Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 6 – According to the
results of a new Serbsky Institute survey, people in predominantly ethnic
Russian regions in the Russian Federation are more likely to be depressed and
to contemplate or commit suicide than are those in non-Russian regions (rg.ru/2017/12/05/reg-sibfo/sostavlen-rejting-regionov-rf-po-zabolevaemosti-depressiej.html).
According to a Russian nationalist commentator,
Archpriest Aleksandr Kuzin who is pastor of a church in Shubin, there are
powerful reasons why this is so, rooted in unemployment or the risk of that and
the sense many Russians now have that they aren’t needed by anyone (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/12/06/pochemu_stradaet_imenno_korennoe_naselenie_rossii/).
Tragically,
he says, the Russian authorities have promoted this sense. “Not long ago,” the
mayor of Moscow suggested that there were “15 million superfluous people living
in the provinces,” a statement that only reinforced the feelings of many in Russian
regions that Moscow doesn’t care what happens to them.
In
non-Russian regions, however, the situation is different, Father Kuzin says.
The level of depression was lowest n the North Caucasus, because there unlike
in Russian regions, “the authorities do everything they can to avoid social
dissatisfaction” that could lead to violence or revolt.
That puts such non-Russian regions
in sharp contrast to what is going on in Russian regions, he continues. In the
latter, the authorities “do without such measures believing that the indigenous
population will solve its own problems with work, employment and a sense of being
needed by others and by the country as a whole.”
“In my view,” the archpriest
concludes, “such a policy is based on a dangerous misconception” that Russians
don’t need the help of others and the
state and that it is somehow all right that “precisely the indigenous
population of Russia is the one that suffers” more while the non-Russians don’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment