Paul Goble
Vienna, April 25 – Whether he wants to or not, incoming Russian president Dmitry Medvedev will have to address some serious shortcomings in Vladimir Putin's approach to nationality problems and federal relations or risk a coming together of ethnic and regional challenges that could tear his country apart, according to a leading Moscow commentator.
In the current issue of Russia in Global Politics, Ivan Sukhov, who writes regularly for "Vremya novostey," argues that Putin's efforts to unify the country's legal space, limit the power of regional elites, and combat the most dangerous consequences of anti-minority prejudices have not achieved "what was desired" (www.globalaffairs.ru/numbers/31/9481.html).
First, Putin's system of presidential plenipotentiaries "in the overwhelming majority of cases" has not worked (except in the Southern Federal District)," Sukhov says, and at the end of Putin's term has turned out to be "a phantom" rather than a transforming political institution as he and his backers so clearly hoped.
Second, Putin's decision to make governors appointed rather than elected also has not worked as he intended. On the one hand, this shift has taken these officials "out of the field of public policy and shifted it into the sphere of behind the scenes intrigue." And on the other, by personalizing these relationships, shifts in power at the center can trigger problems in the regions.
Third, the current Russian president's effort to use United Russia to build relations with the regions has failed as well, Sukhov says, with last year's parliamentary elections being challenged in many non-Russian areas as fundamentally dishonest and the party's statements showing that it is a movement without a program.
Fourth, Putin's much-ballyhooed program to promote tolerance, launched in 2000, has failed to achieve its announced goals. Indeed, Sukhov points out, the only thing that "remains" from it is "a website and a 'bouquet' of individual educational projects" that do more to help the NGOs who participate in them than Russian society as a whole.
And fifth, Putin has failed to understand a fundamental reality of contemporary Russia: Non-Russian groups are more supportive of the continued existence of the Russian Federation than are many ethnic Russian regions, whose residents increasingly identify themselves in terms of these regions, the corporations which dominate them, or neighboring states.
Indeed, Sukhov suggests, it is not too much to say, as others have as well, that Putin's preferred "model" of relations between the center and the regions is precisely Chechnya, where the Russian government has given Ramzan Kadyrov almost unlimited power locally in exchange for declarations of undying loyalty and keeping things quiet.
Under Putin, the only real constraints on the Chechen president's behavior have come not from Moscow but from Rosneft. Both Putin and Kadyrov recognize just where those limits are so that they have not had to come into play all that often, according to the "Vremya novostey" commentator.
"Such a situation is undoubtedly incomparably better than any attempt at building on the territories of Chechnya and Daghestan of an independent Islamic state," Sukhov acknowledges. "It is remarkably better than large-scale military actions … But it hardly testifies to the reestablishment in Chechnya of a legal order corresponding to the Russian Constitution."
Consequently, the Moscow analyst continues, "the new president will have to build anew relations with the regions" Russian and non-Russian alike. "And it will only be better if [these relations] acquire formal and institutional frameworks and do not remain a congeries of behind-the-scenes agreements."
Putin was under very little pressure to do this, Sukhov argues. As long as he kept things quiet enough for them to pursue their lives, they paid little attention to his nationality policy. The only exception concerned their increasing anger about the arrival of large numbers of non-Russian migrants in traditionally Russian cities.
But, Sukhov continues, Medvedev is unlikely to have that luxury. Russian regionalism, some territorially and others on the basis of corporations which control many regions, is growing, tensions between Russians and non-Russians are on the rise, and the "Chechen" solution looks ever less satisfactory to many not only in Grozny but in Moscow as well.
Amalgamating regions, a Putin policy Medvedev appears likely to continue, is not a solution, Sukhov says. Most regional elites either do not understand why Moscow should be doing this or actively oppose it. And allowing ethnic violence to continue to grow, as a laissez faire approach to nationalities almost certainly would allow, is not really an option.
Sukhov ends his article with an appeal increasingly heard in recent months: The next Russian president should reestablish the Ministry for Nationality Affairs that Putin disbanded in 2002. While that would not solve all the problems, it would force the country's elite to recognize that "Russian long ago ceased to be Soviet and is step by step becoming ever less Russian."
Friday, April 25, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Chernobyl’s Other Victims Increasingly Forgotten
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 25 – With each passing year, Chernobyl’s other victims – the thousands of people who exposed themselves to extraordinarily high levels of radiation while taking part in the clean up -- find themselves not only sick as a result but largely forgotten by the successor governments to the regime which ordered them there without the protective gear they needed.
In an article in yesterday’s Vostochno-Sibirskaya Pravda, Irina Alekseyeva recalls what she says were the “tragic contrasts” of the day, 22 years ago tomorrow, when the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident occurred, contrasts between “life and death” and between “truth and lies” (www.vsp.ru/show_article.php?id=45088).
