Paul Goble
Staunton, April 12 – The just-completed visit to Turkey by Abkhaz President Sergey Bagapsh represents both a problem and an opportunity for Ankara and Moscow, involving as it does many issues far beyond the question of broader international recognition for that breakaway republic, according to a leading Russian expert on the region.
In an essay carried by the “Novaya politika” portal yesterday, Sergey Markedonov argues that Bagapsh’s April 7-10 visit to Turkey must be put in this broader context rather than seen as only an effort to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough for a country that is only “partially recognized” (novopol.ru/-turetskiy-voyaj-sergeya-bagapsha-text99510.html).
Ankara both through its embassy in Tbilisi and its foreign ministry have made clear that Bagapsh’s visit does not represent a change in Turkish policy and that Turkey “does not intend to recognize Abkhazia as an independent state.” Indeed, the Turkish foreign office said it continues to view Georgia as “a strategic partner,” something that recognizing Sukhumi would destroy.
As Markedonov points out, Bagapsh was the guest in Turkey not of the government but of the Federation of Abkhaz Associations and the Federation of Caucasus Associations, two umbrella groups which unite many of the large Caucasian diasporas living in the Turkish Republic.
As Turkish Foreign Minister Akhmet Davitoglu said in September 2009, Markedonov continues, Ankara “does want to become acquainted with Abkhazia and seek to regularize its relations with Georgia,” a statement that is part of the reason why many now call him “the Turkish Kissinger.”
Markedonov suggests that no one should see Ankara’s stance as “altruistic.” Instead, it reflects Turkey’s longstanding desire to “have contacts with all the players,” not only because it wants to exert its influence in the Caucasus more than in the past but also because of the large Caucasian diasporas in Turkey itself.
Such people, the Russian analyst continues are “voters” but “not only that.” Among them are “military men and employees of the special services and experts and journalists.” Consequently, “from a pragmatic point of view, it is wrong to ignore their positions.” And thus any effort to block the Abkhaz leader’s visit could have serious negative consequences at home.
But, Markedonov continues, this is precisely the reason why “Ankara is not recognizing the independence of Abkhazia.” That would create the kind of “precedent of ethnic self-determination” that it opposes. If it acted differently, then “representatives of the Circassian, Chechen and Crimean Tatar diasporas could demand” similar treatment from Ankara.
Moreover, if Turkey recognized Abkhazia, it would find itself at odds with Moscow, Kyiv and its partners in NATO and the European Union. “Striving to enter ‘a single Europe’ is also as strong as the desire not to allow the use of an Abkhaz precedent by Kurdish separatists” in Turkey itself, Markedonov points out.
At the same time, however, “Turkey is in a position to broaden ‘the Abkhaz window’ and to force Tbilisi to be more correct in issues concerning the detention of Turkish ships and in general in the struggle with ‘Turkish contraband,’ as the actions of Turkish sailors in Abkhaz waters are described officially by Georgia.”
Abkhazia and Bagapsh personally benefited from the visit, given the centrality of the diaspora in the thinking of Abkhazian leaders. But at the same time, the visit may complicate the relationship of this breakaway government with its Moscow sponsors who may not be entirely pleased to see Abkhazia behaving so independently.
That is at least in part because Moscow, after the events of August 2008, had won greater support among many of the North Caucasus diasporas in Turkey, some of whose leaders have refused to support calls to declare the events of 1864 a genocide or to take part in Circassian efforts to block the Sochi Olympics.
But however that may be, Markedonov concludes, “on the eve of the Sochi Olympiad [scheduled for 2014], the ‘Circassian quesiton’ is becoming extremely important.” Consequently, establishing “constructive relations with the Caucasus diasporas of Turkey with Abkhazia’s help could be an extremely important task for Moscow.”
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Kazan Parents’ Call for Studying Russian Not Tatar Sparks Conflicts about More than Language
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 12 – Six hundred mothers of middle school pupils in Kazan have called on the Russian education minister to reduce or even end obligatory instruction in Tatar to all students in their republic, the latest effort to reduce the ethnic content of Russian Federalism, has triggered a debate between Russians and Tatars over far more than language.
Many of those signing this appeal are themselves ethnic Tatars, a fact that has led some in that Middle Volga republic to talk about the existence of “a fifth column” working against the interests of the Tatar nation. But it has also become the occasion for Russians there and elsewhere to demand that instruction in Tatarstan be in Russian not in the national language.
The original appeal suggested that “the study of Tatar interferes with the mastery of Russian, that learning Tatar is very difficult and that in general it is useless for the future of the child,” all contentions that Tatar intellectuals, like writer Tufan Minnullin, have dismissed as absurd or worse (www.intertat.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1642:-q&catid=119:2010-11-30-19-29-29&Itemid=501).
