Population of Only One Predominantly Russian Region Now Growing in Absence of Immigration, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – The only federal subject whose population is predominantly ethnic Russian and which is projected to increase over the next five years is Tyumen, according to analysts at the Moscow Institute for Digital Transformations and Research on Economic Trends. Others may increase in number but only if there is significant net immigration.

            Many non-Russian areas however, including Daghestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Khanty-Mansiisk, Yamalo-Nenets, the Altai Republic, Tyva, Buryatia, and Sakha, will show population growth with more births than deaths (argumenti.ru/society/2020/05/666466 and nazaccent.ru/content/33258-eksperty-k-2024-godu-estestvennaya-pribyl.html).

            That pattern will have three consequences, the experts say. First, the population of the Russian Federation will decline; second, the share of non-Russians in that population will increase relative to that of ethnic Russians; and third, there will be more migration both within the country and from abroad.

            Internal immigration will increase, mostly within federal districts rather than between them, the Institute says. That likely means that predominantly ethnic Russian federal subjects in the North Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East will become less Russian faster than those elsewhere.

            Migration will also tend to equalize incomes and unemployment levels, as people move to places where there are higher wages and salaries and more jobs.  And in some places, especially in the Central Federal District, the arrival of immigrants from abroad will overwhelm internal migration but still reduce the share of ethnic Russians there as well.

Female Mutilation in Ingushetia Not the Widespread Problem Moscow Writers Claim, Three Republic Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – Even a single incident of female sexual mutilation must be combatted and those responsible punished, Ingush activists say; but efforts by Moscow politicians and journalists to black the reputation of Ingushetia by playing up the extent of a marginal problem there must also be opposed.

            Earlier this month, a Russian politician called attention to a horrific case of a young women who reportedly had been subject to such an operation in a Magas hospital, implying that this was somehow typical of Ingush society as a whole (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/05/russian-politicians-feminists-demand.html).

            For many, this may have seemed entirely plausible given documentation about the extent of the problem in Daghestan (srji.org/resources/search/proizvodstvo-kalechashchikh-operatsiy-na-polovykh-organakh-u-devochek-v-respublike-dagestan/), and the willingness of those unfamiliar with the North Caucasus to assume that what is true of one place is true of all.

            But what may be true in one is rarely true of all, and three Ingush experts, rights activist Timur Akiyev, journalist Izabella Yevloyeva, and lawyer Tamerlan Akiyev, say that the phenomenon while perhaps widespread in Daghestan is uncharacteristic of Ingushetia (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/350123/).

            Timur Akiyev, head of the Ingush section of Memorial, says that female mutilation is rare in the republic. “As far as I am aware,” he continues, this operation is “not practiced among Ingush. And if someone does use this barbaric method, then this is being done in secret and hidden from the population.”

            The case Moscow writers have devoted so much attention to came to light only because one parent objected to what the other parent did, not because there is a specific ban on this practice in Russian law that the authorities could act on independently of such reports.  There should be such a law.

            Izabella Yevloyeva, the editor of the independent Fortanga news portal, adds that she learned about this practice “only a few years ago when it attracted widespread public attention in Daghestan. And I couldn’t imagine that such a practice exists in Ingushetia,” adding that “I have not encountered” any cases in the republic.

            She continues that the practice is abhorrent to her and that doctors who conduct such operations “must be held responsible and the young women given psychological help.” 

            And lawyer Tamerlan Akiyev agrees that female mutilation is rare in Ingushetia. There are some people in the republic who may seek to practice it, but it certainly is not the widespread problem some have suggested.  A legal ban on this horrific behavior would eliminate even those, but Russian law lacks such a ban.

Some Russians Want to Be Called ‘Great Russians’ in 2020 Census and Beyond

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – In tsarist times, the three main Slavic groups in the population were called the Great Russians (Velikorossy), the Little Russians (Malorossy), and the White Russians (Belorussy). Now, some ethnic Russian activists are calling for a restoration of the use of Velikorossy as a term of identity in the 2020 census and beyond.

            They are basing their calls on Vladimir Putin’s insistence that today’s Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are not three nations but one, but by advancing this demand, such people are unintentionally highlighting the extent to which Russian identity in its current form reflects in large measure not a thousand-year history but the policies of the Soviet state.

            It was, after all, the Soviet government and not any national movement that defined those who had called themselves and been called Great Russians as simply Russians to avoid offending the other two groups and to prevent such pretensions of Russian superiority over them from provoking an explosive negative reaction.

            Svobodnaya pressa commentator Veniamin Bashlachev recounts the history of the names Great Russian and Russian and argues that the fate of a people depends on the name it gives itself and demands that others give it as well and suggests that ever more people in Russia are recognizing that reality (svpressa.ru/blogs/article/266777/).

            He reports that on the internet there is now a page labelled “Velikoross. The Truth Sounds Beautiful” and quotes from it the words of a woman from the Altai who said that she had first read that word when she came upon it in a listing of her ancestors at the end of imperial times. “Imagine,” she said, “I am the descendant of my grandfather: I am a GREAT RUSSIAN.”

            According to Bashlachev, she has ever reason for delight and pride because “at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Great Russians were the most numerous and must significant people of Russia.”  But the Bolsheviks took that away from them because they followed the anti-Russian arguments of Karl Marx.

            His doctrine required that they “deprive” Great Russians of their ancestors by renaming them Russians. “They banned Vladimir Dal’s “Great Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Langauge” and the word “Great Russians.” And they introduced instead the adjective “Russians.”

            This “beyond any doubt was a crime against historic Russia because the liquidation of the name ‘Great Russian’ automatically ‘zeroed out’ all the centuries of achievements of the ancestors of the Great Russians. Whether you like it or not, in the 1920s, a course was set toward the disappearance of the Great Russians as a people.”

            Many at the time opposed this, but their leaders were deported. Among those sent out of Russia was Aleksandr Ilin, “the outstanding Russian thinking whom Putin recalls today,” Bashlachev continues.  He saw the danger of giving all the other peoples of Russia a real name but reducing Russians to the status of an adjective.

            “Any real people has a noun as its name. A people exists as long as there is a desire to preserve its name,” the commentator says. Otherwise, it first becomes a mankurt who forgets its past and then ceases to exist and is absorbed by others who have not forgotten their names and their pasts.

            There are signs that this is happening to those who now call themselves Russians, Bashlachev says. He recently encountered on the Internet a post by one of these which shockingly declared that “everything would be easier for everyone on earth if the Russian nation were to cease to exist.”

            “That is what is happening with us, with Russians.” And it must be fought, Bashlachev argues. “Ahead of us is the 2020 census. In order to increase the capacity of Russian people to resist … people must remind census takers that you are descendants of the Great Russians who extended Russia from the White Sea to the Black Sea and from the Baltic to the Pacific.”

            According to the commentator, today’s Russians “have become accustomed since childhood to think they are Russians. Therefore, now, only a few thousand consider themselves Great Russians.” That number must rise to at least a million so that the Kremlin will “finally see the light and official return Great Russians the status of indigenous residents of Russia.”