Window on Eurasia: Internet Accelerating Mankurtization of Russians and Non-Russians, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 29 – The increasing use of online social networks, experts say, is accelerating the mankurtization of all the peoples of the Russian Federation, cutting off members of the younger generation not only from their parents but from their culture and leaving them without clear definitions of how to behave.

            That is the conclusion of experts surveyed by the Adygey version of the Russian-language weekly, “Argumenty i fakty,” who add that this loss of intergenerational ties is also accelerating the demise of some of the smaller languages both in the North Caucasus and elsewhere in the Russian Federation (natpress.net/index.php?newsid=11301).

            One measure of “mankurtization” – a term introduced by Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov in his novel “A Day Longer than an Age” to refer to those reduced to slavery because of the forced loss of their memory – is the fact that ever more people in the Russian Federation do not identify as members of one or another nationality.

            According to the 2010 all-Russian census, 15,000 people in Adygeya alone did not identify as members of a nationality, about the same share of the population of that republic as the Armenians (15,600) and far more than the number of Ukrainians (5900) and Tatars (2600) living there.

            “It is no secret that we are step by step becoming illiterates,” Nelli Shishkova, a specialist on language at Adygey State University. “We do not know our native language and we speak Russian poorly. Letter writing is dying with written letters giving way to SMS and likes.” And as a result, the number of words people know and use at all is precipitously declining.

            Mariet Udzhukhu agrees and points out that Russian is suffering in this regard alongside languages like Circassian which are spoken by far fewer people.  “Today Russian speech has been impoverished,” she says, as a result of spreading ignorance of the classical literary language and the unrestricted importation of “parasite words” and “foreign borrowings.”

            “Teachers are upset,” she continues. “Young people do not read classical literature. But how can they read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin if they do not understand the language or literate speech?” What can one expect, Udzhukhu continues, when the number of people who speak literary Russian is so small that it is a subject for the Guinness Book of World Records.

            And if Russia’s state language is now a “deficit” good, “just imagine what the extent of the impoverishment of Circassian now is.”  In many cases, the parents of Adygey children are to blame: they want their offspring to study Russian or English in school rather than their own national language.

            “Our children are rapidly becoming mankurts who do not remember their roots and who are being transformed in the best case into people who use slang and broken English,” she says. This loss of their native language is contributing to the loss of native culture and to the positive values it inculcates.

            Udhukhu adds that she has only one reason for hope: “We are learning to value our native language from those are returning from Turkey.  Unlike us who do not value the right to speak our native language, these people know what it means to lose it.” For “more than a century, they have insisted on their right to be called Circassians and to have their own culture and language.”

           

Window on Eurasia: The Mongol Yoke Vanishes – and So Too Will Russian Unity

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 28 – In ways that recall David King’s 1997 study of pictorial falsification in Stalin’s time, “The Commissar Vanishes,” the Putin regime plans to eliminate any reference to the Mongol yoke in school textbooks, a step some may welcome in the name of tolerance but one that will have some unintended and possibly unwelcome consequences.

            That is just one event in Russian history not mentioned in the draft conception of the new common history textbook Vladimir Putin is pushing out of a belief that such a work will help unify the peoples of the Russian Federation (kommersant.ru/doc/2305195,  vedomosti.ru/politics/news/16782651/istoriya-obojdetsya-bez-bolotnoj, mk.ru/social/education/article/2013/09/25/921244-istoriya-stanet-politkorrektnoy.html  and km.ru/v-rossii/2013/09/26/istoriya-rossiiskoi-imperii/721554-russkuyu-istoriyu-sdelali-bolee-tolerantnoi).

            Dropping any mention of the “Mongol yoke,” which along with the Soviet contribution to the victory over Hitler in World War II, has long served as a universal moral solvent to “dissolve” criticism of whatever Russia is or does, will please Kazan Tatars and other Muslim peoples.  But passing over events in silence will ultimately work against the Russian state.

            On the one hand, not talking about events that one or another group finds distasteful or objectionable, be it the Mongol yoke, Stalinism, opposition to the Soviet regime, of the contributions of Boris Yeltsin, will inevitably reduce the value of school textbooks as a primary source of knowledge about the past of Russia.

            In Soviet times, many Russians and non-Russians learned an alternative history at home, from their own reading, or from international broadcasting, something that reflected the boring quality of Brezhnev-era textbooks that attempted to avoid all difficult problems past and present by not talking about them and that further undermined public trust in the authorities.

            And on the other, Moscow’s willingness to defer to the objections of groups to talking about this or that issue or event will only lead more groups to demand that their objections be met as well, something that will leave the Russian history textbooks of the future nearly a blank slate if the state concedes or that will cause these other groups to offer their own alternatives.

            In the last decades of Soviet power, the failure of the government to approve discussion of certain themes had the effect of powering the rise of environmental and historical preservations movements, both of which, as some in Moscow appear to have forgotten, contributed to the growth of anti-Moscow regionalism and nationalism.

            In short, and again as in Brezhnev’s time, a Kremlin-led effort to promote unity almost certainly will have exactly the opposite effect, a classical counter-example of the oft-cited aphorism that “he who controls the past controls the future.” Instead, now in the Russian Federation, just as in the USSR, the illusion of control will ultimately lead to its loss.

Window on Eurasia: Migrant Workers Adapting to Russian Culture as They Experience It but Not as Russians Might Like It to Be, Moscow Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 28 – Russians increasingly complain that migrant workers in major cities are not adapting to Russian culture, but in fact, according to a leading expert on migration at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the gastarbeiters are adapting to Russian mass culture as it actually is if not as many Russians would like to imagine it to be.

