Paul Goble
Vienna, January 3 – Increasingly frequent references by Russian officials and Orthodox Christian hierarchs to “traditional [Russian] Islam” are offensive to Muslims and can generate the very radicalism among the Islamic community there that those who use this term clearly want to avoid, according to a Muslim commentator.
In an article on the Islam.ru website yesterday, Abdulla Rinat Mukhametov notes that the notion of “traditional Islam” has been invoked so often that many non-Muslims seem to think that Islam in Russia is “almost a separate religion” from “other ‘Islams’” in other countries (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/tema/trisok/).
Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, who serves simultaneously as Moscow’s special ambassador for relations with the Muslim world and United Russia’s coordinator for ties with religions and nationalities, has come dangerously close to insisting on precisely that, Mukhametov says.
In an interview featured in “Argumenty i Fakty - Novosti” last September 8, Sultygov openly declared that “Islam in Russia is self-sufficient,” and that Russia’s Muslims are connected to the Muslim world abroad “only by the holy places and the haj – and not by anything else.”
Moreover, some, like Metropolitan Kirill, the powerful number two leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and man behind the Inter-Religious Council which unites Russia’s “traditional” religions, treat this term as if it were virtually a legal one even though, as Mukhametov notes, it has not yet appeared in the body of any Russian law.
(As a matter of fact, some Russian laws do refer in their preambles to the existence of “traditional” faiths in that country, but the texts of these acts do not define with any precision just what makes a religion “traditional” in Russia besides its acceptability to the authorities.)
Such a term, the Muslim commentator notes, is inherently offensive, but even more it is dangerous both for those who use it and for those to whom it is applied. That is because it posits a definition of the faithful in Russia very much at odds with the facts and because it contributes not to moderation but rather to the rise of extremism.
Like the followers of any religion, Muslims vary from country to country, region to region, and even individual to individual, Mukhametov observes, but to suggest that Russia’s “traditional” Muslims are separate from the worldwide community of the faithful is simply wrong.
Muslims are united by their faith, whatever their differences, and those non-Muslims who speak about “traditional” Russian Islam, which supposedly has always had good relations with and been prepared to subordinate itself to other faiths, are simply trying to isolate Russia’s Muslims from their co-religionists abroad.
Just how offensive that is to Muslims should be obvious to anyone who knows the central place of oneness in Islam, Mukhametov continues, but Russian government officials and Orthodox hierarchs, given their own experience, should also recognize how dangerous it is to pursue the policy line implicit in such a term.
The results of Soviet efforts to isolate Muslims in the USSR from others, he argues, show this clearly: “The isolation of the Muslim community, the attempt to create its own ‘Islam,” which basically was intended as a display in the foreign policy window for countries of the East led to tragic consequences.”
As soon as that regime loosened up and then collapsed, Mukhametov observes, “we got a wave of radicalization and vulgar primitivization” among some Muslims in the Russian Federation. Had the regime allowed for “the normal development of Islam, there would not have been anything like that.”
And he notes that Russian officials are not the only ones offending the community of the faithful and deluding themselves about the consequences of their actions. Many Western officials and commentators are doing almost exactly the same thing with their passionate but ill-conceived search for “moderate” Islam.
“’Traditional’ and ‘moderate’ Islam are in reality first cousins,” Mukhametov says. “Only in the case of the first, one is not talking about some correspondence to liberal values but rather about a certain loyalty, best expressed by keeping quiet, to the traditional Russian bureaucratic order.”
But now is not the time to keep quiet, he suggests, and the Muslim writer ends his article by urging Muslims to speak up and point out something even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged: they are an integral part of both Russia and the world of Islam and should not be forced to deny either part of their identity.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Window on Eurasia: More Post-Soviet States Want Diasporas to Lobby for Them
Paul Goble
Vienna, January 2 – Ever more post-Soviet governments are seeking to expand their ties with diaspora communities in the hope that these groups will be able to lobby on their behalf in other countries, a trend that likely to introduce some new complications in relations among the former Soviet republics and between them and other governments.
Armenia, Ukraine, and the three Baltic countries have long counted on diasporas to speak out on their behalf, viewing such groups as adjuncts to their foreign policy efforts. And the Russian Federation has notably sought to use ethnic Russians abroad to maintain Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet republics and to increase it elsewhere.
But other countries across this region are now either getting involved in this area for the first time or dramatically expanding their efforts to increase their diplomatic leverage, support the growing number of the nationals living abroad, and, what may be especially significant, counter the influence of the diasporas of other groups.
One of the countries which has recently increased its efforts in this regard most dramatically is Azerbaijan, whose leaders increasingly view their co-ethnics abroad as a foreign policy resource to be deployed not only generally but specifically against the historically influential Armenian lobby in the U.S. and other Western countries.
At the end of December, Azerbaijanis in more than 70 countries marked the Day of Solidarity of the Azerbaijani World. Perhaps the largest of these took place at the United Nations in New York where more than 300 Azerbaijanis, Turks and others attended a party and viewed films about the 50 million Azerbaijanis in the world.
Other gatherings took place in Turkey, Britain, France, and Israel -- where the Azerbaijani organization has the delightful acronym Az-Iz -- but officials in Baku stressed that the largest Azerbaijani diaspora, as opposed to longstanding Azerbaijani community in Iran, is in the Russian Federation.
There, now live more than two million Azerbaijanis, making them one of the most important nations within the Russian population and thus the object of particular concern on the part of both the Russian authorities and the government in Baku (http://www.newsazerbaijan.ru/newsaz/20071230/42090885.html).
Given the rising tide of xenophobia among Russians and the continuing importance of transfer payments from Azerbaijanis working among them to Baku, this is a potential flashpoint in the relations between the two countries, a flashpoint that such diaspora ties may exacerbate or moderate depending on the intentions of all involved.
But the most significant comment on what Baku hopes to accomplish in its work with diasporas more generally came in an interview Valekh Gadzhiyev, the head of the State Committee for Work with Azerbaijanis Living Abroad, gave to the Azerbaijani newspaper, Day (http://www.day.az/print/news/society/103005.html).
Although Azerbaijan has celebrated Solidarity Day since 1991, Gadzhiyev said, the past year has been a turning point in Baku’s work with these groups. Specifically, he said, Baku now wants the diasporas to serve as “an Azerbaijani lobby” fully capable of taking on the powerful Armenian lobby in the United States and other Western countries.
Thanks to the money that his organization has provided, Gadzhiyev added, Azerbaijanis in other countries have the information and resources they need to expand Baku’s circle of friends in these countries and finally put the Armenian lobby on the defensive.
