Duma Proposal Sets Stage for Broad Attack on National Autonomies in Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 24 – Mikhail Matveyev, the KPRF deputy who is deputy chair of the Duma Committee on Regional Policy and Local Self-Administration, has proposed replacing the term “national-cultural autonomy” with the term “national-cultural union” and allowing the government to ban any of these groups which received financing from abroad.

            Not only would the passage of this proposal represent a serious downgrading in the only formal status that more than 200 ethnic communities across the Russian Federation but it would give the state an additional whip hand over them by allowing Moscow to ban them almost at will (sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/legal/2024/07/d50194/).

            The likely trigger for this proposal, however, is not so much a broad attack on national autonomies as such but rather to block calls by some Central Asian diasporas who want to form them in regions near Moscow (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/02/russians-alarmed-by-calls-for-tajik.html).

            In the current overheated atmosphere concerning immigrants, this proposal is likely to pass for that reason alone; but if this measure does become law, the Kremlin almost certainly will employ it to further restrict or even bad the only corporate bodies ethnic communities have if they are not located within a non-Russian republic of the same nationality. 

            For background on the national cultural autonomies that arose in the 1990s and have had a checkered history since then, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/russias-national-cultural-autonomies.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/05/russification-and-assimilation-of-non.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/12/national-cultural-autonomies-failing-to.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/russias-national-cultural-autonomies.html.