Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 25 – Rumors have
been swirling this week that the Kremlin is about to disband the non-Russian
republics and reorganize the country into larger regions centered on major
cities. Whether these rumors are true is
an open question, but if Moscow does take that step, it almost certainly will
be triggering far more serious regional challenges to itself.
Last Sunday, Fauziya Bayramova, a
leading Tatar activist, told a Nizhnekamsk meeting that she had been told by an
unnamed source in the entourage of Tatarstan’s president that “a decision to
liquidate [Tatarstan] had already been taken in Moscow” (in Tatar at azatliq.org/a/28318521.html; in Russian at golosislama.com/news.php?id=31270).
The idea, she said, is that Moscow
wants “to unite around major cities and around Kazan. The position of the
president of the republic will not remain nor will any other national
republics. [And] there won’t be a law on state languages of Tatarstan. According
to Bayramova, Tatarstan will be united with Mari El, Chuvashia and Ulyanovsk
oblast but not with Bashkortostan lest Muslims form a majority in the new
entity.
Bayramova’s remarks have triggered
discussions in Tatarstan and the Middle Volga.
Most experts dismiss her remarks as baseless, arguing that despite
Moscow’s oft-expressed desire to amalgamate regions and republics, her
description of what the center plans to do is highly improbable (idelreal.org/a/28327820.html).
Most observers
suggested that such a move would be harmful for Tatarstan and would be resisted
by any Russian oblast or other non-Russian republic Moscow might try to include
within any such entity. And they
suggested that such rumors are an entirely natural phenomenon given fears about
whether Moscow’s power-sharing treaty with Kazan will be extended this summer.
But one commentator with whom Radio
Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service spoke, Konstantin Strokin, a political
scientist in Mari El, raised the question as to whether such a larger entity to
be called a guberniya or something else might represent a serious challenge to
Moscow itself.
He said that Finno-Ugric nations
would oppose any such unity given the sad experience of their co-ethnics in the
former Komi-Permyak autonomous district which Putin forced into Perm kray a
decade ago and that they would see any such development not as a new
combination but as “the swallowing” of their republics by others, Tatar or
Russian.
But perhaps Strokin’s most important
observation is the following. He suggested that “in principle, it isn’t very
probable that Moscow, having overcome financial asymmetry will go along the
path of creating a super-nation and multi-confessionall mega-subject in which
the share of ethnic Russians would fall below 50 percent.”
To do so, he suggested, would be “an
unjustified risk,” given the kind of political configuration in Russia would
change if it were not a federation of more than 80 subjects but rather one of a
dozen or fewer. Strokin did not say what
many have pointed out: federations with a small number of units are more at
risk of collapse than ones with larger numbers.
Nor did he or any of the other
experts Ideal.Real interviewed mention what almost certainly must be on the
minds of most: A century ago, the Maris, Chuvash, Udmurts, Mordvins, Komis,
Komi-Permyaks, Kalmyks and Tatars came together a declared an independent
Idel-Ural Republic.
That state did not exist for long:
it was suppressed by the Red Army. But
memories of it continue to exist and may serve as a warning to Moscow. Were the
center to create a super-region in the Volga-Urals region – and that is what “Idel-Ural”
means in Turkic – Moscow would confront a force far stronger than Tatarstan or
any other republic.
Indeed, Moscow’s first act of ethnic
engineering, the division of Tatars and Bashkirs into two republics in 1920,
was intended to prevent the formation of that kind of Turkic Muslim challenge. (On that action, its fallout and its current
resonance in the Middle Volga, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/05/window-on-eurasia-is-stalins-first.html.)
Given the ethnic complexity of the
Middle Volga region, Strokin argued that if Moscow is going to adopt a
cities-based reorganization of the country, it will more likely begin it in Siberia and the Far East, rather
than taking all the risks that creating a super-region around Kazan would
entail.
But in pointing to Siberia and the Russian Far
East as candidates for such formations, the Mari El political scientist
implicitly makes reference to the other major portion of the Russian Federation
which has a tradition of regionalism that Moscow has fought in the past by
carving it up into smaller krays, oblasts and national units.
Siberian regionalism – or “oblastnichestvo”
as it is called in Russian – has a long history, one that has generally been
predicated on the idea of autonomy rather than independence. But despite that
Moscow – tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet – has very much opposed it. (For
background, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/06/window-on-eurasia-russian-officials.html).
Many assume that because most of the
population in Siberia and the Russian Far East is ethnically Russian – or at
least so classified by Russian census takers – the region poses no threat to
the territorial integrity of the country and think that the aspirations of
Siberians are limited to autonomy in any case.
But in a new comment for the
AfterEmpire portal, regionalist Yaroslav Zolotaryov points out that Poland,
Ukraine and Belarus provide “a precedent for Slavic states getting independence
from the Russian empire.” They did so, however, by fighting for it rather than
by seeking ever more autonomy (afterempire.info/2017/02/23/siberia-australia/).
“However,”
Zolotaryov continues, “one must not talk as if history is over. In Siberia,
which ‘the center’ continues to exploit, more radical movements may arise … Today
Moscow brands all Ukrainian patriots as ‘Banderites.’ Perhaps, it will call the
future fighters for Siberian independence ‘Potaninites’” in honor of the
founder of the oblastnichestvo 150
years ago.
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