Three Buryats Named to Senior Positions in Chukotka, with One Even Changing Her Name Beforehand

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 13 – Three senior Buryat officials have been transferred to even more senior posts in the Chukchi Autonomous District, an enormous land in the extreme far northeast of the Russian Federation but one that has fewer than 50,000 residents and has long been governed by outsiders.

        But those outsiders have typically been ethnic Russians either from Moscow or from Russian regions in Siberia or even west of the Urals. That makes this latest move noteworthy because it suggests the Kremlin may be operating with a new model of rule, one that assigns some larger non-Russian republics an expanded role in ruling their neighbors.

        If that is the case, then it could set a precedent for something Ramzan Kadyrov very much wants, the insertion of Chechen officials loyal to him in positions of responsibility in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and perhaps other North Caucasus republics, a development with potentially far-reaching consequences.

    And that could set the stage for regional amalgamation or the formation of regional unions that might play a far larger role in Russian politics in the future than has been the case since first Boris Yeltsin and then Vladimir Putin suppressed regional moves like the Urals Republic and Siberian Agreement.

    The three Buryats who have been named to senior posts in Chukotka are Aryuna Baykova, who will oversee education in the autonomous district, Irina Maksimova, who has been named acting deputy governor, and Aleksey Togoshiyev, who will head media relations for the governor and government of Chukotka (baikal-daily.ru/news/19/498004/).

    The most senior and most intriguing of these appointments is that of Maksimova, who was known until recently as Buryat journalist Irina Badlayeva before changing her name to Irina Suzdaltseva and now changing it again before going to Chukotka to the more Russianized one (newbur.ru/newsdetail/byvshiy_zhurnalist_buryatii_smenila_familiyu_i_nashla_rabotu_v_pravitelstve_chukotki/).

    Exactly what is going on here is unknown. It may be only that in a federal subject with as few people as Chukotka, it is difficult to find enough administrative cadres and in one so far from Moscow hard to find ethnic Russians willing to move so far away. But naming three people from one other republic more or less simultaneously is unprecedented and needs to be monitored.