Unfortunately, she continues, both those contrasts continue to this day, with many of those who were dispatched to clean up the accident, people Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian writers have typically referred to as “liquidators,” facing aspects of each even as they are increasingly forgotten by the people living around them.
The explosion at Chernobyl, which the entire world except for those living under Soviet power, found out almost immediately – Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime acknowledged it only on May 10 after the May Day holiday – touched thousands of lives across the entire Soviet space and even more broadly.
The Voctochno-Sibirskaya Pravda account provides evidence of just how broad: In that distant Siberian region, there are today more than 3,000 “liquidators” who remain among the living and some 670 members of the local “Memory-Chernobyl” organization which attempts to defend their interests.
Its president, Yuri Varlamov, recounted his experience during the clean up in 1986. Soviet officials took him and his fellow “liquidators” from the places where they were housed first in “clean” buses and then in radioactively “dirty” buses as they approached the damaged reactor.
Like most of the others, Varlamov told the Irkutsk paper, he had little idea what radiation was, how reliable dosimeters were, and what the impact of radiation on health in fact would be. Soviet officials did not provide much information, and Soviet people at that time generally trusted what officials said.
But Chernobyl as the beginning of the end of that for many, and the sad record of lies and then broken promises means, he continued, that few people involved in the cleanup are prepared to believe anything official ever again – a change highlighted three years ago when the regional “Chernobyl Union” kicked out its leader because that official had never been a liquidator at all.
Despite or perhaps in part because of this suspiciousness, the surviving liquidators from year to year have been getting less and less support from officials, with their “lawful interests” for housing, access to medical care, and other services routinely violated according to local liquidator leaders.
In Irkutsk oblast alone, 182 liquidators still have not received the housing they were promised 20 years ago, and 126 have not even received compensatory housing subsidies. Still worse, in the last three years, officials have not even bothered to respond to complaints from liquidators and their families about why the promised assistance has not been forthcoming.
That represents a serious deteriorating since the late 1990s when, the country’s economic difficulties notwithstanding, the authorities provided certain benefits like telephones, medicines and the like. But since Vladimir Putin came to power and Russia’s economy took off, “these benefits have gradually been taken away,” Chernobyl liquidator activists say.
Irkutsk is far from the only place where liquidators are having problems in securing their legal rights to assistance. The situation in Belgorod is so bad that the central Russian media have reported that liquidators this year are staging a hunger strike in the hopes that this will force officials to talk to them.
Nonetheless, it does appear that the situation in Irkutsk is especially bad, perhaps because it is so far from Moscow. This year, that region’s social security department organized “A Day of memory for Those Who Died in Radiation Accidents and Catastrophes” on April 22, clearly a holiday on which the government might be expected to address the problems of the liquidators.
But what did regional officials do? Instead of providing any assistance, they handed out “souvenirs” and suggested that liquidators who have problems should be turning not to the Irkutsk authorities but to officials in Moscow, thousands of miles away and probably even more inaccessible than the local ones.
Vienna, April 25 – With each passing year, Chernobyl’s other victims – the thousands of people who exposed themselves to extraordinarily high levels of radiation while taking part in the clean up -- find themselves not only sick as a result but largely forgotten by the successor governments to the regime which ordered them there without the protective gear they needed.
In an article in yesterday’s Vostochno-Sibirskaya Pravda, Irina Alekseyeva recalls what she says were the “tragic contrasts” of the day, 22 years ago tomorrow, when the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident occurred, contrasts between “life and death” and between “truth and lies” (www.vsp.ru/show_article.php?id=45088).
Unfortunately, she continues, both those contrasts continue to this day, with many of those who were dispatched to clean up the accident, people Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian writers have typically referred to as “liquidators,” facing aspects of each even as they are increasingly forgotten by the people living around them.
The explosion at Chernobyl, which the entire world except for those living under Soviet power, found out almost immediately – Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime acknowledged it only on May 10 after the May Day holiday – touched thousands of lives across the entire Soviet space and even more broadly.
The Voctochno-Sibirskaya Pravda account provides evidence of just how broad: In that distant Siberian region, there are today more than 3,000 “liquidators” who remain among the living and some 670 members of the local “Memory-Chernobyl” organization which attempts to defend their interests.
Its president, Yuri Varlamov, recounted his experience during the clean up in 1986. Soviet officials took him and his fellow “liquidators” from the places where they were housed first in “clean” buses and then in radioactively “dirty” buses as they approached the damaged reactor.
Like most of the others, Varlamov told the Irkutsk paper, he had little idea what radiation was, how reliable dosimeters were, and what the impact of radiation on health in fact would be. Soviet officials did not provide much information, and Soviet people at that time generally trusted what officials said.
But Chernobyl as the beginning of the end of that for many, and the sad record of lies and then broken promises means, he continued, that few people involved in the cleanup are prepared to believe anything official ever again – a change highlighted three years ago when the regional “Chernobyl Union” kicked out its leader because that official had never been a liquidator at all.
