Since 2000, Murmansk Regional Government has Moved from Protecting Ethnic Minorities to Promoting ‘Friendship of the Peoples’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 7 – Earlier this summer, the Murmansk regional government changed the name of the Murmansk Regional Center of Indigenous Peoples of the North and Interethnic Cooperation into the Murmansk Regional House of Friendship of the Peoples, completing a shift begun 20 years ago from a structure defending minorities to one promoting ethnic harmony.

            In the 1990s, Saami activist Andrey Danilov says, numerically small peoples like his own created their own structures and the regional government set up institutions to work with them. Over time, however, Murmansk gelded the independent structures and changed the focus of government ones (indigenous-russia.com/archives/50014).

            In a 2500-word article, he details how each of these processes occurred, most step-by-step rather than all at once, and argues that this process of eliminating structures whose primary goal was the defense of the minorities or the organization at least of consultation with them has been replaced by something else.

            No one can be against promoting “friendship of the peoples,” of course, he suggests; but that is not the same thing at all as protecting the rights of ethnic minorities and giving them a voice in how the state will mediate between them, business interests and the state.

            While Danilov limits his story to what has happened in Murmansk and to the Saami in particular, his description of what has happened there is a harbinger of similar trends elsewhere in the Russian Federation and recalls the last decades of Soviet period when officials used “friendship of the peoples” to cover their exploitation and suppression.