Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 11 – Despite all
the hullabaloo in the Russian media about the implications of a new law on the
Russian nation and the management of inter-ethnic relations, Alla Semenysheva,
an advisor to the head of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, Vladimir
Putin has not yet given the order for a draft bill to be prepared.
When the Kremlin leader does so,
Semenysheva tells Darya Garmonenko of “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” then of course
FADN will get to work and come up with a draft; but that has not yet happened.
And she adds that the law may in fact have an entirely different title if and
when it is produced (ng.ru/politics/2016-11-11/3_6857_ethno.html).
But regardless of how that may be,
the advisor to the FADN director continues, the key portion of the law will
concern the management of inter-ethnic relations. But no one should expect to
see a draft soon given that “a law is not written in a week.” Rather this is “a
long process in which all interested sides must be involved.” It may take as
much as a year.
She lists those as being “scholars,
society, national-cultural autonomies, deputies of the Duma and members of the
Federation Council.” Perhaps significantly
and certainly from their point of view offensively, she does not include
representatives of the non-Russian republics who would seem to have a
particular interest.
Experts have been
talking about such a law since 2012 when the Strategy on Nationality Policy was
adopted, Semenysheva points out. And she
insisted that the idea of a Russian people [“rossiisky narod”] is “an
absolutely civic identity: it is not ethnic or political.” But she does not say
how it relates to “rossiiskaya natsiay” or “Russian nation,” something else
entirely.
And then she made her main point:
FADN believes that the most important feature of any new law should not be
definitional but rather the delimitation of responsibilities with respect to
the implementation of nationality policy, potentially a power grab by her
agency and something likely to be opposed by other institutions now involved.
Lev Ponomaryev of the For Human
Rights movement says he supports the idea that people should be united “not
around ideology but around the motherland” but that means there need not be any
law. Trying to adopt one as Putin wants
is “voluntaristic” and could lead to “the splintering of the country because we
have only the appearance of a power vertical.”
According to the activist, the
powers that be are afraid now of the disintegration of the country: “everywhere
we have feudal lords and local princelings who
more or less sit on what Moscow says. At present, the only thing needed
from them is to ensure correct voting, and they so far are fulfilling that
requirement.”
“But the situation could change in
an instant when they understand that the powers have weakened. In that event,
the 90 percent now for Putin could be transformed into 90 percent for exiting
from Russia.” The Kremlin is worried about
this and sees very clearly that “there is no united nation in Russia.”
Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director
of the SOVA Center, also argues that no law is needed. Rather there should be a
lively public discussion of the issues involved. He says that such debates
might clarify the relationship of the Russian political nation and its supposed
Russian Orthodox “nucleus.”
And Mikhail Remizov, the head of the
Moscow Institute for National Strategy, says he favors a law regulating the
management of interethnic relations but opposes one defining any Russian
nation. “The formation of a civic nation,” he argues, “will not occur as the
result of government decrees.”
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