Window on Eurasia It’s ‘Too Early’ to Celebrate the Return of Elected Governors, URA.ru Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 25 – “It is too early to celebrate” President Dmitry Medvedev’s proposal, under pressure from Russian society, to restore gubernatorial elections because he will soon be out of office and because the arrangements he and Vladimir Putin have made mean “the first” such votes would take place “only in 2016,” according to the URA.ru news agency.

            According to the agency, which often breaks stories before Moscow outlets, officials in the Urals region have received “explanations from the Presidential Administration” that suggest no direct gubernatorial votes will begin before 2013 and that many may be appointed long after that (www.ura.ru/content/svrd/24-01-2012/articles/1036257519.html).

            Last week, Medvedev made his much-ballyhooed proposal to restore gubernatorial elections, albeit with a number of qualifications including in most cases consultations with the president. Then on Monday, Prime Minister and president-presumptive Vladimir Putin said that there should be a “public” discussion about whether to have such votes.

            “But the entire dispute,” URA.ru continues, “is to put it mildly premature,” given that the staff of several regional heads in the Urals have told the agency that “their leaders are calm and not even preparing for direct elections,” given the focus on the presidential campaign and on Putin’s earlier elimination of votes on these positions.

            Aleksandr Burkov, first deputy chairman of the Duma’s federal affairs and local administration, confirmed the news agency’s conclusions, pointing out that any new electoral law would certainly be reviewed by the incoming president and incoming government before going into force.

            That will be made all the easier by the public discussion Putin has proposed and by the plans of many governors to ask for a new expression of trust after the March 4 elections, as “Kommersant” reported, requests that would likely keep them in office until 2016, when the current term of the Duma expires.

            Moreover, Burkov told URA.ru, “in key regions, governors will be appointed.” Among those would be the heads of “all the subjects of the Russian Federation included in the Urals Federal District, except for that of Kurgan oblast” as well as likely in many other parts of the country.

            The Just Russia deputy added that Medvedev’s draft in any case will have to be modified. And the news agency stressed that those who think the election of governors is a done deal may be disappointed, thereby suggesting that this concession to public opinion may be little more than an electoral ploy rather than a move to return to genuine federalism.

Window on Eurasia: Muscovites, Petersburgers Like Slavs, Dislike Central Asians and People from the Caucasus, Poll Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 25 – Residents of Russia’s two capitals like ethnic Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians but do not care for people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, according to a new poll, findings that help explain why some of the latter appear to have declared themselves to be Russians in the 2010 census.

            The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) queries 1200 Muscovites and Petersburgers about their attitudes toward various ethno-national groups. Both liked ethnic Russians most, 44 and 52 percent respectively, then Belarusians, 17 and 14 percent, and then Ukrainians, 15 and 11 (www.neva24.ru/a/2012/01/24/zhiteli_stolic_nenavidjat_k/).

            The residents of the capitals disliked people from the Caucasus most of all, 31 percent in Moscow and 28 percent in St. Petersburg, and Tajiks, 23 and 24 percent. Muscovites disliked Azerbaijanis next (17 percent) and then Uzbeks (13 percent); Petersburgers in contrast said they disliked Uzbeks (18 percent) and then Azerbaijanis (11 percent).

            Chechens were the fifth most disliked group in both capitals, 12 percent in Moscow and 8 percent in St. Petersburg. Muscovites then named Georgians (9 percent), Armenians (6 percent), Daghestanis (5 percent), and “Asians in general” and Kyrgyz (4 percent each). Petersburgers said they didn’t like Asians, Georgians and Daghestanis, 7 percent, 6 percent and 5 percent.

            Sergey Markov, director of the Moscow Institute of Political Research, said that residents of the capitals had a positive attitude toward Belarusians and Ukrainians “because they in practice are not distinguished from other Russians.  Caucasians and Central Asians, on the other hand, stand out by behavior many Russians see as alien.

            As a result, parts of these communities, he continued, are organized “into criminal groups and often it is difficult to distinguish between criminal communities and diasporas.” That is especially true in the case of the North Caucasians because they have “the rights of Russian citizens.” Central Asians are disliked because of their numbers and the view that they take jobs away from Russians.