Such efforts, of course, are certain to elicit a response from Yerevan, and consequently, with this new push by Baku, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia is likely to spread to Moscow and Western capitals with a new intensity, again something that cannot fail to affect negotiations over the future of Karabakh.
Vienna, January 2 – Ever more post-Soviet governments are seeking to expand their ties with diaspora communities in the hope that these groups will be able to lobby on their behalf in other countries, a trend that likely to introduce some new complications in relations among the former Soviet republics and between them and other governments.
Armenia, Ukraine, and the three Baltic countries have long counted on diasporas to speak out on their behalf, viewing such groups as adjuncts to their foreign policy efforts. And the Russian Federation has notably sought to use ethnic Russians abroad to maintain Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet republics and to increase it elsewhere.
But other countries across this region are now either getting involved in this area for the first time or dramatically expanding their efforts to increase their diplomatic leverage, support the growing number of the nationals living abroad, and, what may be especially significant, counter the influence of the diasporas of other groups.
One of the countries which has recently increased its efforts in this regard most dramatically is Azerbaijan, whose leaders increasingly view their co-ethnics abroad as a foreign policy resource to be deployed not only generally but specifically against the historically influential Armenian lobby in the U.S. and other Western countries.
At the end of December, Azerbaijanis in more than 70 countries marked the Day of Solidarity of the Azerbaijani World. Perhaps the largest of these took place at the United Nations in New York where more than 300 Azerbaijanis, Turks and others attended a party and viewed films about the 50 million Azerbaijanis in the world.
Other gatherings took place in Turkey, Britain, France, and Israel -- where the Azerbaijani organization has the delightful acronym Az-Iz -- but officials in Baku stressed that the largest Azerbaijani diaspora, as opposed to longstanding Azerbaijani community in Iran, is in the Russian Federation.
There, now live more than two million Azerbaijanis, making them one of the most important nations within the Russian population and thus the object of particular concern on the part of both the Russian authorities and the government in Baku (http://www.newsazerbaijan.ru/newsaz/20071230/42090885.html).
Given the rising tide of xenophobia among Russians and the continuing importance of transfer payments from Azerbaijanis working among them to Baku, this is a potential flashpoint in the relations between the two countries, a flashpoint that such diaspora ties may exacerbate or moderate depending on the intentions of all involved.
But the most significant comment on what Baku hopes to accomplish in its work with diasporas more generally came in an interview Valekh Gadzhiyev, the head of the State Committee for Work with Azerbaijanis Living Abroad, gave to the Azerbaijani newspaper, Day (http://www.day.az/print/news/society/103005.html).
Although Azerbaijan has celebrated Solidarity Day since 1991, Gadzhiyev said, the past year has been a turning point in Baku’s work with these groups. Specifically, he said, Baku now wants the diasporas to serve as “an Azerbaijani lobby” fully capable of taking on the powerful Armenian lobby in the United States and other Western countries.
Thanks to the money that his organization has provided, Gadzhiyev added, Azerbaijanis in other countries have the information and resources they need to expand Baku’s circle of friends in these countries and finally put the Armenian lobby on the defensive.
Such efforts, of course, are certain to elicit a response from Yerevan, and consequently, with this new push by Baku, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia is likely to spread to Moscow and Western capitals with a new intensity, again something that cannot fail to affect negotiations over the future of Karabakh.
Window on Eurasia: Internet Use Varies Widely and in Unexpected Ways in Russia’s Regions
Paul Goble
Vienna, January 2 – Russian regions vary not only according to how much their residents go online but also and increasingly in terms of the various ways in which they make use of this new information technology, according to a comprehensive new study released at the end of December.
Moscow’s Yandex Company, together with the Public Opinion Foundation, TNS, RU-Center, and the Cherniy kvadrat project described this situation in a report entitled “The Development of the Internet in the Regions of Russia in 2007.” It is described and with a hypertext link to the original at http://gtmarket.ru/news/state/2007/12/25/1543.
While many of the report’s findings – people in Moscow and St.Petersburg go online far more often than those in the provinces and those in provincial cities do so more often than rural residents – will surprise no one, its other conclusions are both more dramatic and more interesting.
The number of sites on the Russian Internet grew by 66 percent in 2007, and the total number of such sites is on track to top two million by the end of 2008, the study said. But only one in five of the dot RU domains is located outside of the Russian capital, and their number is growing slightly more slowly than that in Moscow.
Approximately 57 percent of Muscovites now go online regularly, the study concluded, while only 40 percent of those in other Russian cities of more than 100,000 currently do so. And in small cities and rural areas, the figure is still below 20 percent, although that number is growing.
Those figures are consistent with ones that other investigators of the Internet in Russia have released in recent months, but the Yandex study goes further and provides information on the way in which people are in fact using the Internet in the two capitals and the various federal districts.
Moscow, to the surprise of no one, leads in every category of Internet use. Its residents make use of the Internet 2.5 times more often than Russians elsewhere. The number of domains registered there is seven times that of the rest of the country, and the level of participation in the blogosphere by Muscovites is 11 times that of other regions.
St. Petersburg residents use the Internet 1.5 times as often as the national average, they blog and register domain names ten and five times more often than others, and they make online purchases six times more often than do residents living in other regions. But media there use the Internet only slightly more than do media outlets elsewhere.
In the Central Federal District (excluding Moscow), five million people over the age of 18 go online regularly, 17 percent of all users in the country. Among the cities there with the highest percentages of surfers are Voronezh, Ryazan’, Tver’, and Yaroslav’.
Media outlets in this region, however, make use of the Internet only half as often as those elsewhere. Its rate of domain registrations is also close to that average, but it is in second place among the federal districts (behind only the Urals FD) in terms of the percentage of the population making online purchases.
The North-West Federal District (excluding St. Petersburg) now has 2.4 million Internet users, 13 percent of the national total. That puts the district in first place among the FDs in the country. But they are less active than many others, with fewer in this region blogging, registering domains, or making online purchases.
There are 4.8 million Internet users in the Volga FD, 17 percent of all Russian users, but overall Internet penetration there – 20 percent – is lower than the average. Internet media here are also less active than the average, but Volga residents blog more than do those in most other areas.
In the Urals FD, 1.8 million adults regularly use the Internet, six percent of the national total. That makes Internet penetration there slightly lower than the national average, and those who do go online there make use of the net’s various offerings about a third less than do surfers elsewhere.
There are 3.5 million Internet users in the Siberian FD, the study found, some 12percent of the Russian total, and on all measures, Internet use there is almost exactly the same as it is in the other FDs. But Novosibirsk represents an exception: its users trail only those in Moscow and St. Petersburg in terms of online activity.
And while only 1.6 million adults in the Far Eastern FD go online, five percent of the national total, their percentage in the population exceeds the national average and the Internet media in this region are more active than any others, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the amount of updating.