Minullin, who is also a member of Tatarstan’s State Council, said on Kazan television that he might have understood such calls if they came from ethnic Russian parents but “when Tatars reject the language of their ancestors and write complaints to Moscow [he] would call this a denunciation of one’s own people.”
According to Minullin, these parents have “the baseless and strange” conviction that “instruction in Russian is the key to the success of a child and that it will allow him to become a big boss.” In fact, he continues, that is absurd, as even the most superficial examination of conditions in Kazan will show.
“If in contemporary society, the Russian language were the chief and main condition for the achievement of the top positions, then ever Russian would be a boss, and there would not be drunkards and criminals on the streets.” But of course, “the issue is not about language;” it is about “the tragedy of the [ethnic] Russian people.”
Everyone knows about this even if few talk about it, Minullin suggests. “In our Tatar schools there is not a single drug addict, and yet how many problems there are in Russian language schools?!” And “how many Tatars who do not know and have not learned their native language … are sitting in prisons or suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction?”
“Moscow does not need out native language just as America, Germany or the others do not need it. We need our language,” Minullin says, “and therefore we will defend it.” That means seeking the repeal of the “barbaric” federal law “which was adopted against all the peoples who live in the Russian Federation” and which limits non-Russian languages.
Up to now, Moscow hasn’t pushed the law forward because people in the Russian capital have recognized that it was a mistake, but now it appears some there want to push things further. Minullin says that he agrees with one historian who noted that “we trust the state too much, but the government has its own problems and tasks.”
Consequently, the Tatar writer continues, “only the people can defend its language.”
Another Tatar commentator, Murza Kurbangali Yunusov, in response to the appeal of the 600 Kazan parents explicitly has addressed the question of “who needs the Tatar language?” (http://www.intertat.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1673:2011-04-01-12-51-04&catid=119:2010-11-30-19-29-29&Itemid=501%20%20).
“What has led these mothers to speak out against the enlightenment and education of their children in the state language?” During the war, one could understand opposition to “the language of the fascists.” But Tatarstan is today “one of the most stable, tolerant and multi-national and multi-confessional republics of a federative state.”
Yunusov says he was particularly struck by this because he had just been in Kazakhstan where the national language is “being reborn.” Ever more people there “are beginning to understand and what is the main thing speak it,” even though in the recent past, the status of Kazakh was “much worse” than that of Tatar.
If the Kazan mothers and their Moscow backers have their way, he continues, “a time will come when Kazakhs will instruct Tatars in their native language just as a hundred years ago the Tatars instructed the Kazakhs.” Indeed, he points out, even the Russian Empire did not block non-Russians from studying native languages and foreign ones as well.
Tragically, it appears that many now think Tatar isn’t important given that neither the president of Russia can read a Tatar text written out for him or the senior officials of Tatarstan use the language in public, but that is all the more reason why “the letter of the 600 must become the litmus test for citizens of Tatarstan and the Russian Federation as a whole.”
“The Russian Federation,” Yunusov points out, “is a federative state, and it is required to introduce Tatar as the second state language. The president, the cabinet of miners, the parliament and local organs of power are required to ensure genuine bilingualism in the republic,” speaking in Tatar but ensuring simultaneous translation into Russian.
Those “citizens of Tatarstan who do not know Tatar should be given special assistance in order to master [it], such as the support that existed in the years of the formation of the republic [in the 1920s]. And they should be regularly reminded that all “the false prophets” and “grave diggers” of the language have proved to be wrong.
Other writers, Tatar and now, have added their voices to this defense of Tatar both on constitutional grounds and because the loss of any language is a loss of a perspective on the world which cannot be had any other way (http://www.peoples-rights.info/2011/04/pora-vernut-gospodderzhku-prepodavaniyu-tatarskogo-yazyka-v-tatarstane/).
But the Kazan mothers have received support from the Society of Russian Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Regnum news agency which often takes an [ethnic] Russian position on developments in non-Russian countries and non-Russian republics now within the Russian Federation.
Regnum has published an appeal by the Society which reads in part “Citizens of Russia, did you know that in the schools of a subject of the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tatarstan, half of the population of which consists of ethnic Russians, the Russian language is not taught as a native one?!” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1393502.html).
“Children during the entire period of instruction receive not 1200 hours of Russian but only 700 hours; that is, 500 fewer than their fellows in other regions of Russia.” The Society calls for “supporting the demands of parents in the defense of Russian in the schools of the republic,” a call that sets the stage for more controversy in Kazan and not just about language.