            Given these attitudes and given the current political season, it is no surprise that the Russian State Statistics Committee (Rosstat) says that the 2010 census shows that 91.6 percent of the residents of Moscow are in fact ethnic Russians, a claim that has led some to ask “whom are you going to believe – statistics or your own eyes?” (www.aif.ru/society/article/48961).

            In the current issue of “Argumenty i fakty,” journalist Galina Sheykina explores the reasons that may be behind official claims. First, she provides what the 2002 and 2010 censuses show.  In 2010, the census found 11.5 million residents in Moscow. Some 668,000 did not give their nationality, many more than the 417,000 who had done so in 2002.

            “On the other hand,” Sheikhina continues, “the overwhelmingly number of the rest surveyed, namely 9.9 million, confidently declared that they are [ethnic] Russians,” a figure 1.2 million more than the 2002 census enumerated there. Moreover, the 2010 census found that the numbers of “practically all” nationalities, including Ukrainians, Jews, Tajiks and Azerbaijanis had declined.”

            Natalya Zubarevich, the director of the regional program of the Independent Institute of Social Policy, said that there are great doubts about these official statistics. First of all, she noted, “it was difficult for census takers to work” because of “the high level of distrust of Muscovites to any surveys and visits by those they don’t know.”

            Second, the social scientist continued, “a definite share” of citizens were “counted twice” because “hundreds of thousands of people live at a different place than where they are registered.  And third, the actual share of the total population surveyed was closer to 70 percent than to the 90 percent officials claimed, with the percentage lower for non-Russian groups.

            But there is another factor at work, she suggested, one which may help to boost the claimed share of ethnic Russians in the population relative to other groups.  “Part of the population calls itself [ethnic] Russians ‘in any case,’ fearing xenophobia in one or another of its manifestations.”

            Olga Antonova, head of Rosstat’s administration for statistics on population and health, provided yet another reason why claims about the ethnic Russian population in Moscow are highly exaggerated. She told “Argumenty i fakty” that census takers did not even ask the nationality of those who were “temporarily” in the city.

            Gavkhar Dzhurayaev, the head of the Migration and Law Information-Legal Center in Moscow, offered another perspective:  “Even if census takers had queried all migrants,” they wouldn’t have gotten much information because the gastarbeiters are generally afraid to tell anyone anything. Thus most are quite prepared to say “I am a Russian” to end the conversation.     

            There are “a few more than 200,000 legal migrants” in the Russian capital and many more “illegal” ones. Thus, talk about a reduction in their numbers “does not correspond to reality.” Officials and society need real numbers if they are to address real problems as opposed to living in a situation where “no statistics are equal to no problem.”

Window on Eurasia: 750 Republic and Local Governments in Russia Issued Their Own Currencies in the 1990s,

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 24 – A major problem in both the USSR and the Russian Federation has been the shortage of cash, the result of government policies which keep the monetarization of the economy “five to ten times less than in developed economies,” a situation that reached its apogee in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

            One consequence of that decline in the 1990s when the rate of monetarization of the economy fell to 15 percent, the Tolkovatel blog points out today was the appearance of self-minted currency in 750 republics and cities of the Russian Federation as well as at about 25,000 enterprises (ttolk.ru/?p=9273).

            In a detailed post richly illustrated with pictures of some of these notes and coins, the blog explains that the appearance of such currencies, which took the place of the lack of state-sanctioned cash, had its roots in Soviet times and was exacerbated by the specific conditions of Boris Yeltsin’s rule.

            After the 1917 revolution, many regions and enterprises issued “surrogate banknotes” until these were forbidden by 1935 in the RSFSR and in some Central Asian republics in 1941, the blog portal reports. But after that time, Soviet leaders wanted to keep the monetarization of the economy low “because there was not a sufficient level of consumer goods and services.”

            Indeed, Tolkovatel points out, “whenever the quantity of money in the economy exceeded a certain level, it was necessary to extract it from the population” by means of “monetary reforms” like those which took place in 1947 and 1991, confiscations which made Soviet citizens suspicious of their own state currency.

            But even in Soviet times, “this rule had an exception: special currencies were printed for special people,” prisoners at the bottom and the party-economic elite at the other.  Except for Weimar Germany in the 1920s, there are virtually no examples of a developed country “which had the parallel circulation at one and the same time of several types of legal money.”