The other FDs are also surveyed, but their rates of participation are lower and in the still unsettled Southern FD, the data themselves are more problematic. While the number of people using the Internet there remains low, certain Internet news outlets like Ingushetia.ru, are extremely important.
Indeed, as the authorities in that republic continue to crack down on that independent site, its supporters are both turning to satellite connections (to get around the government’s control of the ISP there) and printing out and posting printouts of its reports as wall newspapers (http://www.ingushetiya.ru/news/12704.html).
Vienna, January 2 – Russian regions vary not only according to how much their residents go online but also and increasingly in terms of the various ways in which they make use of this new information technology, according to a comprehensive new study released at the end of December.
Moscow’s Yandex Company, together with the Public Opinion Foundation, TNS, RU-Center, and the Cherniy kvadrat project described this situation in a report entitled “The Development of the Internet in the Regions of Russia in 2007.” It is described and with a hypertext link to the original at http://gtmarket.ru/news/state/2007/12/25/1543.
While many of the report’s findings – people in Moscow and St.Petersburg go online far more often than those in the provinces and those in provincial cities do so more often than rural residents – will surprise no one, its other conclusions are both more dramatic and more interesting.
The number of sites on the Russian Internet grew by 66 percent in 2007, and the total number of such sites is on track to top two million by the end of 2008, the study said. But only one in five of the dot RU domains is located outside of the Russian capital, and their number is growing slightly more slowly than that in Moscow.
Approximately 57 percent of Muscovites now go online regularly, the study concluded, while only 40 percent of those in other Russian cities of more than 100,000 currently do so. And in small cities and rural areas, the figure is still below 20 percent, although that number is growing.
Those figures are consistent with ones that other investigators of the Internet in Russia have released in recent months, but the Yandex study goes further and provides information on the way in which people are in fact using the Internet in the two capitals and the various federal districts.
Moscow, to the surprise of no one, leads in every category of Internet use. Its residents make use of the Internet 2.5 times more often than Russians elsewhere. The number of domains registered there is seven times that of the rest of the country, and the level of participation in the blogosphere by Muscovites is 11 times that of other regions.
St. Petersburg residents use the Internet 1.5 times as often as the national average, they blog and register domain names ten and five times more often than others, and they make online purchases six times more often than do residents living in other regions. But media there use the Internet only slightly more than do media outlets elsewhere.
In the Central Federal District (excluding Moscow), five million people over the age of 18 go online regularly, 17 percent of all users in the country. Among the cities there with the highest percentages of surfers are Voronezh, Ryazan’, Tver’, and Yaroslav’.
Media outlets in this region, however, make use of the Internet only half as often as those elsewhere. Its rate of domain registrations is also close to that average, but it is in second place among the federal districts (behind only the Urals FD) in terms of the percentage of the population making online purchases.
The North-West Federal District (excluding St. Petersburg) now has 2.4 million Internet users, 13 percent of the national total. That puts the district in first place among the FDs in the country. But they are less active than many others, with fewer in this region blogging, registering domains, or making online purchases.
There are 4.8 million Internet users in the Volga FD, 17 percent of all Russian users, but overall Internet penetration there – 20 percent – is lower than the average. Internet media here are also less active than the average, but Volga residents blog more than do those in most other areas.
In the Urals FD, 1.8 million adults regularly use the Internet, six percent of the national total. That makes Internet penetration there slightly lower than the national average, and those who do go online there make use of the net’s various offerings about a third less than do surfers elsewhere.
There are 3.5 million Internet users in the Siberian FD, the study found, some 12percent of the Russian total, and on all measures, Internet use there is almost exactly the same as it is in the other FDs. But Novosibirsk represents an exception: its users trail only those in Moscow and St. Petersburg in terms of online activity.
And while only 1.6 million adults in the Far Eastern FD go online, five percent of the national total, their percentage in the population exceeds the national average and the Internet media in this region are more active than any others, not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the amount of updating.
The other FDs are also surveyed, but their rates of participation are lower and in the still unsettled Southern FD, the data themselves are more problematic. While the number of people using the Internet there remains low, certain Internet news outlets like Ingushetia.ru, are extremely important.
Indeed, as the authorities in that republic continue to crack down on that independent site, its supporters are both turning to satellite connections (to get around the government’s control of the ISP there) and printing out and posting printouts of its reports as wall newspapers (http://www.ingushetiya.ru/news/12704.html).
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Window on Eurasia: For Orthodox Russians, the New Year Does Not Start Today
Paul Goble
Vienna, January 1 -- Many religions and nations have their own calendars, but few are as tied to one that is so close but not the same as the one the society around them uses as does the Russian Orthodox Church -- a situation that has increasingly serious if entirely unintended consequences for the Russian Federation.
When Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian calendar in 1582 in order to correct for the increasing divergence between that man-made calendar and nature’s seasons, many Orthodox and Protestant Christians saw his innovation a Vatican plot intended to re-establish the power of Rome over them.
Over time, however, and recognizing the improved accuracy provided by the new calendar -- which at the time of its launch was almost ten days in advance of the Julian one -- nearly all Protestants and most Orthodox churches, including the Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian, came around.
But not so the Russian Orthodox Church and the country in which it was the dominant faith. The church insisted on retaining the Julian calendar as the more correct and hence Orthodox one, and the tsarist authorities went along with them, thus giving Russia a single calendar albeit one almost two weeks behind the one used elsewhere.
So things continued until February 1918 when Lenin’s revolutionary government adopted the Julian calendar that almost all Western countries were using. But the Russian Orthodox Church, which was locked in an ideological struggle with the Communists, refused to go along.
Given the cavalier and brutal way in which the Soviet government treated the church, it has often struck many as odd that it did not order the surviving hierarchs to change their favored calendar. But the Bolsheviks had a very good reason for not doing so, according to a new study (www.apn.ru/opinions/print18860.htm).
The Communists clearly calculated, Valeriy Kadzhaya writes, that “the old calendar only distanced the mass of believers and especially the young from the Russian Orthodox Church,” an arrangement that gave the atheist state greater opportunities to wean Russian society from its Christian roots.
To what extent the competing calendars played that role in Soviet times remains a matter of debate, especially since many Orthodox hierarchs after World War II were prepared to mark holidays according to both the Julian and the Gregorian standards. But the impact of the existence of the two in post-Soviet times is beyond doubt.
During most of the last 15 years and especially during the last three, the existence of the two calendars has meant that many Russians begin celebrating the holiday season in advance of “Western” Christmas on December 25 and do not end their partying or time off from work until “Orthodox” New Years on January 14.
