Paul Goble
Staunton, October 25 – Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party has introduced a draft bill that would allow the Duma and Federation Council to amalgamate federal subjects without a referendum in the territories involved, a measure that some believe is a trial balloon for the restarting of Vladimir Putin’s stalled effort to reduce the number of federal subjects.
Vitaly Sotnik, a journalist for the independent URA.ru news agency, offers the fullest discussion so far of this initiative, its sources, its supporters and opponents, its prospects for passage, and the implications of a new push in this direction for politics in Moscow and the regions affected (www.ura.ru/content/urfo/25-10-2010/articles/1036255726.html).
According to the URA.ru journalist, Zhirinovsky’s party believes that the Federal Assembly should be able to decide on unifying federation subjects without a referendum in those affected, even though the existing federation subjects are listed in the Russian Constitution and referenda are required for any such step according to established Russian law.
“Some analysts,” Sotnik continues, “call the draft LDPR legislation an attempt of the Kremlin to sound out public opinion” about this step, but whether that is the case or not, the LDPR already has compiled a list of the federal subjects that it believes should be combined in order to reduce the number of such units.
These include Moscow and Moscow oblast, Tyumen oblast and Yugra and Yamal, and also Kurgan, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk. Many have suggested the new Moscow mayor wants to absorb surrounding oblast (versia.ru/articles/2010/oct/25/obedinenie_moskvy_i_oblasti), and there is some interest in doing the same with St. Petersburg city and Leningrad oblast (buildingarticles.ru/Stroitelnye-novosti/V-Gosdumu-vnesen-zakonoproekt-kotoryiy-pozvolit-ob%D1%8Aedinit-Peterburg-i-Lenoblast-486).
“Other experts,” the journalist says, “are certain that a fiasco awaits the project of the Liberal Democrats.” And sources in the Presidential Administration suggest that the Kremlin is far more focused on the upcoming Duma and presidential elections than on changing the size and number of federal subjects with all the political problems that would entail.
The LDPR, however, thinks it has a good chance to succeed with this bill. Vladimir Taskayev, the party’s chief for the Urals Federal District, said that “the practice of conducing referenda has compromised itself,” not only because of the enormous administrative pressure brought to bear in each case but also because of the high cost of holding such votes.
He added that “our bill is not in any way directed at the reduction of the democratic rights of citizens” because “decisions [about amalgamating subjects] will be taken in the State Duma, the deputies of which are chosen by the population.” Taskayev indicated that the method LDPR could be used first with Moscow city and Moscow oblast.
Officials in the Presidential Administration noted that “the idea of expanding certain regions has been discussed for a long time.” And a specialist at one of the analytic centers working with the Kremlin added that Moscow had focused on the folding in of the matryoshka subjects of Yugra and Yamal into Tyumen oblast.
But perhaps most intriguingly, this expert said that the powers that be in Moscow were also interested in combing Kurgan, Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk oblasts, the first time that Putin’s program of regional amalgamation would have involved only predominantly ethnic Russian regions.
Duma deputies with whom the URA.ru journalists spoke, Sotnik said, generally indicated that they were “not against discussing the idea” of giving the Federal Assembly the exclusive power to decide on the borders of federation subjects but that they were unwilling to declare their support for the LDPR measure until they had time to become acquainted with it.
The expert community had a similar reaction, with most saying the idea is fine but the details are critical. At the same time, some of them noted that the LDPR had rarely been able to get one of its ideas passed and therefore suggested that people in Moscow and in the provinces ought not to be so worried.
Meanwhile, in a comment to Regnum.ru, Natalya Zubarevich, the director of regional programs of the Independent Institute of Social Policy, expressed the fears of many. If the Duma approved the LDPR measure, it would represent an excessive level of vertical power in Russia and further weaken the regions (www.regnum.ru/news/1338206.html).
Zubarevich is certainly correct. After all, Putin’s efforts between 2003 and 2008 to reduce the number of federal subjects from 89 to 83 by amalgamating the matryoshka subjects was part and parcel of his effort to re-centralize power. If his program gets a new lease on life thanks to Zhirinovsky’s proposal, that trend will almost certainly intensify.
But precisely because of that threat to their own powers, the elites and populations of many regions will certainly resist, possibly adding their voices to the regionalist movements within the Russian Federation and thus creating a situation exactly the reverse to the one Putin and Zhirinovsky clearly want.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s Unwillingness to Support Russian Nation Reflects Its Own Imperial Agenda, Kazan Scholar Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, October 25 – Like their Soviet predecessors, the current powers that be in the Russian Federation are quite prepared to sacrifice the national interests of the ethnic Russian people in the pursuit of an imperialist agenda, but this sacrifice will not serve either Russian national interests or Moscow’s imperial goals, according to a Kazan sociologist.