            During perestroika, “the highest monetarization of the economy” in the history of the country occurred, the blog says.  By 1991, monetarization had reached “73 percent of GDP, one of the highest measures in the world for that time and even greater than was the case then in the United States.”

            This Gorbachev experiment was a failure, the blog suggests, because of the absence of consumer goods and stock markets meant that population had nowhere to spend its cash, and as a result, “the economy and after it the USSR were destroyed.” Consequently, the Russian government carried out the older policy of keeping the population poor “for the sake of security.”

            While the system was in crisis, at the time of “the peak of monetarization,” the first special currencies appeared  But in this case, the primary cause was not economics but “the separatism of the regions and also the attemps of enterprises in the general deficit to create their own small internal market ‘for their own.’”

            But the number of such currencies rose dramatically after Prime Minister Yegor Gaydar in early 1992 signed a special circular officially authorizing such currencies.  Immediately, there appeared the currencies of Tatarstan, Nizhny Novgorod oblast, Khakasia, the Urals Republic and “hundreds of cities and districts,” ultimately involving 750 territories and 25,000 firms.

            And that trend was exacerbated by the precipitous decline of the monetarization of the Russian economy from 70 percent in 1990 to between 9.8 and 17 percent of GDP between 1992 and 1997. Barter filled some of this gap, but surrogate currencies played an important role as well, especially to pay workers or to make political points, to avoid paying taxes, and to serve, along with foreign currency holdings, as a hedge against rumored monetary reforms.

            Tatarstan’s currency which first appeared in 1990 is perhaps the best known, Tolkovatel suggests, but there were some equally intriguing efforts. Kaliningrad Governor Leonid Gorbenko launched the “Kaliningrad mark,” and Volgograd, which had ordered its currency printed in Italy, circulated what became known as “liras” because the firm had printed the bills in Italian.

            There were also special currencies for refugees from Chechnya, the blog continues They were printed by the Committee to Assist Those Suffering from Armed Conflicts in the North Caucasus and were supposed to circulate “’only on the territory of resettlement points and temporary camps.’”

            Such currencies began to disappear under Yevgeny Primakov’s premiership, but some, including that of Tatarstan, lasted until 2008. Under Vladimir Putin, the monetarization of the country rose to 40 percent before the economic crisis, a figure comparable with many African countries, Tolkovatel says, but far less than during perestroika.

            The blog concludes that no one should think that the era of such currencies in the Russian Federation is now over forever.  If the price of oil should fall to 50-60 US dollars a barrel, such “surrogate” currencies would likely reappear, Tolkovatel says, providing employment for “several thousand designers and contemporary artists of the so-called ‘creative class.’”

Window on Eurasia: Daghestan Should Not Remain Part of North Caucasus Federal District, Makhachkala Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 24 – Daghestan should not be part of the North Caucasus Federal District, a structure which “by its nature has not and cannot resolve the problems of the regions” but rather become part of a new federal district which would also include adjoining Russian regions on the northern shores of the Caspian, according to a Makhachkala scholar.

            Abdul-Nasir Dibirov, the rector of the Daghestan Institute of Economics and Politics, told the Regnum news agency that the North Caucasus Federal District “was created not so much as an organic part of the power vertical but as a kind of buffer in advance of in advance of the 2014 Olympic Games” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1491219.html).

             Specifically, Dibirov added, that district represented an attempt “to isolate the problematic North Caucasus republics from Krasnodar kray. But Moscow made a mistake by including Daghestan within the districts borders because that republic “is not only a North Caucasus region but above all a Caspian littoral one.”

            Indeed, “Daghestan’s future to an ever greater degree was connected not with the North Caucasus but with the Caspian,” all the more so, Dibirov said, because “with the conversion of the Caspian into an international sea,” the republic’s “geopolitical situation” and “economic possibilities” will be fundamentally changed.

            According to the Makhachkala analyst, “it would be more organic to establish not a North Caucasus Federal District but a Caspian Federal District which would include Daghestan, Kalmykia, Astrakhan oblast and Volgograd oblast,” an arrangement in which “the industrial potential of the northern regions would be combined with the agricultural potential of the south.”

            In any case, Daghestan must “break away” from the problems of the North Caucasus, Dibirov insisted.