That makes the Russian holiday nearly three weeks long, and as Kadzhaya notes, no one has calculated just what the financial and other costs this calendar-driven lengthening of this winter break, although many have pointed to the negative consequences of heavy drinking during this period on the survival of families.
There are only two ways out of this situation that make sense, Kadzhaya continues. Moscow could impose the Julian calendar on the country, something that would leave Russia two weeks behind the rest of the world and thus a step that no one is seriously contemplating.
Or the Russian Orthodox Church could finally switch to the Gregorian calendar, as other Orthodox groups have. But the Church itself is unlikely to take that step on its own -- such a move is inconsistent with its stance that Russia has “a special path” in the world -- and the Kremlin is unlikely to want a conflict with one of its powerful supporters.
Consequently, the current situation, one inherited from the tsarist and Soviet pasts and exacerbated by post-Soviet realities is likely to continue for some time to come, however much almost everyone there would benefit from a change of one or the other calendar in this or some future new year.
In the meantime, however, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone reading this a happy new year whatever calendar you may think best and to thank you for all of your comments over the last year. I have learned so much from them, and I look forward to more in 2008.
Vienna, January 1 -- Many religions and nations have their own calendars, but few are as tied to one that is so close but not the same as the one the society around them uses as does the Russian Orthodox Church -- a situation that has increasingly serious if entirely unintended consequences for the Russian Federation.
When Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian calendar in 1582 in order to correct for the increasing divergence between that man-made calendar and nature’s seasons, many Orthodox and Protestant Christians saw his innovation a Vatican plot intended to re-establish the power of Rome over them.
Over time, however, and recognizing the improved accuracy provided by the new calendar -- which at the time of its launch was almost ten days in advance of the Julian one -- nearly all Protestants and most Orthodox churches, including the Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian, came around.
But not so the Russian Orthodox Church and the country in which it was the dominant faith. The church insisted on retaining the Julian calendar as the more correct and hence Orthodox one, and the tsarist authorities went along with them, thus giving Russia a single calendar albeit one almost two weeks behind the one used elsewhere.
So things continued until February 1918 when Lenin’s revolutionary government adopted the Julian calendar that almost all Western countries were using. But the Russian Orthodox Church, which was locked in an ideological struggle with the Communists, refused to go along.
Given the cavalier and brutal way in which the Soviet government treated the church, it has often struck many as odd that it did not order the surviving hierarchs to change their favored calendar. But the Bolsheviks had a very good reason for not doing so, according to a new study (www.apn.ru/opinions/print18860.htm).
The Communists clearly calculated, Valeriy Kadzhaya writes, that “the old calendar only distanced the mass of believers and especially the young from the Russian Orthodox Church,” an arrangement that gave the atheist state greater opportunities to wean Russian society from its Christian roots.
To what extent the competing calendars played that role in Soviet times remains a matter of debate, especially since many Orthodox hierarchs after World War II were prepared to mark holidays according to both the Julian and the Gregorian standards. But the impact of the existence of the two in post-Soviet times is beyond doubt.
During most of the last 15 years and especially during the last three, the existence of the two calendars has meant that many Russians begin celebrating the holiday season in advance of “Western” Christmas on December 25 and do not end their partying or time off from work until “Orthodox” New Years on January 14.
That makes the Russian holiday nearly three weeks long, and as Kadzhaya notes, no one has calculated just what the financial and other costs this calendar-driven lengthening of this winter break, although many have pointed to the negative consequences of heavy drinking during this period on the survival of families.
There are only two ways out of this situation that make sense, Kadzhaya continues. Moscow could impose the Julian calendar on the country, something that would leave Russia two weeks behind the rest of the world and thus a step that no one is seriously contemplating.
Or the Russian Orthodox Church could finally switch to the Gregorian calendar, as other Orthodox groups have. But the Church itself is unlikely to take that step on its own -- such a move is inconsistent with its stance that Russia has “a special path” in the world -- and the Kremlin is unlikely to want a conflict with one of its powerful supporters.
Consequently, the current situation, one inherited from the tsarist and Soviet pasts and exacerbated by post-Soviet realities is likely to continue for some time to come, however much almost everyone there would benefit from a change of one or the other calendar in this or some future new year.
In the meantime, however, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone reading this a happy new year whatever calendar you may think best and to thank you for all of your comments over the last year. I have learned so much from them, and I look forward to more in 2008.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Putin’s Russia at the End of 2007 -- Neither Free, Orderly or Great
Paul Goble
Vienna, December 31 -- Vladimir Putin has managed to convince a great number of people in his own country and abroad that he has restored order and greatness to the Russian Federation albeit at the cost of destroying many of the freedoms residents of that country had enjoyed under his predecessor.
But the tragic reality, according to one of Moscow’s most thoughtful and courageous political commentators, is that the Russian leader has succeeded in undermining basic freedoms without managing to restore order throughout the country or make Russia genuinely great again.
Instead, Yulia Latynina argues in Yezhednevniy zhurnal on Friday, Putin has focused on reestablishing order only on the oil and gas industries whose exports generate wealth for him and his associates and on others whose independence might threaten this cash flow (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=7697).
Within the Russian Federation itself, these potentially threatening institutions are the electronic media and especially television whose exposes in the past have limited the freedom of action of the regime and the parliament whose public debates and investigations, as limited as they have sometimes been, also represented a threat.
Putin’s success in reining in both these institutions is one of the major reasons why so many Russians believe that the country is now more orderly and great, Latynina says. They simply do not have the information they need to understand precisely what the Russian president is doing and, equally important, is not doing.
And that domestic effort has been supplemented by a propaganda campaign directed abroad, an undertaking that, as Time’s decision to name Putin its “person of the year” shows, has been amazingly successful, Latynina writes, in large measure because it has been conducted by well-paid Western public relations and media specialists.
“From afar,” she continues, what Putin is trying to project looks “remarkably convincing. If you live in Wisconsin, it is easy to believe that this terrible Russia has again become something like Germany under Hitler. There may be no freedom, but there is Ordnung.”
If one examines the situation in Russia more closely, however, the image Putin has sought to project and that so many in both Russia and the West have been ready, even eager, to accept, falls apart, revealing a reality that is far more frightening and disturbing than most Russians or many in the West currently recognize.
In support of her argument, the Moscow commentator points to three situations in Russia, none of which corresponds to the image Putin tries to project and many others have put their faith in.
First, she points out as have many others that “the territory of Ingushetia is not controlled by Russia at all.” Is it really possible, Latynina asks rhetorically, that the “strong Russian state” Putin says he heads, one capable of “controlling the situation” throughout the country, would not control this North Caucasus republic?
