Window on Eurasia: Scholars Demand Moscow be Held Accountable for Occupation of Crimea and Violation of Crimean Tatar Rights

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 3 – A group of scholars from around the world who study nationality issues in Eurasia are circulating an online petition calling on “all states, agencies, organizations and individuals” to speak out in defense of the rights of the Crimean Tatars and hold “the Russian authorities in illegal occupation of Crimea accountable for the violation of these rights.”

            Written by Idil Imirli of George Mason University, Victor Ostapchuk of the University of Toronto, Andras Riedlmayer of Harvard University and Maria Sonevytsky of Bard College and first posted online on May 29, the petition has already garnered more than 200 signatures from scholars who constitute a who’s who of specialists in this area (scholarsforqirim.com/).

            The petition points out that “the Crimean Tatars are a nation with a long and rich history going back many centuries” and that “unlike Russians and Ukrainians, the Crimean Tatars have no homeland other than Crimea. Ever since the Crimean Khanate was invaded and abolished by Russia in 1783, in violation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kajnardja of 1774.”

Moreover, it notes that “on 18 May 1944 the entire Crimean Tatar nation was deported to Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia. The mass deportation constituted an act of genocide as during and after it about half of the deportees perished from hunger, dehydration, and disease.

“It was only after the breakup of the USSR and attainment of Ukrainian independence in 1991 that the majority of the surviving Crimean Tatars and their descendants were able, with great effort and hardship, to return to their homeland. Today their population there is about 300,000."

Because of the Crimean Tatars’ “catastrophic history under the rule of St. Petersburg and Moscow, which has resulted in massive national trauma,” the petition continues, “the vast majority of Crimean Tatars [is] loyal to Ukraine and remain adamant in their opposition to the Russian annexation of Crimea.

With regard to recent events, it underscores that “the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 was achieved through a covert military operation under cover of which a coup occurred on 27 February, installing a new local government in Simferopol and declaring a referendum that was at first concerned with increased autonomy, and a few days later, secession of Crimea from Ukraine and accession to Russia.”

“This was done contrary to the Constitution of Ukraine and that of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and without even a clear option to vote for the status quo, as one option was to join Russia and the other virtual independence from Ukraine. The referendum was held contrary to all norms for referenda of this importance—such as the possibility for free public discussion of the ramifications of a vote to secede. Moreover, instead of monitoring certified by internationally recognized agencies, it was carried out under the watchful eyes of masked Russian troops and armed local ‘self-defense’ vigilantes.”

“The result, an official 83% turnout and 97% vote to join Russia, was clearly falsified, as virtually the entire Tatar population and much of the Ukrainian and Russian population boycotted the vote. There is considerable evidence that the turnout was no more than 30-50% and that only half of those who actually turned out voted for secession.”

The petition continues: “The Crimean Tatar national assembly, the Qurultay, and its representative-executive body, the Mejlis, have reaffirmed the will of their people to remain in Ukraine and categorically condemn the Russian takeover. The Crimean Tatar population is currently under huge pressure to accept Russian citizenship—refusal can mean loss of work, pension, access to schooling, and other social benefits.”

“The international community has condemned the seizure of Crimea and does not recognize the legality of its annexation (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262, 27 March 2014 and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Resolution 1988, 9 April 2014),” the petition points out.

And both “the Qurultay, the elected assembly of the Crimean Tatars, and its representative-executive body, the Mejlis, have voted to condemn the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea and refuse recognition of Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, to demand recognition of the indigenous status of the Crimean Tatars, to demand the establishment of Crimean Tatar national and territorial autonomy, and self-government in Ukrainian Crimea [and] the full rehabilitation and restoration of the rights of the Crimean Tatars.”

At a time when international attention has shifted away from the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea and the equally illegal actions of the Russian authorities there, the petition calls for everyone to join its authors in supporting “the national and human rights of the Crimean Tatars” and in holding “the Russian authorities ... accountable for the violation of these rights.”

One can only add that simple human decency requires no less.

Window on Eurasia: Daghestanis, Inspired by Abkhazia, Demand Republic Leader Resign

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 3 – In an echo of the success Abkhazians had in pressing for the ouster of their republic’s leader, 271 delegates to a May 31 meeting in Makhachkala calling itself “the Extraordinary Congress of the Peoples of Daghestan” has demanded that Moscow fire Ramazan Abdulatipov as republic head and replace him with one of three Daghestani politicians.