            Asked by Regnum whether Moscow’s ideas of creating a resort cluster in the North Caucasus will “solve the systemic problems” of that reason, the Makhachkala scholar said that “such a project “hardly will be realized in the conditions of an undeclared civil war,” a place where counter-terrorist operations are frequently declared.

             Instead, Dibirov continued, “one must begin with the development of what already exists.” Roads need to be constructed so that private enterprise will develop rural areas and so that rural people will be able to remain in their villages among people of their own ethnicity and culture but travel to urban regions for employment.

            Dibirov said that in his opinion, “the elimination of federal districts is hardly likely to occur.” Gubernatorial elections “will return,” he continued, “but not because the powers have any particular love for democracy but rather as the result of pressure from society.” Indeed, these elections will make Moscow even more interested in preserving the federal districts.

            What everyone needs to understand about the North Caucasus, the Makhachkala scholar argued, is that “in essence” it “has departed from the legal field of Russia. Here laws operate only selectively and are viewed” by the population as simply covers “for the corrupted powers that be” who are “closely connected with the criminal world.”

            The Russian state does not yet have a well-developed policy for the North Caucasus, Dibirov said, adding that “the impression has been created” that Moscow wants to use threats from there to justify its approach to rule, all the more so if Russian leaders want to use nationalism as a source of legitimacy.

            “Today,” Dibirov argued, “we see a power which at one stage attempted to eploid liberalism, at a second stage conservatism, and now ever more is shifting to nationalism, attempting to ride Russian ethnic nationalism. This is a very dangerous policy,” the Makhachkala scholar said, but that is how things look from Daghestan.

            He rejected the suggestion that Moscow had created the North Caucasus Federal District not because of the Olympics but on the basis of “historical experience,” Debirov says that the Soviet-era North Caucasus kray with a capital in Pyatigorsk is generally considered a failure, a view he said he shares.

            Indeed, even in Soviet times, “the leadership of Daghestan at all times struggled in order to excape from this kray and to subordinate itself directly to Moscow.” Once again, that is taking place because “the future of Daghestan is tied to the Caspian” more than to the troubled republics of the North Caucasus.

            While Dibirov is only one voice, his remarks are important for at least three reasons: First, as he suggested, Moscow is more likely to retain the federal districts if it gives way on the election of governors. Second, his remarks are a reminder that the borders of these districts are likely to be the subject of disputes between Moscow and individual federal subjects.

            And third, Dibirov’s comments underscore that the policies of Vladimir Putin in the North Caucasus have succeeded only in creating the simulacrum of control, one that may make for good propaganda but does not solve the problems the region faces or makes it the stable backdrop for the Sochi Olympics that Putin and his supporters argue will be the case.

Window on Eurasia: To Win Votes, Putin Plays the Always Risky Nationality Card

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 23 – In a transparent attempt to win votes but one that may backfire not only among non-Russians but also among many Russians opposed to his authoritarian approach, Vladimir Putin has published the nationality plank of his presidential campaign, one that restates and extends ideas he has presented in the past.

            Putin’s 3700-word essay, which appears today both on his presidential campaign website (http://putin2012.ru/events/95) and as a major article in Moscow’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta” (www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html), adopts a stateman-like pose, saying how dangerous it is for politicians to play the ethnic card and then proceeding to do just htat.   

            As he has often done, the Russian prime minister stresses that the ethnic situation in his country is “in principle different” than it is in other countries, with its “nationality and migration problems “directly connected with the destruction of the USSR and in esstence historically greater Russia which was established in its essentials already in the 18^th century.”

            “Having declared sovereignty 20 years ago,” Putin continues, “the then-deputies of the RSFSR” in their struggle with “the ‘union center’” put in motion “the process of the construction of ‘national states,’ including even within the Russian Federation itself,” a process that could lead to “collapse and separatism.”

            “With the disintegration of the country,” he says, “we turned out to be at the edge and in certain well-know regions even beyond the edge of civil war.” But fortunately, just as in the case of “the first Russian time of troubles” in the seventeenth century, while the state was “critically weakened, Russia did not disappear.”

            The ethnic Russian people and ethnic Russian culture which defines and maintains “the fabric of this unique civilization,” Putin argues, held things together and even now are preventing those who would “with their own hands destroy their own motherland” by calling for “a mono-ethnic state,” “the shortest path … the destruction of the Russian people and Russian statehood.”

