Paul Goble
Vienna, October 12 – Contemporary Russia resembles Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise in Germany, with a population increasingly dominated by “the ideology of revaunchism,” according to a leading Russian specialist on ethnicity. And as a result, fascism is rapidly gaining ground.
Sergei Arutyunov, the head of the sector on the Caucasus at the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, offered that judgment at a meeting in Moscow yesterday devoted to inter-ethnic relations in Russia in the year since the Kondopoga riots (http://www.annews.ru/news/detail.php?ID=131089).
One of the more outspoken Russian ethnographers, Arutyunov is not so much reviving Western discussions in the 1990s about the possible emergence of “Weimar Russia” as focusing on the increasingly negative attitudes of that country’s ethnic Russians toward other groups and especially toward migrants.
Other participants at yesterday’s session provided data that appears to support Arutyunov’s conclusions. Aleksandr Brod, director of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, said that in the year since Kondopoga, the problems of inter-ethnic relations in Russia had remained “just as they were” or become even worse.
Since the beginning of 2007, he said, there had been more than 170 cases of inter-ethnic violence, which had led to 51 deaths and 230 major injuries. Most of these crimes, he noted, had occurred in the Russian capital, Moscow oblast, Nizhniy Novgorod oblast and St. Petersburg.
Brod added that the authorities have been unwilling to talk about how to address this problem. The law enforcement organs do not respond to complaints, actions, and the literature of neo-Nazi ideologues. [And prosecutors] either do not want or cannot take up these cases.”
And Vladimir Muromel, head of the Moscow Center for Ethnopolitical and Regional Research, agreed. “What has happened” in the year since Kondopoga? he asked. “What has been done for preventing inter-ethnic conflicts. The laws remain the same,” as does “the concept paper on nationality policy.”
“On the other hand,” he noted, “foreigners are being driven out, the quota for [new] arrivals has been reduced twice, and the authorities have begun to speak more carefully about repatriation” even of ethnic Russians lest that become the occasion for new conflicts.
Not surprisingly, the statements of these specialists have not attracted much attention beyond the Internet sites of a few human rights groups. But of course, this lack of coverage itself is part of the problem: the dangerous growth of the sense that the time has come for Russians to take their revenge against members of other groups.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Russian Academician Urges Dividing the Arctic ‘Like the Caspian’
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 12 –Moscow’s leading oceanographer is calling for dividing the seabed of the Arctic Ocean among the five countries that border it for economic exploitation in much the same way that the Russian Federation has proposed sharing out the territory under the Caspian Sea.
Acknowledging that he is not a specialist in international law, Academician Yuri Leonov said this week that suggestions by some that the entire floor of the Arctic basin is part of Russia’s continental shelf and thus should belong to Russia alone are exaggerated (http://www.russ.ru/layout/set/print//culture/besedy/ya_schitayu_chto_severniy_ledovityi_okean_mozhno_delite_kak_kaspisskoe_more).
Those suggestions, which were sparked by coverage of Russian polar expeditions last summer and by the reaction of the other polar powers – the United States, Canada, Denmark (which owns Greenland), and Norway – to Russia’s role there, fail to take into account that the situation is actually far more complicated, Leonov argues.
The existing continental shelf in the Arctic, as well as the paleo-shelf that exists in portions of it and the Arctic depths, cannot be simply assigned to the Russian Federation or any other country, he says. And until recent attention to the region and the possibility that its immense natural resources could be recovered, no one had suggested otherwise.
The Soviet Union in the 1920s unilaterally claimed a pie-shaped segment of the Arctic bounded by the northern sea border of the USSR and two meridians extending from the Kola Peninsula and the Bering Straits to the pole, but no other country or group of countries has explicitly acknowledged that claim as legitimate.
Nevertheless, Leonov says, he “does not see any reason” for the Russian government to back away from that claim of an economic exclusion zone. Instead, he argues, the international community should extend the same spatial designations to the four other Arctic powers, with each getting a pie-shaped piece of the region.
Leonov stresses that this proposal is only his personal view, but his closeness to government officials interested in polar questions – including, most prominently, Artur Chilingarov, the vice speaker of the Duma – suggests that his proposal probably already has significant support in the bureaucracy.
