Moscow’s Progress in Registering Individuals as Members of Numerically Small Nations May Soon Threaten Larger Ones as Well

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 23 – Moscow is celebrating its registration of the 100,000^th member of the numerically small peoples of the North and Far East (nazaccent.ru/content/44141-oficialno-zaregistrirovan-100-tysyachnyj-predstavitel-korennyh-malochislennyh-narodov-rossii/), but this action threatens both those groups and larger non-Russian nations as well.

            The Russian government has long maintained a list of the numerically small peoples of the North and Far East whose members enjoy certain rights and privileges because of their indigenous status. It currently has just under 50 nations with a combined population of approximately 300,000.

            But in 2020, Moscow created a list of the individual members of these groups so the authorities could prevent people who are not members of this category of peoples could not claim benefits. And while control of the list was nominally put under the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, it has been from the beginning in fact controlled  by the FSB (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/10/moscow-sets-up-registry-of-northern.html).

            That meant that the Russian security services were in a position to decide not only who was a member of this or that nation but even whether a nation belonged on the list or even existed. Because of that, many of the members of these peoples refused to register at all, and the numbers doing so have increased relatively slowly.

            Between 2020 and mid-2022, some 75,000, roughly a quarter of the census figures for these nations applied for inclusion on this list; but only a third of that number – just 25,000 -- were registered (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/06/moscow-now-compiling-not-just-list-of.html).

            In the three years since those figures were released, only 75,000 additional members were added to the list, bring the total to the 100,000 that Moscow is crowing about – even though that figure is less than a third of the total census numbers for the numerically small peoples of the North and Far East.

            The slowness of this increase undoubtedly reflects skepticism about how this list may be used by the authorities, but it also equally undoubtedly is the product of a Kremlin effort to reduce the number of members of these groups and even the number of the groups and declare those not on the list Russians civic or even ethnic.

            Some in the numerically small peoples of the North and Far East are certain that this is one of the most serious risks they face (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/06/moscow-now-compiling-not-just-list-of.html). But if Moscow can do that to them, it can do that to others, first among the smaller nations of the North Caucasus and Middle Volga and then to others.

            Given Putin’s effort to boost the number and share of ethnic Russians in the population of the Russian Federation and his all-too-obvious hostility to non-Russians, that is a very real possibility – and so what Moscow is celebrating likely will now become something that all non-Russian minorities may come to fear.