Aleksandr Salagayev further argues that “the legal vacuum which characterizes the situation of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation and the position of the powers that be who are ignoring this contradiction is the source of inter-ethnic conflicts with migrants, the extremism of Russian organizations in Russia and the weakness of Russian diasporas abroad.
In a 3200-word essay posted on the Regnum.ru news agency, Salagayev, a specialist on social and political conflicts at the Kazan State Technological University, traces the long and complicated history of the relations between the ethnic Russian nation and the states within which it has existed (www.regnum.ru/news/1337042.html).
Prior to 1917, he notes, “Russians were an imperial nation.” The state’s slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” applied only to them, but the Russian nation included the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the Belarusians, as one might expect an imperial people, as opposed to a nation, to do.
The country’s nationality policy changed dramatically with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks. Their ideas about “proletarian internationalism,” Salagayev argues, instituted “a double standard” with the rights of the non-Russians being protected and the rights of the ethnic Russians as a community being ignored or at least slighted.
While that balance shifted over time, the Kazan scholar says, many now believe that “the main cause of the destruction of the USSR was the weakening of the Russian ethnos and the loss of its role in economic and state-political life which took place after the October 1917 coup” that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In the first years of Soviet power, the communist tilt toward the non-Russians was most pronounced, with the non-Russians being given republics and the ethnic Russians, routinely denounced for “great power chauvinism,” being denied one repeatedly. Salagayev notes that efforts to form a Russian republic were blocked by Soviet leaders in 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926.
After Stalin declared “the final solution of the nationality question in the USSR” in 1934, the Russian nation was redefined. No longer was it “the former oppressor nation” with a historic “debt” to the others, but rather the Russian nation became the elder brother – or as “Leningradskaya Pravda” put it in 1937, “the eldest among equals.”
But despite the rhetorical change, Russians were still expected to provide funding for the non-Russians to help them catch up with modernity, a policy that continued throughout the rest of the Soviet period and one that by “ignoring the interests of the Russian people [was] inevitably accompanied by Russophobia” on the part of the regime.
That is because this attitude “was expressed not so much in the denial of the ‘positive features of the Russian nation and its positive contribution to world history’ as in a fear of the Russian national factor … and the possible resistance from the side of the most numerous people of the communist reconstruction of the country and the world.”
Indeed, KGB and then CPSU leader Yuri Andropov famously observed, Salagayev recalls, that “the chief concern for us is Russian nationalism; as to the dissidents, we would take them all in one night.”
In short, “self-determination of the Russian people was assessed as chauvinism but the self-determination of other peoples was considered as a necessary condition of their national development,” Salagayev says. And as a result, “the national interests and the interests of Russians in autonomous formations were simply ignored.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this policy continued. “Ethnic mobilization” seized “all the ethnic groups” of the country except the ethnic Russians “who despite the actual loss of their imperial status preserve the illusions about their imperial destiny, responsibility for the fate of Russia and other such myths.”
Ethnic mobilization among ethnic Russians thus has been dominated by marginal groups like the RNE and Primorsky partisans and by “the spontaneous ethnic mobilization of Russians” in relatively small cities such as Kondopoga. In his article, Salagayev lists 22 such cases of the latter since 1999.
None of these efforts can be called successful, he says, largely because Moscow opposed all of them. The 1996 law on national-cultural autonomy did not apply to Russians and efforts beginning in 2001 to adopt “a law on the Russian people” were blocked by the powers that be and have come to nothing.
“In thus preserving the imperial ambitions of Russians,” Salagayev continues, “the powers that be are not showing any interest in the fate of the Russian people and in fact are struggling against those who recognize the real situation, calling such people Russian extremists or Russian fascists.”
Moscow continues to subsidize the non-Russian republics at far greater rates than the predominantly Russian areas, but its failure to support the Russian nation is undercutting its own imperial strategy because it is leading ever more ethnic Russians to flee non-Russian areas back to the center of the country.
In Salagayev’s opinion, “the situation is very similar to the policy of support of the national borderlands of the Soviet Union at the expense of the central oblasts which are populated primarily by Russians, a policy which in the final analysis led to the collapse of the USSR. It is obvious that such a policy will preserve the territorial integrity of Russia.”
The Kazan scholar suggests that there are two possible solutions to this situation, a “radical” one in which ethnic Russian oblasts would be formed and non-Russian republics liquidated, and a “moderate” one in which ethnic Russians would gain the same right to form national cultural autonomies that other nations now have.
Salagayev adds that some combination is likely, and he concludes by suggesting that Moscow must address the Russian question at home if it is to have any hope of protecting compatriots abroad, many of whom have been reduced to the status of “second class citizens” there in a way paralleling that of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation itself.
Staunton, October 25 – Like their Soviet predecessors, the current powers that be in the Russian Federation are quite prepared to sacrifice the national interests of the ethnic Russian people in the pursuit of an imperialist agenda, but this sacrifice will not serve either Russian national interests or Moscow’s imperial goals, according to a Kazan sociologist.