            Moreover, those who today say that it is time to “stop feeding the Caucasus” will eventually say that it is time to “stop feeding Siberia, the Far East, the Urals, and the Moscow region,” Putin adds, repeating the kind of domino effect that led to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

            The [ethnic] Russian people, Putin continues, “is a polyethnic civilization held together by a Russian cultural nucleus.” As such, “the [non-ethnic] Russian experience of state development is unique.  We are a multi-national society,” he says, “but we are a single people,” something that must oppose any “germ” of narrow nationalism.

            Again as he has done in the past, Putin notes that “many citizens of the USSR when they were abroad called themselves [ethnic] Russians” because “in our identity is a different cultural code” than others have. “the [ethnic] Russian people is the state-forming people as is shown by the fact of the existence of Russia. The great mission of the [ethnic] Russians is to unify and support [this] civilization.”

            “Such a civilizaitonal identity is based on the preservation of [ethnic] Russian cultural dominants, the bears of which are not only ethnic Russians but all the bears of this identity independently of nationality.  This cultural code which ahs been subjected in recent times to serious tests” has been preserved.

            From this perspective, Putin argues that the Russian Federation needs “a strategy of nationality policy based on civic patriotism,” one in which “every individual living in our country must not forget about his faith and ethnicity. But he must above all be a citizen of Russia and proud of that.”

            “No one has the right to put national and religious differences higher than the laws of the state,” Putin says, although he does allow that “the laws of the state must consider national and religious differences.” To that end, he calls for a new nationalities agency, even though he was the one who disbanded as unnecessary the Russian ministry for nationality affairs.

          The presidential candidate adds that the rights of ethnic Russians must be constantly protected from abuse lest some begin to talk about “the national oppression of [ethnic]s Russian” and use that to promote disorder or even to allow some to talk about the rise of “’[ethnic] Russian fascism.’”

            Force must be used to suppress violence but otherwise dialogue should be maintained, Putin suggests. Only “one thing” is not permissible: There must be no chance “for the creation of regional parties, including in the national republics” because that step “is a direct path to separatism.”

            In some detail, he calls for a toughening of immigration policy and expanded efforts to ensure that legal migrants “adapt” to the Russian cultural code, all popular positions given the number of gastarbeiters in Russian cities.  But he uses this proposal to talk about something else, which potentially has far reaching consequences.

            Putin suggests that to address the migration issue there needs to be “Eurasian integration” across the former Soviet space, a process that will “strengthen our ‘historic state,’ left to us from our ancestors. A state-civilization which is capable of organically resolving the task of the integration of various ethnoses and confessions.”

            “For centuries,” Putin concludes, “we have lived together. Together we won in the most terrible war. And we will lvie together in the future.  To those wo want or try to divide us, I will say only one thing – don’t expect to succeed,” language that probably will generate a different reaction in the other post-Soviet states than among his supporters.

            Given his place in the Russian political system, Putin’s essay even today has attracted enormous comment, generally positive but not universally so even among ethnic Russians and those who describe themselves as Russian nationalists. Among the most interesting of these comments are www.russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/Putinskij-imperskij-nacionalizm-i-regional-nye-partii, actualcomment.ru/theme/2178/,  www.polit.ru/article/2012/01/23/putinnat/,

www.specletter.com/obcshestvo/2012-01-23/natsionalnyi-lider-zagovoril-o-natsionalnom.html, echo.msk.ru/blog/oreh/851592-echo/,  http://www.rus-obr.ru/lj/16444, and

www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=43878).

            But one comment today from a Kazan Tatar suggests how many of the Russian Federation’s increasingly numerous non-ethnic Russians are likely to react to Putin’s approach.  In a commentary on ETatar, Robert Bolgarsky politely but firmly disagrees with the Russian politician’s approach (etatar.ru/top/42022).

            Bolgarsky begins by observing that Putin’s “long-awaited article” failed to provide answers which “it would have been interesting” to find the answers to, among which are Putin’s attitudes toward instruction in non-Russian languages in the republics of the Russian Federation and to the state of native languages in general.

