Paul Goble
Vienna, July 20 – Young Chechens this year are choosing to study in universities in their own republic rather than elsewhere in the Russian Federation, a reversal of the pattern of only a few years ago and one that reflects both the stabilization in Chechnya and rising anti-Chechen attitudes in the Russian Federation.
Bekkhan Khazbulatov, the rector of the Grozniy Pedagogical Institute, said this week “in 2003-2005, youngsters generally sought to enroll in universities elsewhere, but today even those who could study beyond the borders of Chechnya prefer to enroll in Grozniy” (http://kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1192425.html).
Vakha Magomayev, the chairman of the admissions commission at Chechen State University, echoed Khabulatov’s comments, He noted that there had been a dramatic increase in the number of young Chechens who want to study in local universities, a situation that had not been true earlier.
Neither official was prepared to offer an explanation in their comments to the Russian news agency RIA Novsti-Yug, but there are two obvious ones. On the one hand, the situation in Grozniy is somewhat more stable than it was in the past and thus makes enrollment there a more attractive option.
And on the other, Chechen students who do enroll in universities elsewhere in the Russian Federation are all but certain to encounter anti-Chechen attitudes among and increasingly even physical attacks by xenophobic individuals and groups within the Russian community.
Interviews conducted by the Kavkaz-Uzel news portal suggest that the latter cause is the more important in the calculations of Chechen students. One said that she was “sufficiently prepared to enroll at any prestige university of the country, but all my friends, who had earlier enrolled in other regions, have encountered problems”
Often, she continued, these problems reflect anti-Chechen attitudes on the part of instructors but even more frequently, they are the product of the negative and “aggressive” approach of representatives of [the Russian Federation’s] law enforcement organs.”
Anyone going to Russian universities, she continued, faces “a difficult test,” one that many young Chechens want to avoid.
The parents of these students may also be playing a role in keeping their children in Grozniy. One youngster said that parents “are concerned about the security of their children – during the last year only within the circle of my friends and relatives occurred several unhappy cases with young people who went to study in Russian cities.”
Some of these students had been attacked on the street, and these attacks “in the best case scenario” had ended with traumas and wounds.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who marks his 100th day in office with celebrations tomorrow, may be pleased by this latest development as may many others who would like to see Chechnya ultimately become an independent country. But for Moscow it represents a very serious danger to Russian control of the entire region.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russians fled the violence and poverty of the North Caucasus in large numbers: For example, there were more than 200,000 ethnic Russians in Grozniy in 1991, making it in the words of many a “Russian outpost” but fewer than 500 today (http://www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=12365).
Nonetheless, many officials in Moscow appear to have comforted themselves with the notion that young North Caucasians were integrating themselves into the Russian community by coming to Russian cities to study and work, a population flow that many felt would limit any separatism in the future (http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2007/07/20/ramzan.html).
But now that trend has been reversed, something that makes the argument of Akhmed Zakayev, a former Chechen foreign minister now living in London exile, more significant and for Moscow, more disturbing, than they appeared when he advanced it earlier this year (http://www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?language=2&id=12094).
In February 2007, Zakayev suggested that he and others in the Chechen national movement 1990s had fought in the first instance not to gain power or even to achieve independence immediately but rather to “begin and complete the de-colonization” of Chechnya and of the entire North Caucasus.
In Chechnya at least, that process “is practically completed.” And what little remains to be done, Zakayev continued, will likely be completed by President Ramzan Kadyrov as he moves to strengthen his own position by strengthening Chechen state power.
As a result, Zakayev said at that time, “two, three or four years will pass and those structures that the authorities [in Grozniy however nominally pro-Moscow they may appear] are creating will strengthen” and thereby “become a factor” in the achievement of “the freedom of Chechnya.”
That is not a prospect many in Moscow are likely to welcome however much Putin relies on Kadyrov, and the news that Chechen students are going home is yet another indication that Zakayev’s observations regarding de-colonization as a step toward ultimate independence are right on target.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Window on Eurasia: How the Chuvash ‘Discovered’ America – And Other Notions from New Russian Textbooks
Paul Goble
Vienna, July 20 – The history that pupils in the Russian Federation are studying has not only been distorted by President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to promote himself and his vision of that country but also and perhaps more significantly by the efforts of some textbook writers who are rewriting the past to boost their own regions and peoples.
If the former trend is attracting a great deal of attention both in Moscow and the West, the latter has generally remained below the radar screen of most commentators -- even though it is likely to prove more long-lasting and thus more injurious to the way sin which Russian citizens will perceive their country and the world.
In an article that appeared in “Novyye izvestiya” this week, journalists Andrei Leonov and Mikhail Belyy suggest that a flood of “pseudo-scientific” ideas are making their way into the textbooks that Russian teachers are required to use and Russian pupils to memorize (http://www.newizv.ru/news/2007-07-17/72923/).
Indeed, they report, leading Moscow experts have concluded that students in some 80 percent of the schools of Russian regions are being told among other things that the Greeks had Tatar origins, that the wheel was invented by the Bashkirs, and that the Chuvash not only built the classical city of Troy but “discovered America.”
The major reason that such absurd ideas are making their way into textbooks, the journalists continue, is that regional textbook writers draw on the works of local writers who appear to be more interested in sensationalism and sales than in accuracy and that regional educational officials do not take their gate-keeping job seriously enough.