Despite or perhaps in part because of this suspiciousness, the surviving liquidators from year to year have been getting less and less support from officials, with their “lawful interests” for housing, access to medical care, and other services routinely violated according to local liquidator leaders.
In Irkutsk oblast alone, 182 liquidators still have not received the housing they were promised 20 years ago, and 126 have not even received compensatory housing subsidies. Still worse, in the last three years, officials have not even bothered to respond to complaints from liquidators and their families about why the promised assistance has not been forthcoming.
That represents a serious deteriorating since the late 1990s when, the country’s economic difficulties notwithstanding, the authorities provided certain benefits like telephones, medicines and the like. But since Vladimir Putin came to power and Russia’s economy took off, “these benefits have gradually been taken away,” Chernobyl liquidator activists say.
Irkutsk is far from the only place where liquidators are having problems in securing their legal rights to assistance. The situation in Belgorod is so bad that the central Russian media have reported that liquidators this year are staging a hunger strike in the hopes that this will force officials to talk to them.
Nonetheless, it does appear that the situation in Irkutsk is especially bad, perhaps because it is so far from Moscow. This year, that region’s social security department organized “A Day of memory for Those Who Died in Radiation Accidents and Catastrophes” on April 22, clearly a holiday on which the government might be expected to address the problems of the liquidators.
But what did regional officials do? Instead of providing any assistance, they handed out “souvenirs” and suggested that liquidators who have problems should be turning not to the Irkutsk authorities but to officials in Moscow, thousands of miles away and probably even more inaccessible than the local ones.
Window on Eurasia: Kremlin’s Regional Amalgamation Plan Threatens North Caucasus Nations
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 25 – Moscow’s renewed plan to combine regions in the North Caucasus either with neighboring Russian ones or with each other threatens the survival of the national communities there and is leading some of their members to think about independence as the only way to save their peoples from extinction.
In an impassioned appeal posted on the Ingushetiya.ru portal this week, Magomet Barakhoyev, an Ingush activist, argues that the Russian government’s plans to amalgamate regions in the North Caucasus are in fact a plan for the total “russification” of non-Russian groups there and elsewhere (www.ingushetiya.ru/news/14036.html).
Indeed, he says, it is precisely the threat of russification that is pushing Ukraine and Georgia “while they are still sovereign” to seek to join NATO and thus have a chance to maintain their national languages and cultures, a drive that Barakhoyev implies peoples in the North Caucasus should learn from.
The Ingush writer begins his argument with a discussion of an article by Ruslan Gorevoy in the latest issue of Moscow’s “Versiya” newspaper devoted to the “fusion” of regions in the Russian Federation in general and in the North Caucasus in particular, including combining Adgyeia and Krasnodar kray and Chechnya and Ingushetiya.
But those moves, which many people in both the region and in Moscow have been resisting, are only the first step toward something even larger, Gorevoy says and Barakhoyev cites. Ultimately, Russia will have only “six or seven” super-regions, and one of them will be a “Cossack Kray” centered on Rostov-na-Donu.
According to Gorevoy, the folding of Adygeia into Krasnodar kray is a test of this strategy, and after that happens, he continues, Moscow will create the Cossack region, which in the words of Dmitry Kozak will be charged with putting the non-Russian regions of the North Caucasus “in order.”
That should frighten anyone who knows anything about the history of the Cossacks in the North Caucasus, Barakhoyev insists. During the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus, the Cossacks were “the real band formations,” “bandits in law,” or to use contemporary language “illegal armed formations.”
And the Cossacks have continued to act in this way in post-Soviet times, often acting brutally toward non-Russian groups even as they are given more and more power by Moscow and the local Russian authorities. If they were formally put in charge of the non-Russians, Barakhoyev says, that would be an even greater tragedy than the one North Caucasians face now.
With the liquidation of the non-Russian republics or their combination into multi-national ones – such as the restoration of some kind of Chechen-Ingush republic as a half-way house to a Cossack kray – national languages would lose the status of state languages and the peoples involved would lose their identities.
Barakhoyev knows whereof he speaks. He lived through the unification and then the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush republic, and he remembers when the indigenous languages were displaced by Russian often on the basis of ostensibly “rational” arguments about the need to give people the tools to integrate in the broader society.
Given such threats, he continues, it is no surprise that Georgia – part of whose territory is already occupied by Russia under the “pretext” of defending Abkhaz and Ossetins -- and Ukraine – where there are “Russian splitters” -- should be seeking NATO membership. After all, “what guarantee is there that Russia won’t do to them what Stalin did to the Baltic states?”
Obviously, there is no way to know how widespread such feelings now are in the North Caucasus, but Barakhoyev’s article, which is posted on the most widely read Ingush website, is certain to spark debate and possibly crystallize opinion still further against any moves to combine regions there.
