Moscow’s All Too Obvious Lack of a Nationality Policy Could Bring On Another 1991, Kabanov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 12 – Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee and a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, says that the Kremlin “instead of coming up with a genuine nationalities policy” and taking real steps to implement it, “is continuing to imitate feverish activity” by means of agitation and propaganda alone.
    The country’s leadership seems to believe that constant talk about international friendship is “sufficient,” but that is not the case, Kabanov says; and if the Kremlin continues in this way, the consequences could be as disastrous as were those of a similar failure by the regime at the end of Soviet times (iarex.ru/news/145290.html).
    Such declarations about “friendship of the peoples … do not restrain the growth (in the first instance primarily due to immigrants) of Russophobia, radicalism and anti-Russian sentiments aimed at destroying out country,” the Russian official says, in one of the sharpest attacks on the Kremlin’s nationality policy in recent years.
    By focusing on immigration as a problem, Kabanov keeps his words within the framework of acceptable discourse; but the implications of his remarks are far broader and cover a range of issues that at least at present the Putin regime seems to believe it can contain by a whack-a-mole approach of repression.
    And Kabanov makes two additional points which strongly suggest that he is concerned not just about immigrant but about the lack of a nationality policy in general under Putin. On the one hand, he suggests talk about Russia as a multinational and poly-religious country being used as a mantra is dangerous.
    Supporting that principle is fine, he says, if it were not the case that “in practice, this formula did not turn into an attempt to reformat our state into a non-national and non-confessional one.”
    And on the other, the Kremlin seems to have forgotten that constant repetition of one and the same terms, in this case multinational and poly-religious, does not mean that these things will “automatically take root” but in fact could mean that such repetition may cause them to be rejected and with them the system to insists on these terms but doesn’t implement them.