Leonov and Belyy provide some amazing examples of their general point. In Tatarstan, for instance, one text suggests that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were in fact Tatars, that the word “theater” derives from the Tatar expression “to view for a long time,” and that Homer’s “Odyssey” is the retelling of a pre-existing Tatar epic.
In Bashkortostan, the journalists suggest, the situation may be even worse. There, one author insists that all modern languages derive from Bashkir, that Greeks “stole” their mythology from the Bashkir people, and that “even the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” come from the Bashkir language.
And in the Chuvash Republic, students are told to believe that in ancient Mesopotamia, there “lived only one people – proto-Chuvashes” and that somewhat later the Chuvash created the world’s great religions, provided the basis for modern agriculture, and even discovered America!
But lest anyone think that this problem is confined to non-Russian peoples, a view that many Russians certainly are likely to have, the two journalists point out that Russian textbooks are often at least as replete with impossible claims.
One text prepared in Moscow by a professor at the State University of Administration, for example, says that the Slavs dominated all of Eurasia from Portual to the Urals already in Neolithic times and that in the Stone Age, “the North from Alaska to Great Britain was Russian.”
Even more outlandishly, the same author suggests that ethnic Russians helped Alexander the Great in his conquests for which he says they received special written recognition and that Russian was the language which people spoke before the Tower of Babel.
According the two authors, the apperance of such ideas in textbooks reflects the growth of local patriotism and nationalism, the desire of people who feel they have been neglected to push themselves forward, and “the unprofessionalism” of the writers on whom the authors of textbooks draw.
The “Novyye izvestiya” journalists say these examples are an occasion more for humor than for concern, but they and several of the experts they talked with pointedly warn that such texts carry with them the danger of the propaganda of nationalism among the young – something that is an increasing problem in the Russian Federation.
But there is another danger as well: In Stalin’s time, as many will recall, Soviet students were told “Ivanov invented baseball.” Now, in Putin’s, they are being told equally absurd things. That could lead the future generation to misunderstand the world or, more likely, to make them more cynical about everything they are told.
Vienna, July 20 – The history that pupils in the Russian Federation are studying has not only been distorted by President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to promote himself and his vision of that country but also and perhaps more significantly by the efforts of some textbook writers who are rewriting the past to boost their own regions and peoples.
If the former trend is attracting a great deal of attention both in Moscow and the West, the latter has generally remained below the radar screen of most commentators -- even though it is likely to prove more long-lasting and thus more injurious to the way sin which Russian citizens will perceive their country and the world.
In an article that appeared in “Novyye izvestiya” this week, journalists Andrei Leonov and Mikhail Belyy suggest that a flood of “pseudo-scientific” ideas are making their way into the textbooks that Russian teachers are required to use and Russian pupils to memorize (http://www.newizv.ru/news/2007-07-17/72923/).
Indeed, they report, leading Moscow experts have concluded that students in some 80 percent of the schools of Russian regions are being told among other things that the Greeks had Tatar origins, that the wheel was invented by the Bashkirs, and that the Chuvash not only built the classical city of Troy but “discovered America.”
The major reason that such absurd ideas are making their way into textbooks, the journalists continue, is that regional textbook writers draw on the works of local writers who appear to be more interested in sensationalism and sales than in accuracy and that regional educational officials do not take their gate-keeping job seriously enough.
Leonov and Belyy provide some amazing examples of their general point. In Tatarstan, for instance, one text suggests that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were in fact Tatars, that the word “theater” derives from the Tatar expression “to view for a long time,” and that Homer’s “Odyssey” is the retelling of a pre-existing Tatar epic.
In Bashkortostan, the journalists suggest, the situation may be even worse. There, one author insists that all modern languages derive from Bashkir, that Greeks “stole” their mythology from the Bashkir people, and that “even the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” come from the Bashkir language.
And in the Chuvash Republic, students are told to believe that in ancient Mesopotamia, there “lived only one people – proto-Chuvashes” and that somewhat later the Chuvash created the world’s great religions, provided the basis for modern agriculture, and even discovered America!
But lest anyone think that this problem is confined to non-Russian peoples, a view that many Russians certainly are likely to have, the two journalists point out that Russian textbooks are often at least as replete with impossible claims.
One text prepared in Moscow by a professor at the State University of Administration, for example, says that the Slavs dominated all of Eurasia from Portual to the Urals already in Neolithic times and that in the Stone Age, “the North from Alaska to Great Britain was Russian.”
Even more outlandishly, the same author suggests that ethnic Russians helped Alexander the Great in his conquests for which he says they received special written recognition and that Russian was the language which people spoke before the Tower of Babel.
According the two authors, the apperance of such ideas in textbooks reflects the growth of local patriotism and nationalism, the desire of people who feel they have been neglected to push themselves forward, and “the unprofessionalism” of the writers on whom the authors of textbooks draw.
The “Novyye izvestiya” journalists say these examples are an occasion more for humor than for concern, but they and several of the experts they talked with pointedly warn that such texts carry with them the danger of the propaganda of nationalism among the young – something that is an increasing problem in the Russian Federation.
But there is another danger as well: In Stalin’s time, as many will recall, Soviet students were told “Ivanov invented baseball.” Now, in Putin’s, they are being told equally absurd things. That could lead the future generation to misunderstand the world or, more likely, to make them more cynical about everything they are told.
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