            The unofficial group which has focused on rehabilitation issues had wanted to meet April 19-20, but the republic authorities blocked that session. Then in the middle of last month, its leaders said they would meet on June 15, but that announcement, one of their number told Kavka-uzel.ru, was a ruse intended to mislead the authorities (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/243582/).

            Ruslan Rasulov, the head of the Union of the Defense of the Rights and Freedoms of Peoples, Individuals and Citizens and one of the organizers, said that at Saturday’s meeting, speakers “had expressed their lack of trust in the authorities of Daghestan and unanimously passed a resolution demanding the retirement” of Ramazan Abdulatipov.

            The resolution said that Daghestan is “in deep crisis” and that “the measures taken by the head of the republic are not adequate to the existing situation and will lead to its further destabilization.  The constitutional rights of the citizens of the Russian Federation living on the territory of the Republic of Daghestan are being massively violated.”

            Moreover, it said that Abdulatipov bears “all responsibility for the destabilization of the social-political situation in the Republic of Daghestan” and that he should “voluntarily retire in  the name of the preservation of peace and stability” in the republic. Further, the resolution urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to promote that end by stripping Abdulatipov of his powers.

            “The Congress demands that the only acceptable form of state administration in Daghestan be recognized as a parliamentary-presidential form of administration, which will provide for the representation of each people in parliament and the election from each people in turn a president for a term of four years.”

            The three Daghestani politicians the congress proposed that Putin choose among to be the first republic leader are Gajimurad Omarov, head of the regional branch of Just Russia, Senator Umakhanov, and Khasavyurt Mayor Saigidpasha Umakhanov.

            Three aspects of this event make it highly significant. First, it is an indication that what has happened in Abkhazia is having an impact on republics within the borders of the Russian Federation and that some in these republics see the way in which power was transferred in Abkhazia as a model for their own behavior.

            Second, it shows that the politicians in Daghestan and likely elsewhere are prepared to be extremely clever in advancing their demands, combining declarations of loyalty and deference to the Kremlin and its goals while demanding that Moscow get rid of the leadership it had not so long ago installed with much fanfare.

            And third, the Daghestani demands, which involve a return to political arrangements based on ethnic quotas and rotations that Putin had dispensed with, may leave Moscow with few good choices even if some in the Russian capital are calculating that they can use such demands to strengthen the center’s hold in the North Caucasus.

            Instead, the echoes of Abkhazia are likely to weaken Moscow’s control across the North Caucasus and perhaps more generally, yet another blowback from the actions that the Russian government has been taking in eastern Ukraine and one that must be added to the real costs of Putin’s Ukrainian adventure.

Window on Eurasia: Without Real Federalism, Some Russian Oblasts Will Pursue Secession, Moscow Analyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 3 – The Ukrainian crisis and Moscow’s insistence on the federalization of that country have “awakened the interest of Russian society in federalism,” with some predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays now as committed to achieving real federalism in Russia as any of the non-Russian republics.

            And if Moscow does not agree to living up to the federalism enshrined in the Russian constitution, there is a very real chance that some of them either singly or in groups will seek to secede from the country, a challenge that the central authorities have largely ignored on the assumption that only the non-Russian republics present any such threat.

            In an essay on Nazaccent.ru yesterday, Ulyana Ivanova argues that recent events in Ukraine have for many Russians “yet again demonstrated that a unitary state is not in a position to deal with the contradictions between the center and the regions,” regardless of the ethnic composition of the population (nazaccent.ru/content/11891-sibirskij-separatizm.html).

            Most specialists agree, she writes, that Russia “made the correct choice” by putting a federal model in place in 1991 in order “to preserve the integrity of the country.”  One of its additional advantages was shown by the ease of the annexation of Crimea: “Any federation is a union which is able to accept those who want to join if they correspond to certain requirements.”

            “On the other hand,” Ivanova continues, “the very essence of federalism – the division of power between the center and the regions for more effective administration” is very much an issue in Russia. Some see the system as “a fiction because in their opinion, the central authorities in fact directly order the regions as to what economic and social policy is to be conducted.

            However that may be and however much Russians may want to block ethnic separatism, “there is nothing good in excessive centralization,” Ivanova says.  “If territories are not allowed to exercise self-administration, then they will be begin to seek it” regardless of their ethnic composition, either because they oppose central policies or don’t want to “’feed’” other regions.

