If Ethnic Russians are the Only ‘State-Forming’ People, Only They Should Pay Taxes or Serve in the Army, Some Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 6 – The language abut “the state-forming people” Vladimir Putin wants to include in the constitution is already creating problems Moscow’s rule of the country in the future among both non-Russians and ethnic Russians, regionalist writer Vadim Sidorov says, each of which has its own reasons to be offended.

            Non-Russians see even this backhanded reference to ethnic Russians as the only “state-forming people” as an insult to their dignity, and some are concluding, the commentator says, that if only ethnic Russians have that status, then only they are responsible for the state, must pay taxes, and serve in the military.  (region.expert/state-forming-people/).

            And these non-Russians are further concluding, regionalist Vadim Sidorov says, that since Moscow also wants to declare legal continuity from the Russian Empire up to now, some are concluding that the two statements together mean that “ethnic Russians are responsible for all the crimes” f these states against minorities (region.expert/state-forming-people/).

            Meanwhile, the proposed amendment is offending ethnic Russians because it does not in fact celebrate the ethnic Russians as the state-forming nation, as many non-Russians assume, but rather makes it clear that from the Kremlin’s perspective, “the state-forming people in Russia is not the ethnic Russian people at all but some other people whose language is Russian.”

            On the one hand, that is consistent with Soviet and Russian policy, including under Putin, which views the Russian people as a multi-national Russian-speaking community. But on other, it offends many ethnic Russians both because it does not give them pride of place in creating the state or in dominating that civic nation.

            If it is language and  not ethnicity that is the basis of “the state-forming” people – and that is certainly the most reasonable reading of Putin’s words, then, Sidorov says, “representatives of the genuinely ethnic Russian people risk falling into a classcal lose-lose situation,” blamed for everything but that in charge of anything.

            It is thus no surprise that Russian nationalists aren’t happy about Putin’s words either. “Many of them have been demanding,” the regionalist commentator says, “that the Russian people be specifically named as the state-forming one,” not given this status in the backhanded way the Kremlin leader wants to do.

            And even “nationally thinking Russians,” as many of the majority nationality want t be called lest they be labelled “nationalists,” don’t want to have the burden of responsibility for everything the Russian state has done in the past placed on them. So this larger group has problems with Putin’s amendment too.

            And both groups have deeper reasons to oppose this language: they don’t want to be reduced to being “appendages” f the state and thus left as a state nation rather a nation in their own right. They don’t want conflicts with the non-Russians. But they do want self-determination for themselves just as much as non-Russians do.

            If ethnic Russians are to achieve real self-determination, Sidorov says, and not remain “an appendage of the state,” they will almost certainly have to achieve it by moving to transform ethnic Russian regions into republics and then work with the non-Russian republics to achieve a genuine federal union.