Russia Can’t Democratize Until Its People Acquire Genuine National Identities of the Kind the Kremlin hasn’t Offered but that National Movements Do, Dukenbayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 5 – A major reason that Russia hasn’t democratized over the last three decades, Askat Dukenbayev says, is that Moscow has “not offered either Russian or non-Russian regions of Russia a convincing answer to the key question for democracy: ‘Who are we as a people?”

            Instead, the Kazakh political scientist who now lives in the United States, says, the Kremlin has offered only “a surrogate identity, a mix of nostalgia for the Soviet past, authoritarianism, and militarism” to which it has now added the nonsensical notion that “’we are all ethnic Russians” (region.expert/from-empire/).

            As Georgian theorist Ghia Nodia “convincingly showed” more than 30 years ago, Dukenbayev points out, “national movements and questions of identity can be not obstalces but rather a key factor in the democratization of society” and that indeed, “democracy, that is the power of the people, is impossible without the self-definition of the people itself.”

            A problem arises only if nationalism “degenerates into ethnic chauvinism in the context of a weak state and weak public institutions.” When that is not the case, Nodia wrote, “nationalism and democracy do not act as antagonists but as historically inevitable allies in the struggle against an autocratic regime.”

            This observation helps to explain a major reason for the regular failure of democratic reforms in Russia, Dukenbayev says. Instead of becoming self-consciously a people, Russia identity and subjectivity “has dissolved into a subject-less ‘Russianness’ which has remained combined with a false sense of superiority … over [equally powerless] ethnic regions.”

            This new definition of nationhood can be supplied both by national movements and by Russian regionalists, “who are forming a post-Russian that is post-imperial national identity, the Kazakh political scientist argues. Their task “is not disintegration for the sake of disintegration but the subjectivization and expansion of opportunities” for citizens.

            “As the Putin regime degrades, the delegitimization and weakening of the imperial center will inevitably open up space for democratic practices and actions ‘from below’” and that Russian political and liberal-democratic nationalism, together with the liberation movements of the national regions, will undermine and crush the grip of the Chekist-oligarchic leviathan.”

            If a genuine all-Russian identity becomes available, the country might remain in one piece; but if that doesn’t happen – and current trends suggest that it won’t – then it will divide up albeit in ways that currently are impossible to predict at least if the peoples of that enormous space are to enjoy the rewards of democratization.