            Instead, the Tatar commentator said, Putin used terms that raise more questions and will lead almost any non-Russian to draw some very negative conclusions about what the Russian prime minister and president presumptive believes and where he wants to take the country in the future.

            As Bolgarsky notes, Putin talks about “[ethnic] Russian Armenians, [ethnic] Russian Azerbaijanis, [ethnic] Russian Germans, [and ethnic] Russian Tatars.”  Just who are “[ethnic] Russian] Tatars,” the commentator asks, suggesting that Putin for some reason or other has confused the terms “Rossiyanin” or non-ethnic Russian with “Russkiye” or ethnic Russian.

            “Ask any Tatar who speaks even the slightest amoung of his native language,” Bolgarsky continues,  Having heard the term ‘[ethnic] Russian Tatar,’ he as a minimum will begin to think about what that means because from birth he has not heard such a definition of his nationality.”

            “Is this a Tatar who has converted to Orthodoxy? Or is it a Tatar who has forgotten his native language? Or is it a Russified Tatar? There are perhaps a great many possibilities, but they all mean the loss of national identity, of the Tatar cultural code, if you like, and thus the term ‘[ethnic] Russian Tatar’ is viewed by Tatars themselves in an extremely negative way.”

            Putin should know, the Tatar commentator says, that there are more than 100 language and ethnic groups who are “indigenous peoples of the federation. These are not just Russian lands, they are Tatar, Bashkir, Koryak, Yakut and other lands. But for some reason, Putin gives to the Russians ‘the great mission to unite.’”

            Bolgarsky then says “Permit me not to agree with you, Vladimir Vladimirovich! I am first of all a Tatar and Muslim who considers Russia as his motherland. I am in no way an ‘[ethnic] Russian Tatar’! I am a [non-ethnic] Russian Tatar,” despite the fact that the laws of the Russian state don’t allow him or others to learn their native languages to perfection.

            But Bolgarsky concludes that there is one point with which he has to agree with Putin and that is when the prime minister says that anyone “who comes into regions with other cultures and historical traditions must relate to local customs with respect. To the customs of [ethnic] Russians and all other peoples of Russia.”

            So anyone, including Russian presidential candidates who come to Tatarstan and the Middle Volga should be good enough to “learn at least 100 words of Tatar” in order to behave respectfully to the Tatar population.  Vladimir Putin, Bolgarsky concludes, has been good enough to do at least that.

Window on Eurasia: Komi-Permyaks, Victims of Putin’s Regional Amalgamation Plan, Want Autonomy Back

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 23 – Komi-Permyak activists are using the Internet to highlight the worsening situation in their region since it became the first small non-Russian federation subject to be combined with a larger and predominantly ethnic Russian one and to demand that Moscow restore their former status or allow them to become part of the ethnically-related Komi Republic.

            A group of Komi-Permyaks, who feel that they were mistled or even betrayed when Vladimir Putin orchestrated a referendum approving the elimination of their autonomy and status as a federal subject and inclusion in Perm kray in 2005, have launched a “Return Our Autonomy” page on Russia’s V kontakte” network (vkontakte.ru/topic-33845494_25626832)

            Those posting on this page say that their people have experienced a significant “deterioration in the standard of living” since they were “swallowed by Perm kray and argue that the only way forward for their Finno-Ugric nation is to leave that formation and either be restored as a separate federal subject of become part of the Komi Republic.

            The Soviet government formed the Komi-Permyak autonomous district in 1925, and after the USSR disintegrated, it became one of the federation subjects enumerated in the Russian Constitution. But in the name of administrative simplification, then President Vladimir Putin pushed through its amalgamation with Perm on December 1, 2005.

            The Komi-Permyaks and activists in several other Finno-Ugric nations in the Middle Volga have complained since that time that the assistance they were promised and the benefits they were told would flow from amalgamation have not happened and that the Komi-Permyaks are worse off than before. 

            But this is the first time that local activists have formed what could be described as a nascent movement to reverse the amalgamation, and it comes as things appear to be heating up among the population of the Finno-Ugric and ethnic Russian subjects in this part of the Russian Federation.

            Last week, Aleksandr Kalashniko, the head of the FSB administration in the Komi Republic, told the local paper, “Krasnoye znamya” that the most important task his officers now have is “blocking extremism and its most serious form, terrorism” among both Finno-Ugric and Russian populations (www.gumilev-center.ru/?p=9058).