However, even if Moscow does go ahead with this idea, the Russian government will not find it easy to secure the agreement of the others -- especially as global warming and new technologies combine to make more of the Arctic accessible for economic exploitation. Leonov admits as much when he points to the Caspian Sea as a model.
After all, the littoral states involved there after the collapse of the USSR multiplied their number and thus voided earlier Soviet-Iranian arrangements have been talking about how to “divide” the Caspian for most of the time since 1991 – and they have not been able to reach an agreement.
Meanwhile, yet another group has emerged to challenge any simple division of the Arctic: the peoples of that region. In addition to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and the Northern Forum that unite indigenous groups from around Arctic Sea, a new and potentially more significant body is emerging in the Russian Federation itself.
On Wednesday, all the subjects of the Russian Federation in the Far North signed an agreement to cooperate in working to defend their interests and those of their populations legislatively lest their distance from the center lead Moscow to conclude it can continue to ignore them (http://www.raipon.ru, October 11).
And as readers of Edward Topol’s classic futurist novel Red Snow will remember, should the peoples of this region finally decide to take the defense of their interests into their own hands, there is potentially a great deal more they can do to protect themselves than many in Moscow or elsewhere currently think.
Vienna, October 12 –Moscow’s leading oceanographer is calling for dividing the seabed of the Arctic Ocean among the five countries that border it for economic exploitation in much the same way that the Russian Federation has proposed sharing out the territory under the Caspian Sea.
Acknowledging that he is not a specialist in international law, Academician Yuri Leonov said this week that suggestions by some that the entire floor of the Arctic basin is part of Russia’s continental shelf and thus should belong to Russia alone are exaggerated (http://www.russ.ru/layout/set/print//culture/besedy/ya_schitayu_chto_severniy_ledovityi_okean_mozhno_delite_kak_kaspisskoe_more).
Those suggestions, which were sparked by coverage of Russian polar expeditions last summer and by the reaction of the other polar powers – the United States, Canada, Denmark (which owns Greenland), and Norway – to Russia’s role there, fail to take into account that the situation is actually far more complicated, Leonov argues.
The existing continental shelf in the Arctic, as well as the paleo-shelf that exists in portions of it and the Arctic depths, cannot be simply assigned to the Russian Federation or any other country, he says. And until recent attention to the region and the possibility that its immense natural resources could be recovered, no one had suggested otherwise.
The Soviet Union in the 1920s unilaterally claimed a pie-shaped segment of the Arctic bounded by the northern sea border of the USSR and two meridians extending from the Kola Peninsula and the Bering Straits to the pole, but no other country or group of countries has explicitly acknowledged that claim as legitimate.
Nevertheless, Leonov says, he “does not see any reason” for the Russian government to back away from that claim of an economic exclusion zone. Instead, he argues, the international community should extend the same spatial designations to the four other Arctic powers, with each getting a pie-shaped piece of the region.
Leonov stresses that this proposal is only his personal view, but his closeness to government officials interested in polar questions – including, most prominently, Artur Chilingarov, the vice speaker of the Duma – suggests that his proposal probably already has significant support in the bureaucracy.
However, even if Moscow does go ahead with this idea, the Russian government will not find it easy to secure the agreement of the others -- especially as global warming and new technologies combine to make more of the Arctic accessible for economic exploitation. Leonov admits as much when he points to the Caspian Sea as a model.
After all, the littoral states involved there after the collapse of the USSR multiplied their number and thus voided earlier Soviet-Iranian arrangements have been talking about how to “divide” the Caspian for most of the time since 1991 – and they have not been able to reach an agreement.
Meanwhile, yet another group has emerged to challenge any simple division of the Arctic: the peoples of that region. In addition to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and the Northern Forum that unite indigenous groups from around Arctic Sea, a new and potentially more significant body is emerging in the Russian Federation itself.
On Wednesday, all the subjects of the Russian Federation in the Far North signed an agreement to cooperate in working to defend their interests and those of their populations legislatively lest their distance from the center lead Moscow to conclude it can continue to ignore them (http://www.raipon.ru, October 11).
And as readers of Edward Topol’s classic futurist novel Red Snow will remember, should the peoples of this region finally decide to take the defense of their interests into their own hands, there is potentially a great deal more they can do to protect themselves than many in Moscow or elsewhere currently think.
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