Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 8 – In the course
of a discussion about ethnicity and nationalism, three of Moscow’s leading specialists
on these issues – Emil Pain of the Higher School of Economics, Leokadiya Drobizheva
of the Institute of Sociology, and Igor Klyamkin of the Liberal Russia Foundation
– provide a wealth of fundamental insights.
Below are summaries of some of them
which strike the author of these lines as particularly important (liberal.ru/articles/7415).
Pain:
“Is ‘the Jewish Question’ Closed?”
Much of Pain’s presentation is an
elaboration of his recent articles (cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/putins-view-that-bolsheviks-laid-atomic.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/russian-imperial-syndrome-keep-ethnic.html).
But he makes two important additions.
On the one hand, he suggests that
political propaganda can affect how people view others at a general level but
has little impact on hos they view them on a personal one. Such propaganda “worsened the attitude of
Russian society to Ukrainians in the political sphere but did not touch the
positive day-to-day attitude toward them.”
Conversely, attitudes toward the Chinese
people have remained largely negative despite periods in which the Russian
government has promoted a positive view of China. Indeed, Pain says, popular
Russian attitudes toward the Chinese have remained “more negative” than those regarding
the Americans.
And on
the other, the ethno-sociologist asks whether “’the Jewish question’” is now “closed”
in Russia. Before 1917, Pain points out, the situation of the Jews in the
Russian Empire “was undoubtedly worse than those of any other of its peoples” with
harsh restrictions on where the Jews could live and political groups calling
for even more radical forms of mistreatment.
“The
Jewish question” arose again during Stalin’s anti-Semitic “’struggle with
cosmopolitanism’” (1948-1953) and later, between 1970 and 1985 when it was intermixed
with the Soviet regime’s fight against dissidents and the opening of the doors
for emigration. After that, Pain says, “for
the majority of Russians, Jews became ‘almost our own.’”
That
shift came about, he continues, because the number of Jews in Russia relative
to the Jewish community in the world has fallen so dramatically. In 1897,
two-thirds of the world’s Jews lived in the Russian Empire. Today fewer than
one percent do.
Arguments
that there can nonetheless be “anti-Semitism without Jews” in Russia as is the
case in Poland or Lithuania, the Moscow scholar says, are misplaced because relatively
few Jews lived among the Russians and because within the current borders of the
Russian Federation, there was “never mass religious fanaticism.”
It is of
course the case that individuals may seek to portray the Jews as enemies. That
has happened in the North Caucasus about some Islamist radicals, but such
efforts have little traction among Russians. And indeed, they are overwhelmed
by another shift in public attitudes since Soviet times.
Under the
communists, Jews were associated with entrepreneurialism, something the
ideology held to be bad; now, entrepreneurialism is viewed more positively –
and the Jews have benefited from that as well, Pain says.
Drobizheva:
Ethnicity Must Not Be Dispensed with as an Analytic Category
Drobizhev shares Pain’s objection
to the widespread use of the term xenophobia given that what is in evidence is “ethnic
negativism” and not just fear. But she underscores that international
experience shows that negativism toward one group can easily shift to another
as happened in Europe in the 1930s. Consequently, monitoring ethnic attitudes
is important.
And that makes a trend in Russian
thinking particularly dangerous. Ever
more scholars are suggesting that ethnicity should not be the focus of
attention but rather its underlying and component social factors. The old
Institute of Ethnography has been renamed the Institute of Ethnology – and some
want to rename ethnology “social and cultural anthropology.”
“Even the very word ‘ethnicity’ is
one that some colleagues suggest excluding from discourse,” Drobizheva
says. But eliminating the use of the term
means that important sets of attitudes will not be captured and that those who
closely identify with an ethnic group or nation will be offended. “That would
be unfortunate.”
Klyamkin:
Imperial Consciousness “Very Weakly Connected with Russian Ethnicity”
According to Klyamkin, there is
little prospect that ethnic Russian nationalism will displace imperial Russian
nationalism or that it can be transformed into civic nationalism because while
imperial consciousness is only “very weakly connected with Russian ethnicity,”
ethnic nationalism itself is very weak as well.
With regard to the nationalisms of Russia’s
ethnic minorities, he continues, the intellectual and political leaders of the regions
and republics very much favor greater independence from the center and the development
of genuine federalism, but they all say that there is little support for that
among the populations at large.
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