            Vladimir Mukomel, a sector head at the Moscow Institute of Sociology, says that talk about “a colossal cultural divide between migrants and the local population” is at a minimum an exaggeration and that people should be asking themselves just what “culture” the migrants should adapt themselves to (sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/discussions/2013/09/d28008/).

                “The most critically opposed to migrants” among Muscovites “are those who came to [the Russian capital] not long ago and who feel the competition” that the new immigrants represent most severely.  Obviously, those on both sides of this divide should respect “other cultures and traditions,” but it is important to understand just what this means.

            Since Russians generally assume that it is the migrants who must adapt, Mukomel says, they should “be asking themselves the question just which culture [the newcomers] should accept?”  Most gastarbeiters live “in those districts where there is inexpensive housing,”places in Moscow which are the most “socially unfavorable” of the city.

            What culture do they come into contact with and are thus expected to adapt themselves to? A culture of “curses, drunkenness and loutishness”?  That is what they see around them, Mukomel says. “Is this the culture that we must impose on them?”  Obviously, that is not what Russians means, but they forget that “there is no single Moscow culture as such.”

            Those immigrants who are exposed to that kind of mass culture will adapt to it, the scholar says. Those immigrants – and they are far more numerous than many think – who are educated, speak Russian well, and live among Muscovites of a different kind will adapt to their surroundings as well.

            The reality is that migrants to Russian cities learn the Russian language within a few months, and over a roughly similar period, the sociologist continues, they adapt to the values of the Russians they live, combining as such groups do something from their pasts with the world in which they now live.

.  Mukomel’s message will not be a welcome one in many Russian quarters, but it is an important one and something that finds confirmation in the experience of immigrant communities in many other countries.  Unless and until Russians acknowledge this reality, their demands for gastarbeiters to change are likely to make the current situation even worse.

Window on Eurasia: Ukraine Can Effectively Respond to Moscow ‘Asymmetrically,’ Blogger Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 28 – Russians are taking false comfort with the idea that Ukraine cannot respond symmetrically to economic pressure from Moscow, but while that may be the case, a blogger suggests, Ukraine possesses “an entire arsenal” of ideological resources that will allow it for a potentially very effective but completely “asymmetrical” response.

            In a blogpost on Rosbalt.ru, Pavel Kazarin argues that if Moscow continue to pressure Ukraine economically in order to try to force Kyiv to turn away from Europe, that will not only alienate Ukrainians from Russians but open the way for Ukrainians to hit back at some of the most cherished “symbols of Russia” (rosbalt.ru/ukraina/2013/09/26/1180430.html).

            Such a response could matter far more than many in Moscow seem to think because while economic relations between Russia and Ukraine have long been chilly and as they say “nothing personal, just business,” ideological or better symbolic ties have not been, although they soon could become that way if Russian continues to behave in a clumsy fashion.

            Moscow has long sought to “publically” hold Kyiv within “the sphere of its ‘imperial influence,’” Kazarin says, pointing to the efforts to produce common history textbooks, tours by “icon-bearing [Russian] bikers,” and “regular visits” by the Moscow Patriarch, all things that Kyiv has gone along with but could easily dispense with in the future.

            “In Moscow they sincerely think that Kyiv simply has no way out, that Viktor Yanukovich is a hostage of a pro-Russian southeast, that pro-Westernism for the Ukrainian elites is fraught with the loss of power, [and] that the Kremlin has made the Party of the Regions” indebted to it.

            “But it turns out,” Kazarin says, “that the southeast votes not for Russia but for its ‘Donetsk’ people because they are ‘its own,’” that the Ukrainian oligarchs who have real power find it easier to protect their interests in Europe than in Russia,, and that Moscow itself has been too clever by half and given the Ukrainian authorities a weapon of enormous destructive power.”

            The Russians have miscalculated, he continues, “because all Russian foreign policy over the last decade has been based on calculations for ‘internal use’ and has been thus to a significant degree an imitation” of a genuine foreign policy. But this miscalculation has been concealed by Moscow’s propagandistic successes at home and in the West.

             Many Russians and many in the West have been convinced by the work of Moscow’s propaganda “machine” that “Ukraine is not simply an inalienable part of historical Russia” but that Kyiv is “the cradle of Orthodoxy and the mother of Russian cities.”  But by creating this image, Moscow has handed the Ukrainians a tool they can use against Russia.

            Importantly, this tool does not require Ukraine to be “an economic heavy weight.”  It simply requires clever political steps.  Kyiv could invite the pope to visit. It could canonize Kyivan Prince Askold who accepted Christianity “130 years before Vladimir.” It could have regular exercises with NATO. It could support gay rights. And/or it could “publish the complete works of Pushkin in Ukrainian.”

             This list of Ukraine’s “arsensal of inexpensive but extremely offensive actions as far as official Moscow is concerned could be infinitely extended.”

            Moreover, if Ukrainian elites show some inventiveness, they “can even begin to struggle with the Kremlin over the brand ‘Kievan Rus.’” That state was “’the truly European Rus as opposed to the later Asiatic franchise.”  If Kyiv played its cards right, the world could decie that “yes, Ukraine is the real Russia’” – something that for Moscow would be “serious.”

            All of this is possible, the blogger says, because “the weakness of contemporary Russia consists in the hypertrophic quality of its symbolic presentation.”  Kyiv, having wisely chosen to become part of “pragmatic Europe,” can thus play on this, “depriving” Moscow of its ability to present itself as ‘the historical Russian monopoly.’” 

            In short, Ukraine can now do against Russia what Russia has tried to do against others, invert “the base and the superstructure.” And given where Moscow is now, that is a stronger card for the Ukrainian government than any economic games that the Russian government may try to play.