Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 15 – Mikhail Shcheglov,
head of the Society of Russian Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, argues that
the non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation constitute just as much
a threat to the existence of the country as did the union republics to the
survival of the USSR.
According to him, Moscow has
succeeded in blocking this threat in Chechnya by finding a Kremlin loyalist to
run things and in Daghestan by imposing a Russia; but it has failed to take the
steps needed in Tatarstan to ensure that it does not once again become a
secessionist leader (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2019/03/15/respubliki_v_sostave_rossii_instrument_sohraneniya_nacionalnogo_mnogoobraziya_ili_ugroza_raspada_strany/).
In Tatarstan,
Shcheglov argues, the government continues to be in the hands of the same
category of people who dominated Tatarstan in the early 1990s when it was a
real problem: rural Tatars who are far more nationalistic than urban ones and
who encourage other Tatars to maintain a hostile attitude toward Moscow.
The Russian activist from Kazan
would clearly like to see all non-Russian territorial units eliminated because
they represent a continuing problem. Toward that end, he clearly favors the
Daghestani strategy for Tatarstan given what he appears to believe is the
extreme difficulty of finding anyone as loyal to the Kremlin there as Ramzan
Kadyrov is in Chechnya.
But more generally, he says, the
country should dispense with such entities in favor of national cultural autonomies,
which can be organized wherever non-Russians live and which can be subsidized
by the state. Such organizations pose
less of a threat to the country and promise to give support to ethnic groups
widely dispersed as are the Tatars.
Second, he says, if the republics
are done away with, Moscow will be able to devote more attention and resources
to ensuring the survival of the numerically smallest nationalities, many of
whom are at risk. Supporting them in his mind is clearly more important than backing
larger ones who may be a threat.
And third – and this is the most
important part of Shcheglov’s argument – Moscow must take steps to ensure that
ethnic Russians retain their share of the population in the republics until the
latter are done away with. According to
him, their presence is “no more and no less than the most important defensive
position as far as the territorial integrity of Russia is concerned.”
Shcheglov’s words are important for
two reasons. On the one hand, despite their emotional content, they are an
accurate reflection of the thinking of many in the Russian capital about the
future status of republics and their eventual replacement by national cultural
autonomies.
And on the other, they call
attention to a problem Moscow doesn’t talk much about but that clearly is on
the minds of many there: the declining share of ethnic Russians in the
non-Russian republics. As many appear to
have forgotten, an important component in the role the union republics played
in 1991 was their increasing ethnic homogeneity.
In the three decades before the Soviet
Union came apart, almost all of the union republics became more mono-ethnic,
the result of a combination of Russian flight and higher birthrates and longer
life expectancies among non-Russians. As a result, they were “decolonized” in
this way even before they gained their independence.
Today, Russian flight remains at
least as significant from the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation
although demographic differences between Russian and non-Russian nations are
less significant than they were in the union republics prior to the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
As a result, some but far from all
non-Russian republics are becoming more non-Russian – this is especially true
in the North Caucasus – and it is this trend rather than the differences in legal and constitutional status of the non-Russian republics now compared to the past is likely to make all
the difference in the longer term.
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