Noting that Putin’s hand-picked leader of the region probably does not control anything more than his own office, she argues that Putin does not control Ingushetia “because he is not interested in it.” What is he interested in? Oil and gas exports and the money he and his confederates can get from them.
Second, she points out that “the Russian militia has almost ceased to solve crimes.” Bandits kill bank officers or children in Moscow, and the police do nothing or make up stories to explain away whatever has occurred. Such things do not normally happen in a democracy, Latynina says, where officials know they are expected to enforce the law.
But they also do not happen in effective dictatorships. “Such things are unthinkable in the USSR in Stalin’s time or Italy under Mussolini -- indeed, in any country where the dictator takes upon himself responsibility for what takes place … and where criminals, who commit grave crimes, become the personal enemies of the regime.”
Related to this situation is the strange case of the son of the country’s defense minister. The son killed his own wife but is now suing her relatives for inflicting “physical and moral trauma” on him, according to his highly-placed father. If this is “the new order” in Russia, Latynina says, Putin should decree who can commit murder with impunity.
And third, the Moscow commentator notes, criminal elements simply ignore orders from above. Recently, criminals inside the law enforcement agencies stole millions of dollars of equipment being sent to Russia by Motorola for the Euroset Company. U.S. President George Bush asked Putin to intervene.
Putin promised to do so. But nothing happened. Either Putin did not want to punish this criminal whose actions had attracted the attention of Washington, or the millions of dollars the criminals were able to obtain from this theft were more important to them than the orders of the supposedly all-powerful Russian president.
Neither of these conclusions conform with the image of Putin and his regime that the Kremlin and its PR aides have projected, she notes. And consequently, anyone who wants to understand where Russia under Putin now is needs to carefully distinguish between those issues that concern the Kremlin leader and those that do not.
“President Putin is interested in questions connected with obtaining control over multi-billion dollar financial flows” which solves crimes, and he is interested in establishing control over only those other institutions -- the parliament, the domestic electronic media, and the PR image of Russia internationally -- that might threaten that control.
He is not concerned, she continues, about “questions concerning the illegal shooting of people, with the complete loss of control over the situation in the regions, with the total disappearance of law enforcement as a system which solves crimes” rather than its degeneration into a group of armed people “who commit them.”
That is not a description of a country whose leader has reestablished order or greatness even at the cost of freedom. Instead, it is a portrait of a country whose leadership is engaged in looting the wealth of the Russian Federation rather than involved in building a state, even an authoritarian one.
And as another author suggested this week, it is not a recipe for stability but rather for something worse. Sergei Gupalo, who heads the Committee Against Political Repression in the Republic of Tatarstan, argues that this approach threatens the survival of the Russian state as an integral whole (forum.msk.ru/material/region/419057.html).
First of all, he said, Putin’s arrangements are creating a situation in which it is far from clear “where the bureaucracy begins and where the mafia ends” because so many bureaucrats now act like criminals interested only in seeing how much money they can steal and put into their own pockets.
Second, Gupalo argued, the degeneration of state institutions as a result already means that “the bureaucratic dragon” of Moscow is giving birth to many “little dragons” in the regions, mafia officialdoms whose behavior is modeled on but quite often worse and more ill-intentioned than that of the parent.
And third, the Kazan-based activist said, the developments threaten Russia with what he calls “the Somalia variant where formally there is some central government but where in fact [control of] the country is divided among various criminal gangs engaged in fighting one another.”
That picture, like the one offered by Latynina, may overstate the case, but it is clear that neither Putin nor his admirers at home or abroad are willing or able to explain how the problems these two writers highlight are in any way consistent with the notion that at the cost of freedom, Putin has made Russia orderly and great.
Vienna, December 31 -- Vladimir Putin has managed to convince a great number of people in his own country and abroad that he has restored order and greatness to the Russian Federation albeit at the cost of destroying many of the freedoms residents of that country had enjoyed under his predecessor.
But the tragic reality, according to one of Moscow’s most thoughtful and courageous political commentators, is that the Russian leader has succeeded in undermining basic freedoms without managing to restore order throughout the country or make Russia genuinely great again.
Instead, Yulia Latynina argues in Yezhednevniy zhurnal on Friday, Putin has focused on reestablishing order only on the oil and gas industries whose exports generate wealth for him and his associates and on others whose independence might threaten this cash flow (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=7697).
Within the Russian Federation itself, these potentially threatening institutions are the electronic media and especially television whose exposes in the past have limited the freedom of action of the regime and the parliament whose public debates and investigations, as limited as they have sometimes been, also represented a threat.
Putin’s success in reining in both these institutions is one of the major reasons why so many Russians believe that the country is now more orderly and great, Latynina says. They simply do not have the information they need to understand precisely what the Russian president is doing and, equally important, is not doing.
And that domestic effort has been supplemented by a propaganda campaign directed abroad, an undertaking that, as Time’s decision to name Putin its “person of the year” shows, has been amazingly successful, Latynina writes, in large measure because it has been conducted by well-paid Western public relations and media specialists.
“From afar,” she continues, what Putin is trying to project looks “remarkably convincing. If you live in Wisconsin, it is easy to believe that this terrible Russia has again become something like Germany under Hitler. There may be no freedom, but there is Ordnung.”
If one examines the situation in Russia more closely, however, the image Putin has sought to project and that so many in both Russia and the West have been ready, even eager, to accept, falls apart, revealing a reality that is far more frightening and disturbing than most Russians or many in the West currently recognize.
In support of her argument, the Moscow commentator points to three situations in Russia, none of which corresponds to the image Putin tries to project and many others have put their faith in.
First, she points out as have many others that “the territory of Ingushetia is not controlled by Russia at all.” Is it really possible, Latynina asks rhetorically, that the “strong Russian state” Putin says he heads, one capable of “controlling the situation” throughout the country, would not control this North Caucasus republic?
Noting that Putin’s hand-picked leader of the region probably does not control anything more than his own office, she argues that Putin does not control Ingushetia “because he is not interested in it.” What is he interested in? Oil and gas exports and the money he and his confederates can get from them.
Second, she points out that “the Russian militia has almost ceased to solve crimes.” Bandits kill bank officers or children in Moscow, and the police do nothing or make up stories to explain away whatever has occurred. Such things do not normally happen in a democracy, Latynina says, where officials know they are expected to enforce the law.
But they also do not happen in effective dictatorships. “Such things are unthinkable in the USSR in Stalin’s time or Italy under Mussolini -- indeed, in any country where the dictator takes upon himself responsibility for what takes place … and where criminals, who commit grave crimes, become the personal enemies of the regime.”
Related to this situation is the strange case of the son of the country’s defense minister. The son killed his own wife but is now suing her relatives for inflicting “physical and moral trauma” on him, according to his highly-placed father. If this is “the new order” in Russia, Latynina says, Putin should decree who can commit murder with impunity.