            The classical example of regionalism growing over into separatism is provided by the Siberian “oblastniki” of the nineteenth century.  They were true regionalists, but because the center treated their demands for more local control as extremist, some of them began to turn to separatism usually as a tactic but sometimes as a real goal.

            One characteristic of this shift was the promotion of the idea that those most had long assumed to be ethnic Russians like any others were in fact a distinct identity, in this case, “Sibiryaks.”  Nikolay Yadrintsev, one of the leading “oblastniki,” in his book “Siberia as a Colony,” went so far as to contrast the Siberian to “the Russian man.”

            But because it was “obvious” to most that “the Siberians remained Russian in spirit and culture,” the regionalists “never played ‘the ethnic card.’”  As Grigory Potanin, another “oblastnik” put it, people like him “used separatism not as a goal but as a means.” But the imperial authorities did not make that distinction.

            They viewed the Siberian regionalists as secessionists and even labelled the case against them “Concerning the Separation of Siberia from Russia and the Formation of a Republic like the United States.”

            That had one curious consequence, Ivanova says. After the “oblastniki” were convicted, the imperial authorities were unsure were to exile them given that the usual place of exile was Siberia. Finally, they decided to exile Potanin to the Sveaborg fortress on the Baltic and Yadrintsev to Arkhangelsk gubernia!

            During the Russian Civil War, the “oblastniki” were briefly able to articulate a country of their own, but after the defeat of the White Movement, the Bolsheviks crushed them and refused to take into consideration any regionalist ideas in their national-territorial division of the Soviet Union.

            “But today,” Ivanova points out, “certain scholars and politicians assert that the division of the country on an ethnic basis has lost its important and contains within itself a threat of ethnic separatism.”  And they argue that the elimination of the non-Russian republics will thus eliminate any challenge to the center.

In some respects, their arguments “to a certain degree” recall those of the first Siberian regionalists, but that should be a wake-up call for the country because the nineteenth century history shows that regionalism can become separatism if the demands of its supporters are ignored or suppressed.

If Russia is to be a genuinely federal state, its leaders must recognize that doing away with the non-Russian republics does not have “any relation” to the issue of federalism because “today any oblast is an historically evolved region with its own social and economic ties, self-consciousness, and often territorial solidarity.”

Redrawing borders without taking the opinions of those who live in the areas involved is dangerous and wrong, Ivanova says. On the one hand, “the liquidation of republics could push national activists to struggle for independence” because they see these republics as the only guarantee of the survival of their peoples.

And on the other, it will only reinforce the growing importance of regionalism and of demands based on it. “The leaders of the territorial subjects of the federation,” Ivanova says, “ever more often are expressing their dissatisfaction about the preferences which the ethnically-based subjects have.”

But they are also unhappy about the failure of the center to live up to the constitutional requirements for federalism.  This is having an interesting consequence: it is leading some regionalist leaders to promote the idea that regional identities are in fact or should be ethnic ones so that they can claim their rights.

The clearest example of this is again in Siberia. Despite official opposition, in the 2010 Russian census, 4116 people declared themselves to be “Siberian” by nationality, 400 times as many as did so only eight years earlier. “It is quite obvious” from that, Ivanova concludes, that Russian federalism is going to be transformed and in way few expect.

Window on Eurasia: How Eurasianism Became the Neo-Eurasianism of Today

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – Two  new studies, one a biography of the late ethnic theorist Lev Gumilyev and another an investigation of the Eurasianists of the 1920s, throw new light on how classical Eurasianism was transmitted to its recent advocates and how they transformed it into something quite different than the original.

            The first of these, a just-released volume by Ivan Smirnov entitled “Ascents and Descents in the History of Ethnoses: About the Life and Creativity of L.N. Gumilyev – a View from the 21^st Century” (in Russian; Moscow: URSS, 2014), was reviewed by Mikhail Roshchin last week (kavkazoved.info/news/2014/05/31/zagadki-mutagenov-passionarnosti-novaja-kniga-o-zhizni-i-tvorchestve-lva-gumileva.html).

            Smirnov (1966-2013) was a botanist who became interested in Gumilyev’s work because of his own focus on plant selection. In recent years, Roshchin points out, he increasingly devoted himself to political topics and attracted widespread attention for his article, “How is Russia Not Like Nigeria?” (in Russian; Moscow: “Liberal Mission,” 2006).