            In addition to nationalists groups, Kalashnikov complained about the work of Golos and Memorial, two human rights groups that he said were “directed from abroad, often financed by foreign non-governmental foundations, and directed at the transformation of the political system in Russia,” including by the disruption of the upcoming presidential elections.

            One group the FSB officer did not mention but that seems likely to prove a greater threat to public order than these human rights organizations is the newly organized Russian nationalist “Ethnopolitical Union -- ‘Russians’” in Syktyvkar which promises to protect ethnic Russians from non-Russian oppression (rubsev.ru/2012/01/v-syktyvkare-proshlo-uchreditelnoe-sobranie-etnopoliticheskogo-obedineniya-russkie/).

Window on Eurasia: Economic Crisis behind ‘Winds of Change’ in Post-Soviet States, Analyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 24 – The leaders of the post-Soviet state and in particular those who have successfully constructed “administered democracies” no longer fear “orange” revolutions, but they are being pushed toward “reforms” of one kind or another by the economic crisis and the demonstrations that have already taken place across the Russian Federation.

            In today’s “Novyye izvestiya,” Konstantin Nikolayev, Olga Gorbacheva and Elena Antonova argue that recent weeks, “the former USSR has become an arena of unexpected political developments … [as] one after another leader … begins to talk about reforms” that would change “the entire political landscape in these states.”

            And what is especially striking, these three journalists suggest, is that this trend is clearly in evidence “even there were practically nothing has changed from the moment of the disintegration of the USSR” – specifically, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan (www.newizv.ru/politics/2012-01-23/157889-veter-neizvestnyh-peremen.html).

            Moreover, the “Novyye izvestiya” writers continue, this outbreak of “reformist initiatives in the near abroad looks particularly surprising if one takes into consideration that it is occurring at the time of the real triumph of ‘administered democracies’ over ‘the orange threat’” that earlier brought change to Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

            Mikhail Khazin,the president of the Neokon Consulting Company, provides an explanation, the journalists say. He suggests that the economic crisis presents “a far more threatening challenge” to such leaders than any “hypothetical ‘orange’ threat’” to existing arrangements.

            “If an individual lives in a situation in which his material well-being constantly grows, he will not particularly reflect about who is leading the country. But when incomes fall and the question arises as to whose incomes must be reduced, then people immediately become interested in just how legitimate the authorities are.”

            The December protests in Moscow and other Russian cities sent a message not only because of what participants in them were saying but even more because those taking part were very different than “the ‘orange’ meetings of the times of the revolutions of 2003-2005” and because they came together spontaneously.

            Belarusian leader Alyaksandr  Lukashenka in a recent speech drew a specific link between these protests and his suggestion – “for the first time during his administration,” the journalists point out – of the need for “political modernization,” whose nature perhaps not surprisingly, he has not yet been willing to specify.

            Lukashenka’s opponents including Anatoly Lebedko of the United Civic Party and Aleksandr Milinkevich of the For Freedom Movement thus remain skeptical, with the former saying that Lukashenka is taking his cue from Moscow but perhaps and the latter suggesting this may all be nothing more than “a playing at democratization.”

             However that may be, the three journalists write, the upcoming elections in Belarus may provide an opening: Lukashenka might permit representation from the opposition to make himself and his regime appear more legitimate not only among his own hard-pressed population but also among European governments.

            Kazakhstan provides another example, the “Novyye izvestiya” writers say. Indeed, it was the leader in this regard with President Nursultan Nazarbayev calling of changes at least in part because of the protests in Zhanaozen, demosntrators which resembled those in Moscow in one key particular: in both, the protesters were largely drawn from the angry middle class.

             But the most intriguing examples of these “winds of change” may be in Turkmenistan and Moldova. In the former, for the first time, several candidates will take part in the presidential election. And in the latter, precisely because the economic crisis calls for unpopular measures, politicians are talking about direct election of the country’s president.

             How things may develop remains uncertain, the journalists suggest, and they offer as a concluding remark the observation of Mensk political scientist Vsevolod Shimov that any serious reforms will require public consultations. If that doesn’t happen, than “the probability is great” that things will go wrong, with negative consequences for all.