And third, the Moscow commentator notes, criminal elements simply ignore orders from above. Recently, criminals inside the law enforcement agencies stole millions of dollars of equipment being sent to Russia by Motorola for the Euroset Company. U.S. President George Bush asked Putin to intervene.
Putin promised to do so. But nothing happened. Either Putin did not want to punish this criminal whose actions had attracted the attention of Washington, or the millions of dollars the criminals were able to obtain from this theft were more important to them than the orders of the supposedly all-powerful Russian president.
Neither of these conclusions conform with the image of Putin and his regime that the Kremlin and its PR aides have projected, she notes. And consequently, anyone who wants to understand where Russia under Putin now is needs to carefully distinguish between those issues that concern the Kremlin leader and those that do not.
“President Putin is interested in questions connected with obtaining control over multi-billion dollar financial flows” which solves crimes, and he is interested in establishing control over only those other institutions -- the parliament, the domestic electronic media, and the PR image of Russia internationally -- that might threaten that control.
He is not concerned, she continues, about “questions concerning the illegal shooting of people, with the complete loss of control over the situation in the regions, with the total disappearance of law enforcement as a system which solves crimes” rather than its degeneration into a group of armed people “who commit them.”
That is not a description of a country whose leader has reestablished order or greatness even at the cost of freedom. Instead, it is a portrait of a country whose leadership is engaged in looting the wealth of the Russian Federation rather than involved in building a state, even an authoritarian one.
And as another author suggested this week, it is not a recipe for stability but rather for something worse. Sergei Gupalo, who heads the Committee Against Political Repression in the Republic of Tatarstan, argues that this approach threatens the survival of the Russian state as an integral whole (forum.msk.ru/material/region/419057.html).
First of all, he said, Putin’s arrangements are creating a situation in which it is far from clear “where the bureaucracy begins and where the mafia ends” because so many bureaucrats now act like criminals interested only in seeing how much money they can steal and put into their own pockets.
Second, Gupalo argued, the degeneration of state institutions as a result already means that “the bureaucratic dragon” of Moscow is giving birth to many “little dragons” in the regions, mafia officialdoms whose behavior is modeled on but quite often worse and more ill-intentioned than that of the parent.
And third, the Kazan-based activist said, the developments threaten Russia with what he calls “the Somalia variant where formally there is some central government but where in fact [control of] the country is divided among various criminal gangs engaged in fighting one another.”
That picture, like the one offered by Latynina, may overstate the case, but it is clear that neither Putin nor his admirers at home or abroad are willing or able to explain how the problems these two writers highlight are in any way consistent with the notion that at the cost of freedom, Putin has made Russia orderly and great.
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Muslims in 2007 -- The Best of Times or the Worst?
Paul Goble
Vienna, December 31 -- In their year-end reviews, Muslim leaders in the Russian Federation argue that their community made enormous progress in 2007. But Russian academic specialists on Islam suggest that Russia’s Muslims should not be so upbeat, with one insisting Russia’s Muslims are currently “in a state of the deepest crisis.”
Among the positive developments over the past year Muslim leaders pointed to were the largest haj from Russia ever, rising mosque attendance especially among the young, the opening of new mosques in many parts of the country, and the expansion of Muslim media activities.
(These assessments can be found at www.muslim.ru/1/cont/20/37/1305.htm, www.islamrf.ru/articles.php?razdel=1&sid=1176, www.islamnasledie.ru/news.php?id=838, and www.islamrf.ru/articles.php?razdel=1&sid=1188.)
Moreover, they cited the Russian government’s decision to provide more funding for Muslim groups and to recognize the diplomas of Muslim universities, Moscow’s increased attention to the Muslims of Russia as an important part of Russian society, and the Kremlin’s opposition to the introduction of Orthodox Christian courses in Russia’s school.
But the greatest accomplishments of 2007, almost all of them said, were three: increased social and political activism by Russia‘s Muslims, their own moves to create a Council of Ulema to guide Russia’s Muslims, and newly expanded contacts with Muslims abroad and with governments where Muslims live.
At the same time, however, the Russian Federation’s various Muslim leaders said that the situation of the country’s Islamic community was far from ideal and that both the leadership and the country’s more than 20 million Muslims would have to continue to work hard in 2008.
The leaders identified five such problems that need resolution. First, they said, far too few mullahs have sufficient theological education to be able to counter extremist groups. Many still lack any formal training in Islam and thus are often at a loss when challenged by radicals.
Second, the leaders of Russia’s Islamic community said, the feuding Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs) and the two super-directorates, the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) and the Central MSD need unity so that non-Muslims, including the Russian state will have an interlocutor.
Third, Muslim leaders need to address the issue of what is to become of those Muslim training centers whose diplomas are not going to be recognized by the state. Should they close? Or should they be upgraded? And related to that, what role should the state have in evaluating lower-level Muslim educational institutions?
Fourth, even though outside the North Caucasus, Russia’s Muslims are overwhelmingly followers of the Hanafi legal school of Sunni Islam, they have not created the “unified theological and legal space” they need, although the creation of an active Council of Ulema could do so.
And fifth, Muslims need to develop closer relations with the government at all levels both to ensure that the voices of the Islamic community are heard in the corridors of power and to enlist the government’s help in blocking the aspirations of the Russian Orthodox Church to dominate the country and overcoming anti-Muslim sentiments in Russian society.
But even in listing these “minuses,” the self-confidence, not to say self-satisfaction of most Muslim leaders this year is palpable. Thus it is not surprising that one of them felt compelled to remind his colleagues that Islam bans the consumption of champagne even during New Years’ celebrations (www.islamnasledia.ru/news.php?id=834).
Such upbeat conclusions are the norm in most year-end reviews by the leaders of any community and thus are unlikely to receive much attention. But in contrast, the year-end comments by Moscow academic specialists about the state of Islam in the Russian Federation stand out because they are not only overwhelmingly negative but even gloomy.
The most downbeat comments came as might be expected from Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam for the Orthodox Church who lost his position as executive secretary of the Inter-Religious Council more than a year ago for his negative remarks about Muslim leaders.
In remarks to the Russian media, Silantyev not only suggested that there are fewer Muslims in Russia than even President Vladimir Putin has said but argued in addition that Russia’s Muslim community and its leaders at the present time are mired “in the deepest crisis” (www.annews.ru/news/detail.php?ID=146402).
According to the controversial writer, “unfortunately, the last 19 years in Russian Islam have been the blackest period in its history. Russian Islam has become the victim ideological expansion from abroad and, unlike [the country’s] other traditional religions, it has suffered from this more severely.”