Staunton, April 12 – Six hundred mothers of middle school pupils in Kazan have called on the Russian education minister to reduce or even end obligatory instruction in Tatar to all students in their republic, the latest effort to reduce the ethnic content of Russian Federalism, has triggered a debate between Russians and Tatars over far more than language.
Many of those signing this appeal are themselves ethnic Tatars, a fact that has led some in that Middle Volga republic to talk about the existence of “a fifth column” working against the interests of the Tatar nation. But it has also become the occasion for Russians there and elsewhere to demand that instruction in Tatarstan be in Russian not in the national language.
The original appeal suggested that “the study of Tatar interferes with the mastery of Russian, that learning Tatar is very difficult and that in general it is useless for the future of the child,” all contentions that Tatar intellectuals, like writer Tufan Minnullin, have dismissed as absurd or worse (www.intertat.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1642:-q&catid=119:2010-11-30-19-29-29&Itemid=501).
Minullin, who is also a member of Tatarstan’s State Council, said on Kazan television that he might have understood such calls if they came from ethnic Russian parents but “when Tatars reject the language of their ancestors and write complaints to Moscow [he] would call this a denunciation of one’s own people.”
According to Minullin, these parents have “the baseless and strange” conviction that “instruction in Russian is the key to the success of a child and that it will allow him to become a big boss.” In fact, he continues, that is absurd, as even the most superficial examination of conditions in Kazan will show.
“If in contemporary society, the Russian language were the chief and main condition for the achievement of the top positions, then ever Russian would be a boss, and there would not be drunkards and criminals on the streets.” But of course, “the issue is not about language;” it is about “the tragedy of the [ethnic] Russian people.”
Everyone knows about this even if few talk about it, Minullin suggests. “In our Tatar schools there is not a single drug addict, and yet how many problems there are in Russian language schools?!” And “how many Tatars who do not know and have not learned their native language … are sitting in prisons or suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction?”
“Moscow does not need out native language just as America, Germany or the others do not need it. We need our language,” Minullin says, “and therefore we will defend it.” That means seeking the repeal of the “barbaric” federal law “which was adopted against all the peoples who live in the Russian Federation” and which limits non-Russian languages.
Up to now, Moscow hasn’t pushed the law forward because people in the Russian capital have recognized that it was a mistake, but now it appears some there want to push things further. Minullin says that he agrees with one historian who noted that “we trust the state too much, but the government has its own problems and tasks.”
Consequently, the Tatar writer continues, “only the people can defend its language.”
Another Tatar commentator, Murza Kurbangali Yunusov, in response to the appeal of the 600 Kazan parents explicitly has addressed the question of “who needs the Tatar language?” (http://www.intertat.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1673:2011-04-01-12-51-04&catid=119:2010-11-30-19-29-29&Itemid=501%20%20).
“What has led these mothers to speak out against the enlightenment and education of their children in the state language?” During the war, one could understand opposition to “the language of the fascists.” But Tatarstan is today “one of the most stable, tolerant and multi-national and multi-confessional republics of a federative state.”
Yunusov says he was particularly struck by this because he had just been in Kazakhstan where the national language is “being reborn.” Ever more people there “are beginning to understand and what is the main thing speak it,” even though in the recent past, the status of Kazakh was “much worse” than that of Tatar.
If the Kazan mothers and their Moscow backers have their way, he continues, “a time will come when Kazakhs will instruct Tatars in their native language just as a hundred years ago the Tatars instructed the Kazakhs.” Indeed, he points out, even the Russian Empire did not block non-Russians from studying native languages and foreign ones as well.
Tragically, it appears that many now think Tatar isn’t important given that neither the president of Russia can read a Tatar text written out for him or the senior officials of Tatarstan use the language in public, but that is all the more reason why “the letter of the 600 must become the litmus test for citizens of Tatarstan and the Russian Federation as a whole.”
“The Russian Federation,” Yunusov points out, “is a federative state, and it is required to introduce Tatar as the second state language. The president, the cabinet of miners, the parliament and local organs of power are required to ensure genuine bilingualism in the republic,” speaking in Tatar but ensuring simultaneous translation into Russian.
Those “citizens of Tatarstan who do not know Tatar should be given special assistance in order to master [it], such as the support that existed in the years of the formation of the republic [in the 1920s]. And they should be regularly reminded that all “the false prophets” and “grave diggers” of the language have proved to be wrong.
Other writers, Tatar and now, have added their voices to this defense of Tatar both on constitutional grounds and because the loss of any language is a loss of a perspective on the world which cannot be had any other way (http://www.peoples-rights.info/2011/04/pora-vernut-gospodderzhku-prepodavaniyu-tatarskogo-yazyka-v-tatarstane/).