And to the extent that happens, Moscow may discover that it will have even more difficulty in moving against Adygeiya this year than it did a year ago, when the combination of local opposition and anger among Circassians abroad combined to force the central Russian government to back away from its amalgamation plans.
Vienna, April 25 – Moscow’s renewed plan to combine regions in the North Caucasus either with neighboring Russian ones or with each other threatens the survival of the national communities there and is leading some of their members to think about independence as the only way to save their peoples from extinction.
In an impassioned appeal posted on the Ingushetiya.ru portal this week, Magomet Barakhoyev, an Ingush activist, argues that the Russian government’s plans to amalgamate regions in the North Caucasus are in fact a plan for the total “russification” of non-Russian groups there and elsewhere (www.ingushetiya.ru/news/14036.html).
Indeed, he says, it is precisely the threat of russification that is pushing Ukraine and Georgia “while they are still sovereign” to seek to join NATO and thus have a chance to maintain their national languages and cultures, a drive that Barakhoyev implies peoples in the North Caucasus should learn from.
The Ingush writer begins his argument with a discussion of an article by Ruslan Gorevoy in the latest issue of Moscow’s “Versiya” newspaper devoted to the “fusion” of regions in the Russian Federation in general and in the North Caucasus in particular, including combining Adgyeia and Krasnodar kray and Chechnya and Ingushetiya.
But those moves, which many people in both the region and in Moscow have been resisting, are only the first step toward something even larger, Gorevoy says and Barakhoyev cites. Ultimately, Russia will have only “six or seven” super-regions, and one of them will be a “Cossack Kray” centered on Rostov-na-Donu.
According to Gorevoy, the folding of Adygeia into Krasnodar kray is a test of this strategy, and after that happens, he continues, Moscow will create the Cossack region, which in the words of Dmitry Kozak will be charged with putting the non-Russian regions of the North Caucasus “in order.”
That should frighten anyone who knows anything about the history of the Cossacks in the North Caucasus, Barakhoyev insists. During the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus, the Cossacks were “the real band formations,” “bandits in law,” or to use contemporary language “illegal armed formations.”
And the Cossacks have continued to act in this way in post-Soviet times, often acting brutally toward non-Russian groups even as they are given more and more power by Moscow and the local Russian authorities. If they were formally put in charge of the non-Russians, Barakhoyev says, that would be an even greater tragedy than the one North Caucasians face now.
With the liquidation of the non-Russian republics or their combination into multi-national ones – such as the restoration of some kind of Chechen-Ingush republic as a half-way house to a Cossack kray – national languages would lose the status of state languages and the peoples involved would lose their identities.
Barakhoyev knows whereof he speaks. He lived through the unification and then the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush republic, and he remembers when the indigenous languages were displaced by Russian often on the basis of ostensibly “rational” arguments about the need to give people the tools to integrate in the broader society.
Given such threats, he continues, it is no surprise that Georgia – part of whose territory is already occupied by Russia under the “pretext” of defending Abkhaz and Ossetins -- and Ukraine – where there are “Russian splitters” -- should be seeking NATO membership. After all, “what guarantee is there that Russia won’t do to them what Stalin did to the Baltic states?”
Obviously, there is no way to know how widespread such feelings now are in the North Caucasus, but Barakhoyev’s article, which is posted on the most widely read Ingush website, is certain to spark debate and possibly crystallize opinion still further against any moves to combine regions there.
And to the extent that happens, Moscow may discover that it will have even more difficulty in moving against Adygeiya this year than it did a year ago, when the combination of local opposition and anger among Circassians abroad combined to force the central Russian government to back away from its amalgamation plans.
Window on Eurasia: Dugin Says Moscow Must Counter US-Backed Caucasus War by Moving to Divide Ukraine
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 24 – Aleksandr Dugin, a Eurasianist leader known to be close to the Kremlin and especially to its chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov, predicts that Russia will soon find itself embroiled in a broader war in the Caucasus as a result of American actions there and should pursue the dismemberment of Ukraine to prevent the expansion of NATO.
While Dugin’s comments are overblown – he has made a career by striking dramatic poses about any number of issues – his observations on these two points are nonetheless worth attending to because they suggest some at the highest levels in Moscow are nervous about new fighting in the Caucasus and are still prepared to think about dividing Ukraine.
In an interview on KM.ru today, Dugin predicted that there would be “yet another war in the Caucasus – [this time] against Georgia, Chechnya, Ingushetiya and Daghestan” and that Moscow should seek to dismember Ukraine in order to protect its own national interests and those of ethnic Russians living there (forum.msk.ru/material/news/470244.html).
According to Dugin, “America is supporting the striving of the Georgian elites to move toward a sharpening of relations with Russia. And Georgia on the occasion of each such sharpening turns to the U.S. for military and diplomatic help,” the last of which Washington “as a rule” provides.