A major reason for this, Silantyev continued, is a shortage of well-trained cadres. Only three of four of the country’s 65 muftis know Arabic well, he said, and despite the expansion in the number of mosques, there are almost no new mullahs being trained to lead them.
That has opened the door for extremists from abroad, allowing them to recruit among Muslims locally. One measure of this disturbing trend, he said, is that in his view, some 70 percent of all Muslim media, print and electronic, in the Russian Federation is controlled by Wahhabis and the followers of other radical groups.
Unless the state intervenes to promote the training of mullahs inside Russia and to crack down hard on the radicals, he continued, “the thousand-year-long tradition of inter-religious peace in Russia will come to an end.” Indeed, he said, “the stratum of Muslims who want to live in peace with Christians is becoming extraordinarily small.”
Two other Moscow specialists also expressed their concerns, albeit in more measured language. Writing in Nezavisimaya gazeta-Religii, Aleksei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center argued that politicization and radicalization of Russia‘s Muslims had continued during 2007(religon.ng.ru/people/2007-12-19/4_islam.html).
In another article, Malashenko said that the failure of Muslims to act as a corporate political entity in the December 2 parliamentary elections should not lead anyone to conclude that they will not do so in the future, especially if they feel that the state is failing to check Islamophobia (mn.ru/issue/2007-50-49).
And Aleksandr Ignatenko, of the Institute for Religion and Politics and its oft-quoted web portal, added that Islamophobia is indeed a serious concern but its existence should not blind anyone to the reality that “religious-political extremism” among Muslims remains a problem, especially in the North Caucasus (mn.ru/issue/2007-50-48).
Indeed, he argued, in place of the armed conflicts that had dominated that region in the past have arisen an ideological extremism which “mimics” Islam, attracting the unwary to its banners and presenting the Russian authorities with a variety of challenges they have not yet figured out how to cope with.
Ignatenko said that defeating this ideological challenge, one that currently takes the form of the distribution of “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of radical texts among Russia’s Muslims, would require a multi-faceted campaign including “ideological, social-economic, legal, and international diplomatic” actions.”
But in calling for just such an effort, Ignatenko cautioned that it must be carried out with “the greatest of care” lest it contribute to the further “traumatization” of Russia’s Muslims not only by offending them directly but by giving Islamophobic groups in the broader population the dangerous sense that the government is on their side.
Bridging these divides over what the facts of this case actually are and even more over what Muslims, on the one hand, and the Russian government, on the other, should do about them is not going to be easy for any of those involved. And as a result, these controversies are likely to form an increasingly important part of Russian life in 2008.
Vienna, December 31 -- In their year-end reviews, Muslim leaders in the Russian Federation argue that their community made enormous progress in 2007. But Russian academic specialists on Islam suggest that Russia’s Muslims should not be so upbeat, with one insisting Russia’s Muslims are currently “in a state of the deepest crisis.”
Among the positive developments over the past year Muslim leaders pointed to were the largest haj from Russia ever, rising mosque attendance especially among the young, the opening of new mosques in many parts of the country, and the expansion of Muslim media activities.
(These assessments can be found at www.muslim.ru/1/cont/20/37/1305.htm, www.islamrf.ru/articles.php?razdel=1&sid=1176, www.islamnasledie.ru/news.php?id=838, and www.islamrf.ru/articles.php?razdel=1&sid=1188.)
Moreover, they cited the Russian government’s decision to provide more funding for Muslim groups and to recognize the diplomas of Muslim universities, Moscow’s increased attention to the Muslims of Russia as an important part of Russian society, and the Kremlin’s opposition to the introduction of Orthodox Christian courses in Russia’s school.
But the greatest accomplishments of 2007, almost all of them said, were three: increased social and political activism by Russia‘s Muslims, their own moves to create a Council of Ulema to guide Russia’s Muslims, and newly expanded contacts with Muslims abroad and with governments where Muslims live.
At the same time, however, the Russian Federation’s various Muslim leaders said that the situation of the country’s Islamic community was far from ideal and that both the leadership and the country’s more than 20 million Muslims would have to continue to work hard in 2008.
The leaders identified five such problems that need resolution. First, they said, far too few mullahs have sufficient theological education to be able to counter extremist groups. Many still lack any formal training in Islam and thus are often at a loss when challenged by radicals.
Second, the leaders of Russia’s Islamic community said, the feuding Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs) and the two super-directorates, the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) and the Central MSD need unity so that non-Muslims, including the Russian state will have an interlocutor.
Third, Muslim leaders need to address the issue of what is to become of those Muslim training centers whose diplomas are not going to be recognized by the state. Should they close? Or should they be upgraded? And related to that, what role should the state have in evaluating lower-level Muslim educational institutions?
Fourth, even though outside the North Caucasus, Russia’s Muslims are overwhelmingly followers of the Hanafi legal school of Sunni Islam, they have not created the “unified theological and legal space” they need, although the creation of an active Council of Ulema could do so.
And fifth, Muslims need to develop closer relations with the government at all levels both to ensure that the voices of the Islamic community are heard in the corridors of power and to enlist the government’s help in blocking the aspirations of the Russian Orthodox Church to dominate the country and overcoming anti-Muslim sentiments in Russian society.
But even in listing these “minuses,” the self-confidence, not to say self-satisfaction of most Muslim leaders this year is palpable. Thus it is not surprising that one of them felt compelled to remind his colleagues that Islam bans the consumption of champagne even during New Years’ celebrations (www.islamnasledia.ru/news.php?id=834).
Such upbeat conclusions are the norm in most year-end reviews by the leaders of any community and thus are unlikely to receive much attention. But in contrast, the year-end comments by Moscow academic specialists about the state of Islam in the Russian Federation stand out because they are not only overwhelmingly negative but even gloomy.
The most downbeat comments came as might be expected from Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam for the Orthodox Church who lost his position as executive secretary of the Inter-Religious Council more than a year ago for his negative remarks about Muslim leaders.
In remarks to the Russian media, Silantyev not only suggested that there are fewer Muslims in Russia than even President Vladimir Putin has said but argued in addition that Russia’s Muslim community and its leaders at the present time are mired “in the deepest crisis” (www.annews.ru/news/detail.php?ID=146402).
According to the controversial writer, “unfortunately, the last 19 years in Russian Islam have been the blackest period in its history. Russian Islam has become the victim ideological expansion from abroad and, unlike [the country’s] other traditional religions, it has suffered from this more severely.”
A major reason for this, Silantyev continued, is a shortage of well-trained cadres. Only three of four of the country’s 65 muftis know Arabic well, he said, and despite the expansion in the number of mosques, there are almost no new mullahs being trained to lead them.