            What has made Gumilyev so difficult for many to understand, Smirnov writes in his book, is that the ethnographer worked at the intersect point of several academic disciplines and arrived as it were “too early,” by which his biographer means that Gumilyev had to sketch out ideas for which there is not yet an established body of evidence.

            That evidence, Smirnov says, is now beginning to be gathered. But this “synthesis is only beginning and has not yet given sufficient material for those brave and enormous generalizations which are foundin Gumilyev’s works.”  That is true “in particular” of his theory of the passion-based rise and decay of ethnic communities, a set of ideas that remains a hypothesis.

            “If one agrees with tht approach,” Roshchin says, “then it will be easier to accept and understand” Gumilyev, something that an “exclusive” effort to find confirmation or disconfirmation will not allow. Smirnov in short insists that the Eurasianism of Gumilyev is more a methodology than a description of reality.

            In the course of his review, Roshchin draws attention to “a definite  personal motive” behind Smirnov’s decision to write about Gumilyev: his grandfather was in the same cell of Moscow’s Kresti Prison in 1938.   

                Another encounter in Stalin’s camps is the centerpiece of the second new article, one entitled “The Birth of Euasianism as an Idea System” by Igor Kefeli, a St. Petersburg historian and the editor of the Russian journal, “Geopolitics and Security”  (ntv.spbstu.ru/ntv/article/H2.172.2013_07/ reposted last week at  rossiyanavsegda.ru/read/2018/).

            Kefeli argues that “Eurasianism msut not be considered as some historiosophic relic limited to the time frames of the Eurasian movement of the 1920s and 1930s. [It] had a pre-history” in nineteenth century thought and it “is acquiring new live in the present time” with the formation of the Eurasian Union.

            After surveying the pro-Eurasian ideas of Vladimir Lamansky, Pyor Chaadayev, Nikolay Danilevsky, and Fyodor Tyuchev, Kefeli argues that their most important contribution was not only an insistence on Russia as a civilization separate from Europe or Asia but also a focus on “the ‘historical age’” of these civilizations and others as an indication of their vitality.

            Following the Bolshevik revolution, a group of Russian émigré intellectuals elaborated classical Eurasianism as a way of seeking to integrate communism with Russian nationalism and thus justify cooperation with the Soviets.  None of these were more prolific in their writings than Petr Savitsky (1895-1968).

            After studying at Petersburg’s Polytechnic University, he worked in the Russian embassy in Oslo in 1916-1917, was an aide to Baron Wrangel who commanded White Russian forces in the south during the civil war, and then went into emigration in Bulgaria, Germany and ultimately Czechoslovakia.

            Savitsky accepted the arguments of those like Lamansky that there are three distinct continents in between the Atlantic and the Pacific: Europe, Eurasia, and Asia and that Russia was the same as Eurasia. But he gave additional stress to the idea that Eurasian culture was very different and fundamentally opposed to the Greco-Roman culture of Europe.

            The Eurasianist also insisted that the relations between the Russian nation and the other nations of Eurasia were fundamentally different than those among other nations and in particular “do not have any analogies in the international relati0ns of the colonial empires” of the European states.

            During World War II, Savitsky was the director of the Russian Gymnasium in Prague, but in 1945, with the arrival of the Soviet army, he was arrested, condemned for “anti-Soviet activities,” and sent to the GULAG.  He remained there until 1956, but while incarcerated, he attracted perhaps his most prominent student, Lev Gumilyev.

            The conversations of the two while they were political prisoners are lost, but the letters that Savitsky and Gumilyev exchanged between their release in 1956 and Savitsky’s death in 1968 have been preserved in the archives, and Kefeli has examined them to show how much influence the first had on the second.

            The St. Petersburg author makes three points: First, he says, Savitsky clearly recognizedsaw in Gumilyev a like-minded believer in Eurasianism as the ideological basis for the future. Second, the two agreed that Eurasianism was in the first instance about imagery and opposition to the West. And third, they shared a reverence for Chingiz Khan and the Mongols as the formative figures of Eurasia and thus of Russia.

            In summing up his research on this correspondence, Kefeli argues that what makes Eurasianism so important now is that it insists on “the necessity of the restoration of the status of Russia as a super power within a reviving Eurasian Union as one of the centers of a polycentric world.”

           And although the St. Petersburg scholar does not say so, it is clear that Eurasianist ideas have suffered a certain primitivization as they passed from the 19^th century writers to Savitsky to Gumilyev and even more as they have become the neo-Eurasianism of  those like Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin who are seeking to implement them.