Two Parties Compete in Moscow – the Internationalists and the Xenophobes, Batyr Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 8 – The almost hysterical reaction to Gasan Gasanov’s remarks about the Russian language and the discrimination against non-Russian ones reflect a clash that always has been part of Russia, one between “a love for those closest” and hostility to outsiders, that now takes the form of two parties within the ruling elite, Rustam Batyr says.

            The Tatar Muslim activist says that these are “the internationalists” and “the xenophobes.” The first “proclaims the multinational people of Russia to be the source of power” and “helps all the traditional confessions,” as well as helping many of the Muslim republics to develop economically (m.business-gazeta.ru/article/445492).

            The other “in these very same national republics limits instruction in the two state languages, introduces school uniforms in order to prevent the wearing of the hijab and prohibits numerically small peoples from using any alphabet besides Cyrillic” and insists on a common set of laws and even rules of private behavior. 

            These two Russian parties, Batyr continues, are “our ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans,’” and their combat began “long before” the Russian empire was established. And “as paradoxical as it may seem, the first victims of the unitarists were the Slavic peoples themselves who as a result of their activity were deprives of a significant part of the uniqueness of their culture.”

           

            Just how ancient this embedded conflict is, the Tatar commentator continues, is shown by the history of the invention of Cyrillic, “an absolutely unique alphabet” established especially for the Slavic peoples by a scholar who did not simply copy the Greek as most Russians imagine but combined elements of many scripts before his successors unified things via the Greek.

            “It seems to me,” Batyr argues, “that in this historical substitution was marked out the outline of the future Russia. St. Cyril gave the Slavic world a multi-faceted alphabet drawing on the achievements of the most varied peoples … But the ancient unitarists of the Slavic world turned away from this multiplicity,” levelling out all the differences.

            From that time forward, these two elements in the Russian “genome” have fought with one another, the diverse and the unitary. And even now, “the party of the unitarist xenophobes professes the idea … of Russia for the Russians where there is no place for the equality of other peoples.”

            While “the party of internationalist-federalists continue the work of the great scholar St. Cyril and work for Russia to become a home for all nations and cultural traditions,” the Tatar commentator continues, rather than split between Russians and the others who are viewed as “illegitimate children.”

            “It is possible,” he says, “that this struggle will last forever and that future generations will have eternally to defend their right to wear hijabs and read newspapers in their native languages.  But one would like too believe that in the end, good sense will all the same triumph and the xenophobes will leave the historical scene.”