Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 9 – No one yet
knows what the specific content of the law Vladimir Putin has called for to
define the place of the Russian nation, Badma Byurchiyev says; but this
proposal, judging from his earlier actions, suggests that Russia is moving away
from the principles of federation and is returning to its imperial past.
The Kavkazskaya politika portal
observer begins by pointing out that Vyacheslav Mikhailov, the former
nationalities minister who proposed the law Putin now backs, stressed that “’the
Russian nation’ is not a civic political but an ethnic concept” and that its
special status must be enshrined in the constitution (kavpolit.com/articles/natsija_sverhu-29470/).
“If the law is successfully adopted,”
Mikhailov said at the time, then there could follow corresponding changes in
the constitution. The entire
formulation, ‘multi-national people’ must be defined more precisely: behind it
stands the ethnic people of the Russian Federation, a multitude of ethnoses but
not a civic nation.”
As one can see, Byurchiyev
continues, Mikhailov “juggled” the terms “people” and “nation” “like a magician”
before pulling out of his sleeve his “trump card.” Officially, he said, “it is considered that
there is no state ideology, but in reality, a state cannot live without an
ideology.”
“Therefore,” the former
nationalities minister concluded, “our law must have a declaration of
principles as in the US which created a state by declaring its intention or
even the USSR which viewed its goal as the achievement of communism … The goal
of our bill is a Russian nation [“russkaya natsiya”] and its unification.”
To better understand what all this
means given Mikhailov’s playing with terms, “one must return back to events of
several years ago. In February 2014, we remember, staffers of the Presidential
Administration were required to study the works of Nicholas Berdyaev,”
including his “Philosophy of Inequality.”
There, Berdyaev said the following
about nationalities and nationality policy:“Every
nationality in various periods of its existence has various rights. And all
historical natioanlities have varied rights. These rights cannot be equalized.
There exists a complex hierarchy of nationalities. It is senseless and stupid
to equate the right to self-determination of the Russian nation and that of
Armenian, Georgian or Tatar nationalities.”
The émigré scholar continued: “And the nationality question is very
different for small and weak nations and for large and strong ones. For the
small and the weak, the nationality question is an issue of liberation and independence,
one of the formation or preservation of a nation state. For large and strong nations, the nationality
question is about world power and mission, a question of the formation and
extension of the imperialist state.”
Byurchiyev notes that he discussed
this at the time and that many non-Russians viewed the Kremlin’s advocacy of
Berdyaev as a direct threat to their nations and republics (kavpolit.com/articles/berdjaev_i_vertikal-832/).
Now it is clear, he continues, that “our concerns were justified.”
While the staff of the Presidential
Administration has changed over the last two years, “the ideas certainly
remain,” Byurchiyev argues. “The state already for 15 years has been
constructed according to ‘Putin’s plan’ because there are no other subjects of
political will in our country.”
Since 2004, when Putin began to
speak about the construction of a power vertical, the observer says, “Russia de facto ceased to be a federal state.
The next step is to enshrine this change de
jure. Gradually of course” lest it stir up difficulties for the Kremlin as
Putin himself has noted (regnum.ru/news/polit/2201877.html).
“It is curious,” he says, “how this reformatting
is occurring at the level of symbols.” The idea of a law on the Russian nation
was put forward “on the eve of the Day of National Unity” which was designed to
get people to forget the October revolution and on the eve of 2017 which Moscow
has decided to call the Year of Unity (nsn.fm/hots/sovet-po-mezhnatsionalnym-otnosheniyam-2017-god-stanet-godom-edinstva.php
and lenta.ru/news/2016/11/01/thelaw/).
These holidays and the statues going
up are “the very ‘ideological impulses’ for the sake of which the authorities
intend to correct the Constitution and unify the peoples as a mark of the creation
of a civic nation.” But of course, a nation can’t be built from above but only
by shared values. (On this, see Leonkadiya Drobizheva’s article at izvestia.ru/news/642234).
Trying to build a
nation from above as Putin is trying to do won’t produce a nation: it will
generate instead a devotion to serfdom, a rejection of gender equality, a restoration
of a state ideology, an official religion, and new punishments for anyone who
dissents from any of these. Putin’s law on the Russian nation only shows the
direction things are going, Byurchiyev says.
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