of the Russian Resistance,” Astrakhan-based
commentator Dmitry Altufyev describes how this has come about in an article
entitled “The Russo-Balts:
On the Question of the Formation of a Regional Baltic Identity in Koenigsberg
Oblast” (zarenreich.com/rusobalt/).
According to Altufyev, the people of
the oblast are ready to form a new ethnos, the Russo-Balts, because they lost
their ties to the ethnic groups of which they were a part when they were moved
into the exclave and are subject to entirely different influences from the
adjoining foreign countries, especially if they are in business or among the
younger age groups.
The Astrakhan writer says that “the
borders of this regional subculture are in no way connected with the borders of
Koenigsberg oblast as a subject of the Russian Federation. If there were two or
three oblasts on the territory of the exclave, they would most likely represent
themselves as the regional subculture named here.”
“In that cultural landscape, the
vertical brick Gothic is dominant” and there is “no basis for the development
of the poetics of Orthodox churches, peasant izbas or Russian birch treets.
They are something alien to the majority of local young people,” he continues.
All this makes the region “an extremely favorable place for the construction of
a new identity.”
There is clear evidence that is
already happening. “The residents of the
most western Russian region significantly more often view themselves as
residents of a corresponding territory than as representatives of their ethnic
groups,” a reflection of their economic activity, the impact of outside
propaganda, and their distancing of themselves from “’the Russian world.’”
Despite that, Altufyev says, there has
not been on offer a clever definition of this regional or new ethnic identity,
although he says that “it is possible that the time has come to openly declare”
it. That must begin with the recognition
that “Russian state identity is a completely empty thing.”
“It has no real content” for
Koenigsbergers who do not feel any links to a land “from Chechnya to Chukotka.” Many older people hold on to a misty Soviet
identity, but their grandchildren increasingly feel that they have the right to
define their own identity and they are defining it according to their
geographic and socio-economic position.
Their “growing alienation from
Russia is obvious” to anyone who pays close attention. They speak of having
visited “Russia” as if it were a separate place while they talks about being in
this or that European city or country. And
they rarely include themselves in the expression “with us in Russia it is like
this or that.”
Thus, already at “an unconscious
level,” they see themselves apart from Russia and apart from Russia’s ethnic
definitions. Indeed, “the de-ethnicized
population consists of more than 85 percent of the total number of residents of
the oblast.” Such people are ready for a new identity, not based on Soviet
patterns but by necessity reflecting some of the past.
But any such identity, Altufyev will
inevitably lead them away from Russia and toward integration with Europe where
regional identities and ethnic identities sometimes correspond and sometimes
don’t.
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