Paul Goble
Vienna, January 20 – The Moscow Patriarchate’s advocacy of a dress code for all Russians is at one level simply an absurdity, but at another it is evidence of “a very strong tendency” in Russia “toward the establishment of a proto-fascist regime masked under the name of sovereign democracy,” according to a senior Moscow scholar.
Indeed, Sergey Arutyunov, a specialist on the North Caucasus, argues, Russia is moving toward a system “in essence no less totalitarian than Mussolini’s regime in Italy or with certain qualifications (let us say, without anti-Semitism or perhaps even with a revived anti-Semitism) Hitler’s regime in Germany (grani.ru/blogs/free/entries/185488.html).
That trend is “natural,” he argues, because “the situation in [Russia] recalls that in the Weimar Republic on the eve of the fascists’ coming to power. The very same factors, the very same attitudes in society, and the very same perspectives,” including the risky behavior and ultimate catastrophe Russia would suffer if “adventurists playing at fascism came to power.”
“I do not want to call Mr. Chaplin [the Patriarchate official who proposed a dress code for the country] a fascisizing adventurist,” Arutyunov says. “In the final analsys, what he is proposing is a petty detail,” but his words are part of a general trend toward “an all-embracing adventurism” which is increasingly infecting and informing Russian society.
Dress codes by themselves are not the problem, the ethnographer continues. It is the attitude behind them and the attempt to extend them beyond the reaches of “closed aristocratic clubs” that is. As for himself, Arutyunov continues, “I never observe dress codes” and consider “any attempt to impose a dress code a crude violation of my freedoms and human rights.”
But there is another, more serious recent attempt to impose uniformity, Arutyunov says, which points in a similarly unfortunate direction. That involves President Dmitry Medvedev’s effort to play up the role of the ethnic Russian nation in violation of the Constitution and against the rights of other ethnic communities.
“The Russian Federation,” Arutyunov points out, “is a federative state, and formally its foundation is not in the state forming role of the Russian people but in a federal treaty which now [some] are trying to forget” and to redefine what the Constitution says the Russian Federation in fact is.
“An attempt somehow to stress the role of the Russian people among the other peoples of the Russian Federation, to somehow divide it out in a special way is,” Arutyunov says, “in essence also an attempt in the spirit of national socialism” in much the same way that the Russian Orthodox Churchman’s call for a dress code is.
“Perhaps,” the Moscow scholar continues, “it is not explicitly expressed in that way, and this hardly was among the intentions of Mr. Medvedev,” who, Arutyunov says, he does not “in any case consider a national socialist” and someone who “must understand” that playing with such ideas or appearing to support them will lead to disaster for the Russian people.
What is needed instead, Arutyunov continues, is a constant stress on the “multi-national” nature of “the Russian political nation.” Doing that does not mean to deny “the leading role of the Russian people in this task.” To do so or to act as if the Chukchi role was equivalent to the Russian one would be laughable.
“But the task of the state,” the Moscow ethnographer argues, “is to seek to ensure that the extent of the functioning of the Chukchi language does not decline but rather grows … in order that Chukchi culture does not decay but develops in correspondence with the norms of civilized society.”
Arutyunov notes that “comparatively recently,” the leadership in the US reached the same conclusion about minorities in American society as the Moscow scholar at the opportunity to observe when he was on an academic exchange in California.
In the bus he regularly rode between San Jose and San Francisco, he recalls, there were signs in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, a reflection of the new reality that in Silicon Valley, “there are many Latin Americans and that in the city of San Jose alongside them there is a large community of Vietnamese immigrants.”
“In this (and not only in this) concern is expressed about the development of the Vietnamese and Latin American components of American society is expressed. [And] in this is manifested the spirit of genuine democracy, even though many WASPs in the US, Arutyunov says, find these arrangements disturbing.
Within the Russian Federation, he continues, “the prestige of the non-Slavic nations is falling,” a development which he calls “a tendency toward entropy” and “a threat to our common well-being.” And Arutyunov concludes that “it would be wise” to promote more use of these languages by giving officials who know them a five-percent supplement.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Adygeya Loses ‘Morally’ by Not Being Part of North Caucasus Federal District, Activist Says
Paul Goble
Vienna, January 20 – Nalbiy Chuchev, the leader of the League of Peace Organization, says that it is too soon to tell whether Moscow’s failure to include Adygeya in the North Caucasus Federal District when that institution was created a year ago but that it is already obvious that the republic has “lost morally” because it was not.
Cheuchev told Kavkaz-uzel.ru that the Circassians – for whom Adygey is the most common self-designator – are “a single people … a single Caucasus family living in a single home,” but the inclusion of all Circassian republics within the North Caucasus Federal District except Adygeya has “deeply split” the nation (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/179864/).
Indeed, he suggests, this Moscow decision reinforces rather than helps overcome the Soviet-imposed divisions of the Circassians into Adygeys, Kabards, Cherkesses, Shapsugs and several other smaller groups, a division that Circassian activists say blocks the way to the restoration of a single Circassian republic.
But not all Adygeys agree with Cheuchev, with some arguing that their republic is better off being among the more stable republics, krays, and oblasts of the Southern Federal District, others noting that Adygeya’s “matryoshka” character would require transferring Krasnodar kray if Adygeya were included, and still others doubting that the federal districts matter that much.
Mariya Zaytseva, a graduate student at the Adygey State University says that Moscow’s decision to include Adygeya in the Southern rather than the North Caucasus Federal District clearly speaks of “the stability of the region and of the absence of the need to interfere in the process of its development.” In practice, she adds, “we have acquired nothing and lost nothing.”
