‘Russian Opposition at Times More Hostile to Siberian Minorities than are the Authorities,’ Vyushkova Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 7 – Mariya Vyushkova, one of the co-founders of the Free Buryatia Foundation who now has resigned from that group and lives in the US, says that the Russian opposition is often “more xenophobic” than are the Russian authorities but that independence may not be the solution unless both Russians and Buryats face up to the reasons.

    Buryats and other ethnic minorities from east of the Urals who have a different physiognomy from Russians have long been at risk of attack by Russian nationalists, but unexpectedly for many, they have been sharply criticized by Russian opposition leaders who oppose Putin’s war in Ukraine (indigenous-russia.com/archives/42967).

    There are many reasons for that, Vyushkova says. The Buryats were the face of the 2014 Russian invasion of the Donbass. Many Russians are trapped into the idea that everything Western is good and everything eastern is bad, and opposition Russians view criticizing them as a way to escape responsibility for what has happened in Ukraine.

    “According to the latest research” carried out by Wake Forest scholar Adam Lenton, she continues, “the opposition public in Russia is even more xenophobic than is Russian society as a whole” in part because those who oppose Putin’s war in Ukraine can then say “’we aren’t guilty; it’s those wild Asians whom we aren’t able to control.”

    Vyushkova says that “this phenomenon can be called a manifestation of ‘Eurocentric anti-colonialism,’ a paradoxical development in which the condemnation of one form of imperialism is accompanied by support for the continuation of another” especially as many Russians think Russian colonialism was both peaceful and positive.

    (Even many Buryats believe that because at the end of the Soviet period, they were among the most successful non-Russian groups, having accepted Russification as a price worth paying for better lives otherwise, she says. Only more recently have they begun to learn the truth about this trade-off.)

    But that doesn’t mean that independence is necessarily the answer, Vyushkova continues. “Backers of independence are becoming more numerous, but as before, there are very few of them; and they aren’t popular. Ethnic thinking remains in second place.” And as for herself, she fears that “independence doesn’t guarantee either democracy or the defense of Buryat rights.”

    She says her greatest fear is that “if independence takes place via ‘a Prigozhin scenario, then this will lead to the establishment of a Trans-Baikal Bandit-Cossack Republic” through which drugs will flow through into Russia and wood and gold will flow in the opposite direction into China. The Buryats will not have any rights or democracy in such a state.”

    There is thus the real risk that “independence will only result in a society with old authoritarian models, one in which the people will be pushed around and cry out for Grandpa Putin … The region is already full of illegal weapons and there are many with combat experience. If former military men end up in power, the criminal world will merge with them.”

    “That is why I fear that in an independent Buryatia, war criminal rather than democrats will be free and that those who opposed the war won’t have any place in this country. Even in an independent Buryatia, I fear, we will be persecuted just as we are now, in the same authoritarian state but in a new form.”

    And Vyushkova concludes sadly that “we don’t want to discuss this, but I think that the first step to the solution of a problem is to acknowledge that it exists.”