That has opened the door for extremists from abroad, allowing them to recruit among Muslims locally. One measure of this disturbing trend, he said, is that in his view, some 70 percent of all Muslim media, print and electronic, in the Russian Federation is controlled by Wahhabis and the followers of other radical groups.
Unless the state intervenes to promote the training of mullahs inside Russia and to crack down hard on the radicals, he continued, “the thousand-year-long tradition of inter-religious peace in Russia will come to an end.” Indeed, he said, “the stratum of Muslims who want to live in peace with Christians is becoming extraordinarily small.”
Two other Moscow specialists also expressed their concerns, albeit in more measured language. Writing in Nezavisimaya gazeta-Religii, Aleksei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center argued that politicization and radicalization of Russia‘s Muslims had continued during 2007(religon.ng.ru/people/2007-12-19/4_islam.html).
In another article, Malashenko said that the failure of Muslims to act as a corporate political entity in the December 2 parliamentary elections should not lead anyone to conclude that they will not do so in the future, especially if they feel that the state is failing to check Islamophobia (mn.ru/issue/2007-50-49).
And Aleksandr Ignatenko, of the Institute for Religion and Politics and its oft-quoted web portal, added that Islamophobia is indeed a serious concern but its existence should not blind anyone to the reality that “religious-political extremism” among Muslims remains a problem, especially in the North Caucasus (mn.ru/issue/2007-50-48).
Indeed, he argued, in place of the armed conflicts that had dominated that region in the past have arisen an ideological extremism which “mimics” Islam, attracting the unwary to its banners and presenting the Russian authorities with a variety of challenges they have not yet figured out how to cope with.
Ignatenko said that defeating this ideological challenge, one that currently takes the form of the distribution of “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of radical texts among Russia’s Muslims, would require a multi-faceted campaign including “ideological, social-economic, legal, and international diplomatic” actions.”
But in calling for just such an effort, Ignatenko cautioned that it must be carried out with “the greatest of care” lest it contribute to the further “traumatization” of Russia’s Muslims not only by offending them directly but by giving Islamophobic groups in the broader population the dangerous sense that the government is on their side.
Bridging these divides over what the facts of this case actually are and even more over what Muslims, on the one hand, and the Russian government, on the other, should do about them is not going to be easy for any of those involved. And as a result, these controversies are likely to form an increasingly important part of Russian life in 2008.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Moscow Schools Hope to Overcome Their Pupils’ Dislike of Migrant Children
Paul Goble
Vienna, December 28 -- Seventy-five percent of pupils in Moscow schools say they are “negatively inclined” toward children whose parents have arrived in their city from non-Russian areas, but school officials have been stymied in their efforts to address this problem by a lack of funds, scheduling difficulties, and the opposition of parents.
On Wednesday, the capital’s education department held a press conference to show off two new textbooks its staff have prepared to help integrate the 30,000 pupils in the Moscow school system who do not speak Russian as a native language, Komsomol’skaya Pravda reported yesterday (http://www.kp.ru/daily/24026.4/91636/print/).
The books, one for kindergarteners and a second for those in the first several grades, are intended to help the non-Russian arrivals adapt to Russian realities, but they also present a picture of multi-cultural cooperation that sadly is not very much in evidence either in the schools or in the society at large.
On the cover of one of the textbooks “little children of all skin colors are smiling,” the paper said. Inside the pupils are told what the Russian state shield is, who the president is, and why people need a government. And the pictures on its pages are signed by ethnic Russians, Buryats, Chechens and Tatars.
School officials said that they had devoted four years and some 350,000 rubles (14,000 U.S. dollars) to the preparation of these books which they hope will reduce the tensions between native Muscovites and new arrivals that are reflected in the poll results mentioned above.
But so far, they have not been able to overcome not only the consequences of such low levels of funding but two other problems as well. On the one hand, “Komsomol’skaya Pravda” reported, officials say that there is no gap in the curriculum for a new class where these texts could be employed.
And on the other, both the pupils themselves and their parents -- both native Muscovites and the migrants -- have been vocal in their objections to introducing tolerance courses because that would reduce the amount of time the students have to acquire the knowledge they need to succeed in more advanced grades.
Native Muscovite parents frequently have opposed the opening of special schools for migrants, believing that such institutions take funds away from the education of their own children. And migrant parents generally appear to believe that their children will get more benefits from normal courses than from any tolerance program.
Consequently, as the newspaper pointed out, the good intentions of the school system seem likely to founder on the harsh realities of the world in which Moscow schools exist -- unless, as some teachers have suggested, these texts designed to produce tolerance might be included in existing courses on “the world around us.”
Vienna, December 28 -- Seventy-five percent of pupils in Moscow schools say they are “negatively inclined” toward children whose parents have arrived in their city from non-Russian areas, but school officials have been stymied in their efforts to address this problem by a lack of funds, scheduling difficulties, and the opposition of parents.
On Wednesday, the capital’s education department held a press conference to show off two new textbooks its staff have prepared to help integrate the 30,000 pupils in the Moscow school system who do not speak Russian as a native language, Komsomol’skaya Pravda reported yesterday (http://www.kp.ru/daily/24026.4/91636/print/).
The books, one for kindergarteners and a second for those in the first several grades, are intended to help the non-Russian arrivals adapt to Russian realities, but they also present a picture of multi-cultural cooperation that sadly is not very much in evidence either in the schools or in the society at large.
On the cover of one of the textbooks “little children of all skin colors are smiling,” the paper said. Inside the pupils are told what the Russian state shield is, who the president is, and why people need a government. And the pictures on its pages are signed by ethnic Russians, Buryats, Chechens and Tatars.
School officials said that they had devoted four years and some 350,000 rubles (14,000 U.S. dollars) to the preparation of these books which they hope will reduce the tensions between native Muscovites and new arrivals that are reflected in the poll results mentioned above.
But so far, they have not been able to overcome not only the consequences of such low levels of funding but two other problems as well. On the one hand, “Komsomol’skaya Pravda” reported, officials say that there is no gap in the curriculum for a new class where these texts could be employed.
And on the other, both the pupils themselves and their parents -- both native Muscovites and the migrants -- have been vocal in their objections to introducing tolerance courses because that would reduce the amount of time the students have to acquire the knowledge they need to succeed in more advanced grades.
Native Muscovite parents frequently have opposed the opening of special schools for migrants, believing that such institutions take funds away from the education of their own children. And migrant parents generally appear to believe that their children will get more benefits from normal courses than from any tolerance program.
Consequently, as the newspaper pointed out, the good intentions of the school system seem likely to founder on the harsh realities of the world in which Moscow schools exist -- unless, as some teachers have suggested, these texts designed to produce tolerance might be included in existing courses on “the world around us.”
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