Moscow ‘Losing the North’ By Treating It Like a Colony, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ Journalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 13 – Moscow’s plan to build trash dumps in the Russian North has backfired on its originators, Tatyana Britskaya says. The center thought it could do what it liked without consulting the people only to discover that by its arrogance and incompetence, it has created a civil society that now stands against Moscow and its representatives.

            In a Novaya gazeta report entitled “’Moscow, Leave!’” the journalist says that “the power vertical has collapsed in Shiyes, and the Kremlin’s appointed representatives have come to be viewed as alien outsiders” who are treating the north as a colony these officials and Moscow can take as much as they want (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/11/13/82711-moskva-uhodi).

            As the meetings of the protesters have grown in number and size, the northerners are now calling for Moscow to get out, Britskaya says. “The Northern regions are turning away from the center which over the last year has lost its electoral support. That is the real price of Shiyes” after the people wrote to Moscow but got “fines, arrests, and clubs of the Russian Guards” back.

            Officials in Moscow “didn’t think about the mentality of the Northerner,” one of the protesters says. “Free people fled year during the time of serfdom. Free people were exiled by the tsar and in the 1930s. The North is a land of free people.”  Moscow forgot that, miscalculated, and now the free people have formed up as a civil society of their own.

            The protests against Moscow’s colonial trash policy have taught them how to “resist and unified the anarchists and communists, the liberals and the radicals … ” and not unimportantly, the ethnic Russians of the North and the local Finno-Ugric people, the Komi, the journalist continues.

Nikolay Udoratin, who represents the national organization of the Komi people, spoke to the most recent demonstration against the construction of the Moscow trash dump. He “began his speech in Komi but then shifted to Russia. He called for unity to help the republic. When Nikolay is picketing and the police hassle him, he responds in Komi.”

“The police do not understand him, the state has reduced instruction in the national language, they are taking it out of the school program, but people continue to struggle for their identity. The fight for Shiyes … is thus also part of the war for [the Komi], for their traditions, nature and unspoiled taiga.”

Until recently, Komi officials had not gotten involved in the Shiyes controversy because it isn’t on their land; but now they have too – and that has had the unintended consequence of showing to the Komi that the officials Moscow has imposed on them are working for Moscow and not for them.

Moscow and its representatives “hoped for our weakness,” one of the protesters tells Britskaya. “But if we rise up as a single people, brother for brother, we will break their backs. Shiyes is ours. We are changing history forever.  The entire country is watching us!”

The powers that be are trying to ignore the fact that support for the Shiyes protest has spread to 24 population centers in the North; but soon they won’t be able to ignore that a civil society has emerged in the North and that is members won’t be voting for Moscow’s candidates ever again.