Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 29 – Since 2019, when the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada directed Kyiv to do what it could to support ethnic Russians and all other non-Russians living within the current borders of the Russian Federation, Ukrainian experts have been discussing these communities, their hopes and fears.
Ukrainian interest in the so-called “wedges” of ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Federation and in particular the so-called Ukrainian area in the Russian Far East known as the Green Wedge is longstanding (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/08/kyiv-takes-up-cause-of-ukrainian-far.html).
And official attention to other ethnic groups inside Russia, particularly those in the North Caucasus and Middle Volga, has been striking, with numerous articles appearing in the Kyiv media and the Ukrainian government welcoming political emigres from them (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/05/ukrainian-parliament-calls-for-new.html).
Now, in an indication of the growing seriousness of this effort, a Ukrainian scholar has published a lengthy article on Sultan Galiyev, the Muslim national communist who enflamed opinion among many Muslim nations and who predicted the demise of the Soviet Union (trtrussian.com/mnenie/proekt-antikolonialnoj-revolyucii-mirsaida-sultan-galieva-7610561).
There has been a renaissance in interest in Sultan-Galiyev among Tatars, Bashkirs and Kazakhs in recent years (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/three-events-in-sultan-galiyevs-life.html); and Grigory Mavrov’s article suggests that Kyiv is about to promote the attention to a leader who resisted Great Russian chauvinism before he was killed by Stalin.
This article is thus an indication of Ukrainian seriousness in Kyiv’s focus on ethnic minorities in Russia and likely to become a new source of problems for Moscow in trying to maintain control over the most restive of them.
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