Aleksandr Salagayev further argues that “the legal vacuum which characterizes the situation of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation and the position of the powers that be who are ignoring this contradiction is the source of inter-ethnic conflicts with migrants, the extremism of Russian organizations in Russia and the weakness of Russian diasporas abroad.
In a 3200-word essay posted on the Regnum.ru news agency, Salagayev, a specialist on social and political conflicts at the Kazan State Technological University, traces the long and complicated history of the relations between the ethnic Russian nation and the states within which it has existed (www.regnum.ru/news/1337042.html).
Prior to 1917, he notes, “Russians were an imperial nation.” The state’s slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” applied only to them, but the Russian nation included the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the Belarusians, as one might expect an imperial people, as opposed to a nation, to do.
The country’s nationality policy changed dramatically with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks. Their ideas about “proletarian internationalism,” Salagayev argues, instituted “a double standard” with the rights of the non-Russians being protected and the rights of the ethnic Russians as a community being ignored or at least slighted.
While that balance shifted over time, the Kazan scholar says, many now believe that “the main cause of the destruction of the USSR was the weakening of the Russian ethnos and the loss of its role in economic and state-political life which took place after the October 1917 coup” that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In the first years of Soviet power, the communist tilt toward the non-Russians was most pronounced, with the non-Russians being given republics and the ethnic Russians, routinely denounced for “great power chauvinism,” being denied one repeatedly. Salagayev notes that efforts to form a Russian republic were blocked by Soviet leaders in 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926.
After Stalin declared “the final solution of the nationality question in the USSR” in 1934, the Russian nation was redefined. No longer was it “the former oppressor nation” with a historic “debt” to the others, but rather the Russian nation became the elder brother – or as “Leningradskaya Pravda” put it in 1937, “the eldest among equals.”
But despite the rhetorical change, Russians were still expected to provide funding for the non-Russians to help them catch up with modernity, a policy that continued throughout the rest of the Soviet period and one that by “ignoring the interests of the Russian people [was] inevitably accompanied by Russophobia” on the part of the regime.
That is because this attitude “was expressed not so much in the denial of the ‘positive features of the Russian nation and its positive contribution to world history’ as in a fear of the Russian national factor … and the possible resistance from the side of the most numerous people of the communist reconstruction of the country and the world.”
Indeed, KGB and then CPSU leader Yuri Andropov famously observed, Salagayev recalls, that “the chief concern for us is Russian nationalism; as to the dissidents, we would take them all in one night.”
In short, “self-determination of the Russian people was assessed as chauvinism but the self-determination of other peoples was considered as a necessary condition of their national development,” Salagayev says. And as a result, “the national interests and the interests of Russians in autonomous formations were simply ignored.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this policy continued. “Ethnic mobilization” seized “all the ethnic groups” of the country except the ethnic Russians “who despite the actual loss of their imperial status preserve the illusions about their imperial destiny, responsibility for the fate of Russia and other such myths.”
Ethnic mobilization among ethnic Russians thus has been dominated by marginal groups like the RNE and Primorsky partisans and by “the spontaneous ethnic mobilization of Russians” in relatively small cities such as Kondopoga. In his article, Salagayev lists 22 such cases of the latter since 1999.
None of these efforts can be called successful, he says, largely because Moscow opposed all of them. The 1996 law on national-cultural autonomy did not apply to Russians and efforts beginning in 2001 to adopt “a law on the Russian people” were blocked by the powers that be and have come to nothing.
“In thus preserving the imperial ambitions of Russians,” Salagayev continues, “the powers that be are not showing any interest in the fate of the Russian people and in fact are struggling against those who recognize the real situation, calling such people Russian extremists or Russian fascists.”
Moscow continues to subsidize the non-Russian republics at far greater rates than the predominantly Russian areas, but its failure to support the Russian nation is undercutting its own imperial strategy because it is leading ever more ethnic Russians to flee non-Russian areas back to the center of the country.
In Salagayev’s opinion, “the situation is very similar to the policy of support of the national borderlands of the Soviet Union at the expense of the central oblasts which are populated primarily by Russians, a policy which in the final analysis led to the collapse of the USSR. It is obvious that such a policy will preserve the territorial integrity of Russia.”
The Kazan scholar suggests that there are two possible solutions to this situation, a “radical” one in which ethnic Russian oblasts would be formed and non-Russian republics liquidated, and a “moderate” one in which ethnic Russians would gain the same right to form national cultural autonomies that other nations now have.
Salagayev adds that some combination is likely, and he concludes by suggesting that Moscow must address the Russian question at home if it is to have any hope of protecting compatriots abroad, many of whom have been reduced to the status of “second class citizens” there in a way paralleling that of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation itself.
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