“The very same thing” is happening in Ukraine, Moldova, and “partially” in the Baltic countries, Dugin continued. “And theoretically it could occur in other countries on the post-Soviet space as well. Including, Russia itself. Moreover, “when the Chechen enclave is not controlled by federal forces, approximately the same geopolitical struggle is being played out.”
Because the NATO Bucharest summit shows that the U.S. plans to go ahead with the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO, Dugin said, Moscow does not have much time in order to block this and consequently “ought to immediately and actively get involved in the process of dismembering Ukraine” in order to prevent NATO from moving eastward.
Ukraine is so important for both Russia and the West that this conflict could move from a cold to a “hot” one very quickly. “For the Americans, Georgia is much less important,” but “the Caucasus is the weak place of Russia.” And consequently, Dugin argued that the US will push Georgia into a conflict in order to distract Moscow from what is going on in Ukraine.
In Dugin’s view, recent events in Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetiya reflect “not simply instability called forth by internal contradictions but also by the activization of that American network which has already been established there,” one that risks shifting the balance of power in the region against Russia.
As is usually the case, Dugin in this instance seeks to link a wide variety of issues together, something that many in Moscow and the West view as an indication of the depth of his thought, and to see the “hand of Washington” behind everything negative that happens in the post-Soviet state, a perspective that plays to Soviet-style paranoia.
But not everyone is impressed. Two observers on the FORUM.msk site, for example, dismissed Dugin’s remarks out of hand. Vladimir Filin said his words were part of “a psychological war” against Ukraine, pointing out that “if one country conducts against another a war for destruction, the other country has a complete right to respond symmetrically.”
And Ruslan Saidov noted that whatever Dugin thinks, there are “no American networks in Chechnya now. But they will inevitably appear if federal forces do not stop unceremoniously interfering in internal Chechen affairs and continue to insist that the Kremlin controls something in Chechnya besides Khankala and a few buildings in Grozny.”
Vienna, April 24 – Aleksandr Dugin, a Eurasianist leader known to be close to the Kremlin and especially to its chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov, predicts that Russia will soon find itself embroiled in a broader war in the Caucasus as a result of American actions there and should pursue the dismemberment of Ukraine to prevent the expansion of NATO.
While Dugin’s comments are overblown – he has made a career by striking dramatic poses about any number of issues – his observations on these two points are nonetheless worth attending to because they suggest some at the highest levels in Moscow are nervous about new fighting in the Caucasus and are still prepared to think about dividing Ukraine.
In an interview on KM.ru today, Dugin predicted that there would be “yet another war in the Caucasus – [this time] against Georgia, Chechnya, Ingushetiya and Daghestan” and that Moscow should seek to dismember Ukraine in order to protect its own national interests and those of ethnic Russians living there (forum.msk.ru/material/news/470244.html).
According to Dugin, “America is supporting the striving of the Georgian elites to move toward a sharpening of relations with Russia. And Georgia on the occasion of each such sharpening turns to the U.S. for military and diplomatic help,” the last of which Washington “as a rule” provides.
“The very same thing” is happening in Ukraine, Moldova, and “partially” in the Baltic countries, Dugin continued. “And theoretically it could occur in other countries on the post-Soviet space as well. Including, Russia itself. Moreover, “when the Chechen enclave is not controlled by federal forces, approximately the same geopolitical struggle is being played out.”
Because the NATO Bucharest summit shows that the U.S. plans to go ahead with the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO, Dugin said, Moscow does not have much time in order to block this and consequently “ought to immediately and actively get involved in the process of dismembering Ukraine” in order to prevent NATO from moving eastward.
Ukraine is so important for both Russia and the West that this conflict could move from a cold to a “hot” one very quickly. “For the Americans, Georgia is much less important,” but “the Caucasus is the weak place of Russia.” And consequently, Dugin argued that the US will push Georgia into a conflict in order to distract Moscow from what is going on in Ukraine.
In Dugin’s view, recent events in Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetiya reflect “not simply instability called forth by internal contradictions but also by the activization of that American network which has already been established there,” one that risks shifting the balance of power in the region against Russia.
As is usually the case, Dugin in this instance seeks to link a wide variety of issues together, something that many in Moscow and the West view as an indication of the depth of his thought, and to see the “hand of Washington” behind everything negative that happens in the post-Soviet state, a perspective that plays to Soviet-style paranoia.
But not everyone is impressed. Two observers on the FORUM.msk site, for example, dismissed Dugin’s remarks out of hand. Vladimir Filin said his words were part of “a psychological war” against Ukraine, pointing out that “if one country conducts against another a war for destruction, the other country has a complete right to respond symmetrically.”
