Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 7 – A major reason why
non-Russian nations who have autonomous republic status fear to lose it and why
non-Russians without that seek to gain it is that Russification and
assimilation of the latter take place “several times faster” in the latter than
in the former, Nail Gyylman says.
This is not something Moscow
scholars like to discuss given that the Kremlin has made it clear that it would
like to see the national republic be dissolved and routinely claims that
non-Russians living outside of such entities can nonetheless retain their
languages and identities via national-cultural associations and the like.
That makes a study conducted by Nail
Gyylman, who blogs for the 7x7 portal and writes frequently on nationality
issues involving Turkic and Finno-Ugric groups, on rates of ethnic and
linguistic survival among Karels in Karelia and Karels in Tver Oblast
especially instructive and important (zamanabiz.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_97.html).
“The current status of the Karels
and the Karelilan language is the saddest example of the consequences of the
policy of Russification and assimilation of the indigenous peoples of the
Russian Federation which began in the Soviet era in the middle of the 20th
century and continues in present-day Russia.”
That reality is known to most who
are concerned about ethnic problems in Russia. But they know only about the
Karelians in Karelia, a nation which forms only 7.6 percent of the total population
of the republic and only a third of whose members speak their native language,
one that alone of the titular languages of the non-Russian republics doesn’t
have official status.
But as bad as things are for
Karelians in Karelia, the situation of Karels outside of the republic,
including in Tver Oblast which was once home to a large community of them is
far worse, Gyylman says. Formed after Russia’s defeat in the 17th
century war with Sweden, the Tver Karels have almost completely disappeared.
According to the 1926 census, there
were 140,000 Karelians in Tver Gubernia, “of whom more than 95 percent spoke
Karelian.” In the 1920s and 1930s, the
Soviet supported the community with schools and administrative districts; but
that policy was ended in the late 1930s, and the Tver Karelians were clearly
slated for assimilation.
From that time began “the
catastrophic decline of Tver Karelia,” Gyylman says. “The destruction of
national culture and the absence of prospects generated an active resettlement
of the rural population, in the first instance the young from villages to major
cities since the beginning of the 1950s.”
As
a result, their numbers tumbled from 119.900 in the 1939 census to 23,200 in
the 1989 enumeration to only 7400 in 2010; and their share of the population in
the oblast fell from 3.7 percent to 1.4 percent to 0.6 percent now. The
community tried to revive itself in the 1990s by opening Karel language schools
but all but one school has dropped this program.
Between 1926 and 2010, the number of
Karels in Karelia fell by a factor of 2.2 times, but the number of Karels in
Tver Oblast fell over the same period by an order of magnitude greater, by 19
times, Gyylman says.
This “assimilation is taking place
as a result of the compete destruction of the institutions for the preservation
of the national language and culture,” something regional officials may have
taken the lead in so as to force the Karels to leave rural portions of the
oblast and more to the cities.
Gyylman
sums up: “The processes of assimilation and socio-economic degradation of
national districts as shown by the example of the Karels of Tver Oblast affects
or can affect all the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation.” And
consequently, what is happening to the Karels is something all of them should
attend to.
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