People with Ethnically Mixed Backgrounds Celebrated in Buryatia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – In Soviet times, officials routinely pointed to the rise of ethnically mixed marriages as an indication of the rapprochement of nations and their coming together into a single Soviet people.  In the post-Soviet period, that issue has been on the back burner in most places.

            On the one hand, that shift reflects a heightened sense of nationality among many people Russian and non-Russian alike. And on the other, it also appears to reflect a decline in the number of ethnically mixed marriages and thus of ethnically mixed people in many parts of the country.

            But now in a break with the post-1991 trend, Aleksandr Makhacheyev, a Buryat journalist is celebrating such ethnically mixed people in an article entitled “The Time of the Metis in Buryat Politics” which considers their position in the past, present and future (asiarussia.ru/news/18417/).

            Three of the 21 members of the republic government are products of ethnically mixed marriages, he notes, adding that “the issue of the national membership of the representatives of the authorities in Buryatia is one of the most important” not only in that republic but in most places in the world.

            The newly appointed head of Buryatia, Aleksey Tsydenov, is a metis and used the occasion of his first address to point that out.  “Obviously,” Makhacheyev says, “the federal center considered this background” in appointing him to this post, quite likely intending to send a message to Buryats and others as well.

            Ethnically mixed marriages and their ethnically mixed offspring appeared in Buryatia with the arrival of the Russians. The Cossacks weren’t accompanied by women and by force they often seized Buryat women, often with tragic results. But “thus began the mutual process of the genetic penetration of ethnic Russians and Buryats.”

            The Russian Orthodox Church worked hand in glove with the state to promote such marriages. Buryats who converted were not only freed of certain taxes but gained the right to marry Russian women without paying a bride price. But some Buryats without conversion were still prepared to pay a bride price for Russian women when they appeared.

            Such intermarriages, the Buryat journalist says, contributed to the rise of “new sub-ethnoses” in which elements of the two national cultures were combined. This process was accelerated rather than slowed by Soviet policies and by the 1970s, one in every seven marriages in Buryatia’s capital were ethnically mixed. 

            Today, Makhacheyev continues, the share is approximately the same, although polls show that just under half of all Buryats say they have relatives who are members of other ethnic groups and that just over half would support the marriage of their children to members of other nationalities, with slightly more Russians than Buryats feeling that way, 57.8 percent to 53.5.

            “Under favorable socio-economic and political conditions,” the journalist concludes, such figures “will only grow.”

One Russian Citizen in Three Opposes Putin’s Language Policies

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Thirty-three percent of Russians, some 48 million people, say they support obligatory instruction in non-Russian languages in the non-Russian republics, according to a new VTsIOM poll, thus positioning themselves in opposition to Kremlin policy (nazaccent.ru/content/26036-bolee-30-rossiyan-vystupili-za-obyazatelnoe.html).

            That share is significant because it constitutes more than the total percentage of non-Russians in the population and thus suggests that many Russian speakers believe that instruction in non-Russian languages is something they support either on principle or out of concern that dropping that requirement could harm the country.

            At least some of these people, one could expect, will express their opposition to Vladimir Putin’s policies in this area by participating in demonstrations, pressuring officials or even voting against him in the March 2018 elections. But there is no evidence that the Kremlin leader is going to be dissuaded from his present course of Russianization anytime soon.

            Moscow has forced Tatarstan to back down on this issue, and a prosecutor’s report that there are violations of federal law regarding Russian language instruction in non-Russian republics suggests that the central government will press hard against non-Russian languages everywhere (kommersant.ru/doc/3482053).

Putin’s New Militarist Rhetoric Reflects His Domestic Political Problems Rather than Foreign Agenda, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – Vladimir Putin’s talk about military threats and the need for the Russian economy to go on a war footing has more to do with his domestic political problems than with any real plans by the Kremlin leader to put Moscow on course toward a third world war, according to Vladislav Inozemtsev.

            Tragically, the Moscow economist says, while “there are no real plans to put industry in Russia on a military footing,” Putin’s “militarist rhetoric,” as useful for his regime as it may be by distracting the attention of the population from economic problems, “can inflict not a little harm” on the country (rbc.ru/opinions/politics/28/11/2017/5a1d12e29a79472893caed47).

            If Putin were not employing this type of rhetoric, Inozemtsev says, Russians would be asking questions about why Moscow thinks it can plan to spend 19 trillion rubles (300 billion US dollars) between 2018 and 2015 instead of using that money to address many of the immediate economic and social problems Russia now faces. 

            Russia’s military industrial complex is “an enormous part of the Russian economy in which about two million people are involved,” the economist says. But it isn’t producing anything like the number of weapons Russia would need were it to get involved in a conflict with NATO.

              In 2016, it produced 69 military planes and 60 helicopters, miniscule numbers if one considers the likely losses in any such conflict and if one remembers that “today Russia is so far behind our Western ‘partners’ in conventional weapons that no mobilization of civilian enterprises can correct the situation.”

            A recent assessment of the balance of forces shows that Russia had 750 tanks on its western flanks while NATO had 8500, it had 420 attack aircraft while NATO had 2900, and it had 280 military helicopters while NATO had 1100.  Given this imbalance, how can any Russian talk about really going to war?

            But talk of war has even more serious consequences than that, Inozemtsev says. “In recent months, it is becoming ever more obvious that the economy is stagnant, any ‘growth’ is extremely unstable, real incomes of the population are falling ever more rapidly, and investments are supported in the first instance from the federal budget or by state companies.”

            In such a situation, he continues, “talk about a foreign threat and correspondingly about the need to finance resistance to it reduces the level of the expectations of citizens as far as the growth of their well-being is concerned.” Indeed, Inozemtsev suggests, it represents a call to put off all such subjects until after 2024 or perhaps even 2030.

            But what that means for the economy, he continues, is that all this talk is not about a genuine mobilization but rather about exactly the opposite.  The powers that be don’t need mobilization right now; they need to pacify the population and keep the Russian people focused only on issues of survival.

            It should be remembered that Moscow’s military moves in Georgia and Ukraine “began not on the background of military hysteria but at a time of talk about rapprochement with the West and modernization (2008) and about the Olympics games (2014).” That too leads to the conclusion that talk about mobilization now bears “an imaginary character.”

            And that means this: “the more talk about the shift of the economy onto military rails, the fewer chances there are for the realization of such plans.” Putin clearly is more interested in playing at being a leader in wartime than in actually being one since business in Russia “does not have any military-mobilizational potential.”

            But the war hysteria Putin has sponsored depresses the economy further, driving down savings and investment because people see no use in such steps if the end of the world is at hand and undermining the regime’s authority because “a significant portion of society understands that the authorities are lying when talking about the aggressive intentions of the West.”

            “It is difficult to say,” Inozemtsev concludes, “whether those in the Kremlin recognize this; but there is almost no doubt that no real mobilization will be achieved by raising the military rhetoric.”