And Ruslan Saidov noted that whatever Dugin thinks, there are “no American networks in Chechnya now. But they will inevitably appear if federal forces do not stop unceremoniously interfering in internal Chechen affairs and continue to insist that the Kremlin controls something in Chechnya besides Khankala and a few buildings in Grozny.”
Window on Eurasia: Most Immigrants to Russia from CIS Countries Don’t Speak Russian
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 24 – Although most Gastarbeiters in the Russian Federation come from former Soviet republics, “more than half” of them do not speak Russian, a measure of just how much has changed in the 17 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a major cause of tensions between the new arrivals and longtime Russian residents.
That statistic, its causes and its consequences, was the subject of a discussion in the Russian Duma yesterday, during which deputies called for providing free Russian language training centers for Gastarbeiters both in Russian cities and in the former Soviet republics which make up the Commonwealth of Independent States.
In reporting on that debate, Novyye izvestiya today said that the problem is “really very sharp.” On the one hand, the paper said, “as many as 50 percent of the migrants cannot speak a word of Russian.” And on the other, the number of language training opportunities is very small: Moscow has “only two schools where foreigners are studying [Russian].”
And a visit by that newspaper’s journalists to one of these schools uncovered an unwelcome fact: Many refugees from beyond the borders of what was the Soviet Union are seeking to learn Russian, but, the school’s director said, “there aren’t many from the former USSR people” (www.newizv.ru/news/2008-04-24/89178/).
A student from Somalia told the paper that even though he was learning Russian, he had no desire to remain in Russia. “I want to become a doctor [through training in Russia and then] live and work in Canada.” That country, he said, “please me: it’s quiet and, unlike Russia, there is no hostility toward people of another nationality.”
“On April 20,” Abdul Aziz continued, “on Hitler’s birthday, my relatives and I tried not to go out on the streets: we were afraid of the skinheads. Why then am I studying Russian? In order to interact with my fellow students. I will be living here for awhile [and] without the language you feel isolated.”
One of the reasons that so few of the migrants from the former Soviet republics attend, school officials said, is that “no one knows” about the free instruction. “The embassies do not do anything to help,” and consequently, the teachers and administrators of the school have been reduced to going door to door and distributing leaflets they have made themselves.
There is any number of paid courses in Russian available in Moscow, but Gastarbeiters seldom have the funds or inclination to use them. “As a result, a Moscow city parliamentarian said, “the overwhelming majority of those who come [to the city to work] remain illiterate” and thus unable to keep within the limits the broader society expects them to.
According to one leader of the 270,000-strong Tajik Diaspora in the Russian capital, “70 percent of them do not speak and no not understand Russian,” although he insisted that “a majority” would like to learn the language if they were given the opportunity to do so at low or no cost.
Unlike the arrivals in Russian cities in Soviet times who generally came from the cities and spoke some Russian, those who have come in recent years often are from rural areas or from cities where Russian is now viewed as a “foreign” language and have never had any instruction in the language, something that makes it difficult for them to integrate into Russian society.
The paper noted that the children of migrants are more likely to be receiving Russian language instruction than their parents. There are some 30,000 migrant children in Moscow schools, of which 270 have special profile courses for those with a limited knowledge of the country’s basic language.
But most analysts and politicians agree that more has to be done, although they disagree as to who should be responsible. Many in the Duma favor an expanded government program, but some scholars, like Yevgeny Gontmakher of the Moscow Center of Social Policy, say that the diasporas should assume responsibility for this.
After all, he points out, very few countries – Israel and Germany are the most prominent – do very much to integrate new arrivals linguistically and culturally. The general attitude is: “’if you want to live here, be good enough to find the time to study the language and gain some knowledge of the history and culture of this country.’”
But given the large number of Gastarbeiters already in the Russian Federation and projections that their number will continue to rise as far into the future as anyone can see, someone will have to address this problem of a large number of linguistically isolated people, lest that in and of itself generates more problems between Russians and migrants.
Meanwhile, this week brought reports of two other developments in the Russian Federation that are very much signs of the changes that country and its people have undergone since the collapse of the Soviet system. Both concern the changing composition of the country’s armed services.
New draftees, Russian defense ministry officials said today, are four times more likely to be religious than are their officers, with 60 percent of the soldiers saying they are believers, with three quarters declaring an attachment to Orthodox Christianity, compared to only 15 percent of the officer corps (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=24141).
And on Monday, Nezavisimaya gazeta reported that as the Russian military attempts to find enough men to fill its ranks, the medical commissions which examine potential draftees are increasingly declaring fit for service men who earlier would have been excluded because of serious physical or mental maladies (www.medportal.ru/mednovosti/news/2008/04/21/army/).
“Half of the young people called to military service,” the paper said, “are neurotics and psychopaths.” Others suffer from a variety of physical ailments. And many in both categories have to be discharged because they prove incapable of adapting to military discipline or meeting its physical and mental demands.