But Khazret Yudin, a construction work in Adygeya, disagrees. Given the enormous sums Moscow is pouring into the North Caucasus, he argues, Adygeya and Krasnodar kray would only benefit from being included in that federal district. Consequently, he says, he favors uniting the two and shifting them into the new entity.
Murat Khabakhu, the head of the Adygeya branch of the Young Guard of United Russia, says that the region must rely on its resources and that “little” would change in that regard if the republic, with or without the surrounding Krasnodar kray were to be shifted from the Southern to the North Caucasus administration, although he says the Adygeys might get more investments.
And he added that Adygeya would also benefit by being part of a federal district with an active and influential leader. If the head of the Southern Federal District were like the North Caucasus District’s Aleksandr Khloponin, he said, “we would only win from such an arrangement.”
But some outside observers take a much harder line against any change in the arrangements Moscow has made. Sergey Razdolsky, a sociologist at the Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that under no circumstances must Adygeya be shifted and become part of the North Caucasus.
“Our republic,” he says, “is set up economically in a completely different way thasn the regions included in the North Caucasus Federal District. Were Adygeya to be included” in that district, it would not fit in and its economic well-being would suffer. Consequently, it must not be transferred.
But Circassian activists continue to push for a rearrangement of the administrative map. Arambiy Khapay, president of the Adyge Khase Movement, argues that “it is simpler to find a common language when [similar republics] are situated in one district” because those within a single district meet more frequently.
If Moscow had asked the opinions of the people in the region, he adds, the center might have drawn up a completely different administrative map, one that would “include Osetia, Kabasrdino-Balkara, Karachayevo-Cherekessia, Stavropol kray, Adygeya and Krasnodar kray,” in order to include all Circassian republics within it.
Had Moscow done so, however, it would have had to deal with the remaining parts of both the Southern Federal District as well as with a very different North Caucasus Federal District, one in which some of the most problem-filled republics would have been concentrated without any more pacific ones to balance the situation.
And perhaps most seriously from the center’s point of view, the Russian authorities would have had to cope with what Circassian activists would have seen as a major step de facto to the recreation of a common Circassian Republic, something that would have created even more problems for the planned Olympiad in Sochi in 2014.
Vienna, January 20 – Nalbiy Chuchev, the leader of the League of Peace Organization, says that it is too soon to tell whether Moscow’s failure to include Adygeya in the North Caucasus Federal District when that institution was created a year ago but that it is already obvious that the republic has “lost morally” because it was not.
Cheuchev told Kavkaz-uzel.ru that the Circassians – for whom Adygey is the most common self-designator – are “a single people … a single Caucasus family living in a single home,” but the inclusion of all Circassian republics within the North Caucasus Federal District except Adygeya has “deeply split” the nation (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/179864/).
Indeed, he suggests, this Moscow decision reinforces rather than helps overcome the Soviet-imposed divisions of the Circassians into Adygeys, Kabards, Cherkesses, Shapsugs and several other smaller groups, a division that Circassian activists say blocks the way to the restoration of a single Circassian republic.
But not all Adygeys agree with Cheuchev, with some arguing that their republic is better off being among the more stable republics, krays, and oblasts of the Southern Federal District, others noting that Adygeya’s “matryoshka” character would require transferring Krasnodar kray if Adygeya were included, and still others doubting that the federal districts matter that much.
Mariya Zaytseva, a graduate student at the Adygey State University says that Moscow’s decision to include Adygeya in the Southern rather than the North Caucasus Federal District clearly speaks of “the stability of the region and of the absence of the need to interfere in the process of its development.” In practice, she adds, “we have acquired nothing and lost nothing.”
But Khazret Yudin, a construction work in Adygeya, disagrees. Given the enormous sums Moscow is pouring into the North Caucasus, he argues, Adygeya and Krasnodar kray would only benefit from being included in that federal district. Consequently, he says, he favors uniting the two and shifting them into the new entity.
Murat Khabakhu, the head of the Adygeya branch of the Young Guard of United Russia, says that the region must rely on its resources and that “little” would change in that regard if the republic, with or without the surrounding Krasnodar kray were to be shifted from the Southern to the North Caucasus administration, although he says the Adygeys might get more investments.
And he added that Adygeya would also benefit by being part of a federal district with an active and influential leader. If the head of the Southern Federal District were like the North Caucasus District’s Aleksandr Khloponin, he said, “we would only win from such an arrangement.”
But some outside observers take a much harder line against any change in the arrangements Moscow has made. Sergey Razdolsky, a sociologist at the Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that under no circumstances must Adygeya be shifted and become part of the North Caucasus.
“Our republic,” he says, “is set up economically in a completely different way thasn the regions included in the North Caucasus Federal District. Were Adygeya to be included” in that district, it would not fit in and its economic well-being would suffer. Consequently, it must not be transferred.
But Circassian activists continue to push for a rearrangement of the administrative map. Arambiy Khapay, president of the Adyge Khase Movement, argues that “it is simpler to find a common language when [similar republics] are situated in one district” because those within a single district meet more frequently.
If Moscow had asked the opinions of the people in the region, he adds, the center might have drawn up a completely different administrative map, one that would “include Osetia, Kabasrdino-Balkara, Karachayevo-Cherekessia, Stavropol kray, Adygeya and Krasnodar kray,” in order to include all Circassian republics within it.
Had Moscow done so, however, it would have had to deal with the remaining parts of both the Southern Federal District as well as with a very different North Caucasus Federal District, one in which some of the most problem-filled republics would have been concentrated without any more pacific ones to balance the situation.
And perhaps most seriously from the center’s point of view, the Russian authorities would have had to cope with what Circassian activists would have seen as a major step de facto to the recreation of a common Circassian Republic, something that would have created even more problems for the planned Olympiad in Sochi in 2014.
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