Given that the size of the draft pool is projected to continue to contract over the next decade at least, the military is likely to be forced either to take into its ranks those it would prefer not to have unless Russia’s political leadership decides to improve health care or reduce the size of the military.
Vienna, April 24 – Although most Gastarbeiters in the Russian Federation come from former Soviet republics, “more than half” of them do not speak Russian, a measure of just how much has changed in the 17 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a major cause of tensions between the new arrivals and longtime Russian residents.
That statistic, its causes and its consequences, was the subject of a discussion in the Russian Duma yesterday, during which deputies called for providing free Russian language training centers for Gastarbeiters both in Russian cities and in the former Soviet republics which make up the Commonwealth of Independent States.
In reporting on that debate, Novyye izvestiya today said that the problem is “really very sharp.” On the one hand, the paper said, “as many as 50 percent of the migrants cannot speak a word of Russian.” And on the other, the number of language training opportunities is very small: Moscow has “only two schools where foreigners are studying [Russian].”
And a visit by that newspaper’s journalists to one of these schools uncovered an unwelcome fact: Many refugees from beyond the borders of what was the Soviet Union are seeking to learn Russian, but, the school’s director said, “there aren’t many from the former USSR people” (www.newizv.ru/news/2008-04-24/89178/).
A student from Somalia told the paper that even though he was learning Russian, he had no desire to remain in Russia. “I want to become a doctor [through training in Russia and then] live and work in Canada.” That country, he said, “please me: it’s quiet and, unlike Russia, there is no hostility toward people of another nationality.”
“On April 20,” Abdul Aziz continued, “on Hitler’s birthday, my relatives and I tried not to go out on the streets: we were afraid of the skinheads. Why then am I studying Russian? In order to interact with my fellow students. I will be living here for awhile [and] without the language you feel isolated.”
One of the reasons that so few of the migrants from the former Soviet republics attend, school officials said, is that “no one knows” about the free instruction. “The embassies do not do anything to help,” and consequently, the teachers and administrators of the school have been reduced to going door to door and distributing leaflets they have made themselves.
There is any number of paid courses in Russian available in Moscow, but Gastarbeiters seldom have the funds or inclination to use them. “As a result, a Moscow city parliamentarian said, “the overwhelming majority of those who come [to the city to work] remain illiterate” and thus unable to keep within the limits the broader society expects them to.
According to one leader of the 270,000-strong Tajik Diaspora in the Russian capital, “70 percent of them do not speak and no not understand Russian,” although he insisted that “a majority” would like to learn the language if they were given the opportunity to do so at low or no cost.
Unlike the arrivals in Russian cities in Soviet times who generally came from the cities and spoke some Russian, those who have come in recent years often are from rural areas or from cities where Russian is now viewed as a “foreign” language and have never had any instruction in the language, something that makes it difficult for them to integrate into Russian society.
The paper noted that the children of migrants are more likely to be receiving Russian language instruction than their parents. There are some 30,000 migrant children in Moscow schools, of which 270 have special profile courses for those with a limited knowledge of the country’s basic language.
But most analysts and politicians agree that more has to be done, although they disagree as to who should be responsible. Many in the Duma favor an expanded government program, but some scholars, like Yevgeny Gontmakher of the Moscow Center of Social Policy, say that the diasporas should assume responsibility for this.
After all, he points out, very few countries – Israel and Germany are the most prominent – do very much to integrate new arrivals linguistically and culturally. The general attitude is: “’if you want to live here, be good enough to find the time to study the language and gain some knowledge of the history and culture of this country.’”
But given the large number of Gastarbeiters already in the Russian Federation and projections that their number will continue to rise as far into the future as anyone can see, someone will have to address this problem of a large number of linguistically isolated people, lest that in and of itself generates more problems between Russians and migrants.
Meanwhile, this week brought reports of two other developments in the Russian Federation that are very much signs of the changes that country and its people have undergone since the collapse of the Soviet system. Both concern the changing composition of the country’s armed services.
New draftees, Russian defense ministry officials said today, are four times more likely to be religious than are their officers, with 60 percent of the soldiers saying they are believers, with three quarters declaring an attachment to Orthodox Christianity, compared to only 15 percent of the officer corps (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=24141).
And on Monday, Nezavisimaya gazeta reported that as the Russian military attempts to find enough men to fill its ranks, the medical commissions which examine potential draftees are increasingly declaring fit for service men who earlier would have been excluded because of serious physical or mental maladies (www.medportal.ru/mednovosti/news/2008/04/21/army/).
“Half of the young people called to military service,” the paper said, “are neurotics and psychopaths.” Others suffer from a variety of physical ailments. And many in both categories have to be discharged because they prove incapable of adapting to military discipline or meeting its physical and mental demands.
Given that the size of the draft pool is projected to continue to contract over the next decade at least, the military is likely to be forced either to take into its ranks those it would prefer not to have unless Russia’s political leadership decides to improve health care or reduce the size of the military.
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Northern Peoples to Get Linux-Based Computer Scripts
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 24 – Scholars in the Sakha Republic have developed computer scripts for the Linux operating system not only for the Sakha but also for the Yukagirs, Evens, and Evenks, three other numerically small nationalities who live in that region, a breakthrough that steals a march on Microsoft and promises to open the way for computerization across the Russian north.
Yesterday, Russian news agencies reported that specialists at Yakut State University, the Sakha Institute of Humanitarian Research, and the Institute of Problems of the Numerically Small Peoples of the North had succeeded in their efforts to develop scripts and keyboards for these languages (hitech.newsru.com/article/23apr2008/linux).
According to Newsru.com, the scholars concluded that they needed to introduce a “universal” keyboard “which could work not only for the scripts of the Yakut [Sakha] language but also for the scripts of all the peoples of the North who live in the republic,” a challenge given their diversity and one that computer specialists had long believed could not be met.
But the Sakha scholars have now developed just such a keyboard using Unicode and the Linux operating system, an achievement that many unfamiliar with the problems of the Northern peoples may see as small but one that has at least three major consequences for the future of the 26 numerically small nationalities living across the northern third of the Russian Federation.
First, because the system the Sakha have developed almost certainly will be extended to the other nationalities in the near future, these peoples will be able to go online in their own languages rather than having to go through Russian or English as at present and thus will be able to share information and mobilize their members more effectively than ever before.
Second, because these scripts will help make the Northern peoples of the Russian Federation more computer savvy, they will almost certainly increase the links between these isolated and often hard-pressed communities and the more politically active and effective Arctic peoples of Greenland, Canada, and the United States, opening the way for the former to be affected by the latter.
And third – and from the perspective of computer and Internet development more broadly, perhaps most important – the success the Sakha researchers have had using the Linux system almost certainly will spark a new competition in this region between Linux and Microsoft, which until recently had the field there largely to itself.
Over the last several years, Microsoft has worked with computer experts in Tatarstan and in several Finno-Ugric republics to produce new scripts compatible with its operating system. It seems unlikely that having made this investment, Microsoft will not try to recover its predominant position by pushing even harder for the development of its own OS scripts for these languages.
If that happens, then competition between two American companies could lead not just to the elaboration of new computer scripts for the people of the North but also open the way for greater political activism among them, a possibility most observers in Moscow and the West have long discounted but one that is entirely possible.
Vienna, April 24 – Scholars in the Sakha Republic have developed computer scripts for the Linux operating system not only for the Sakha but also for the Yukagirs, Evens, and Evenks, three other numerically small nationalities who live in that region, a breakthrough that steals a march on Microsoft and promises to open the way for computerization across the Russian north.
Yesterday, Russian news agencies reported that specialists at Yakut State University, the Sakha Institute of Humanitarian Research, and the Institute of Problems of the Numerically Small Peoples of the North had succeeded in their efforts to develop scripts and keyboards for these languages (hitech.newsru.com/article/23apr2008/linux).
According to Newsru.com, the scholars concluded that they needed to introduce a “universal” keyboard “which could work not only for the scripts of the Yakut [Sakha] language but also for the scripts of all the peoples of the North who live in the republic,” a challenge given their diversity and one that computer specialists had long believed could not be met.
But the Sakha scholars have now developed just such a keyboard using Unicode and the Linux operating system, an achievement that many unfamiliar with the problems of the Northern peoples may see as small but one that has at least three major consequences for the future of the 26 numerically small nationalities living across the northern third of the Russian Federation.
First, because the system the Sakha have developed almost certainly will be extended to the other nationalities in the near future, these peoples will be able to go online in their own languages rather than having to go through Russian or English as at present and thus will be able to share information and mobilize their members more effectively than ever before.
Second, because these scripts will help make the Northern peoples of the Russian Federation more computer savvy, they will almost certainly increase the links between these isolated and often hard-pressed communities and the more politically active and effective Arctic peoples of Greenland, Canada, and the United States, opening the way for the former to be affected by the latter.
And third – and from the perspective of computer and Internet development more broadly, perhaps most important – the success the Sakha researchers have had using the Linux system almost certainly will spark a new competition in this region between Linux and Microsoft, which until recently had the field there largely to itself.
Over the last several years, Microsoft has worked with computer experts in Tatarstan and in several Finno-Ugric republics to produce new scripts compatible with its operating system. It seems unlikely that having made this investment, Microsoft will not try to recover its predominant position by pushing even harder for the development of its own OS scripts for these languages.
If that happens, then competition between two American companies could lead not just to the elaboration of new computer scripts for the people of the North but also open the way for greater political activism among them, a possibility most observers in Moscow and the West have long discounted but one that is entirely possible.
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