But the Kazan mothers have received support from the Society of Russian Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Regnum news agency which often takes an [ethnic] Russian position on developments in non-Russian countries and non-Russian republics now within the Russian Federation.
Regnum has published an appeal by the Society which reads in part “Citizens of Russia, did you know that in the schools of a subject of the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tatarstan, half of the population of which consists of ethnic Russians, the Russian language is not taught as a native one?!” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1393502.html).
“Children during the entire period of instruction receive not 1200 hours of Russian but only 700 hours; that is, 500 fewer than their fellows in other regions of Russia.” The Society calls for “supporting the demands of parents in the defense of Russian in the schools of the republic,” a call that sets the stage for more controversy in Kazan and not just about language.
Window on Eurasia: Russian Federation on the Way toward Final Disintegration, Kashin Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 12 – The process of the disintegration of the Russian empire will finally conclude sometime in the next few years until what some may still want to call Great Russia with a capital in Moscow will be limited to the space between Smolensk and Vladimir, according to Oleg Kashin.
But this development, the Russian journalist says, will have less to do with the actions of nationalist groups, Russian or non-Russian, than with the rise of a generation for whom Moscow is increasingly irrelevant to their identities and concerns, much as the Soviet center became irrelevant to the union republics a quarter of a century ago.
In a March 24 speech in Moscow that has been posted online and sparked widespread discussion, Kashin argues that it is instructive to consider Russia today by recalling how people “looked at the Soviet Union in 1983,” a time when “it was difficult to guess that eight years later it would not exist” (www.openspace.ru/society/russia/details/21660/).
Kashin points out that “in the Putin decade, the unity of Russia cased to be an absolute value,” and “for many Russia ceased to be a value in general because these by the millions each year have been leaving” to take up residence abroad, “from which they will not return in the near future.”
As a result of the declining significant of Russia and Moscow as sources of identity and influence, “the centers of the federal districts, and also places like Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg in principle [today] occupy just the same place that Kyiv, Minsk and Tbilisi occupied in the Soviet Union,” that is, as “potential new capitals of other countries.”
Because that is the case, the Yekaterinburg journalist argues, the ongoing disintegration of the Russian Federation is occurring along “purely political lines” and in ways that recall the Belovezha accord by which the leaders of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus put an end to the USSR.
“Somewhere in some park will assemble a few key governors, they will sign a second Beloveshchaya accord, and that will be that,” Kashin continues. “The destruction of the Soviet Union was legally accomplished when the delegations of [the three Slavic republics] left the Supreme Soviet of the USSR” and the latter no longer had a quorum.
The sense of Moscow’s and even the Russian Federation’s growing irrelevance to people in many parts of the Russian Federation is clear to anyone who travels about the country, the journalist says. “It is especially felt” in large regional centers where “Moscow is ceasing to be the place towards which they are oriented as an economic and mental source.”
“We,” Kashin suggests, “are an empire that has not yet fallen apart.” But “sooner or later this process of disintegration must be concluded.” It is “completely wild,” he says, “that in the framework of one country should live such varied, literally, states as St. Petersburg and Daghestan.” This place is “already not one country;” these are “different countries.”
Kashin stresses that this process has less to do with ethnic conflicts than with political ones. “In contemporary Russia,” he suggests, there are no strongly felt inter-ethnic contradictions. If tomorrow the police disappeared from the streets and a public murder day began, it is hardly the case that this would take the form of ethnic cleansings.”
Instead, he argues, these conflicts would be “not inter-ethnic but rather between representatives of different social classes.” And he continues, within any of the national state formations, what is happening now is this: “the new generation of local residents is being educated not in the spirit of separatism [as such] but in that of the denial of Russia.”
Young Tatars, for example, are now focusing on Mintimir Shaimiyev’s refusal to sign the federal treaty in 1992 as “a colossal step in the development of national sovereignty an d a step toward future independence.” When this generation takes power there, Kashin says, “Tatarstan just like the Caucasus will cease to be part of Russia.”
Even in nominally ethnic Russian regions, the journalist continues, ever more people feel alienated and apart from Moscow and from Russia. One official in Kirov oblast, for example, said he hoped for a new “big war in the Caucasus” because that would allow more parts of the federation to escape and possibly have “a good life.”
Some may think that Moscow television is unifying people “populating the space from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.” That is nonsense, Kashin says, noting that in his native Kaliningrad, people look to Europe rather than to Moscow, view Russia as foreign. “Moscow is needed only by the Muscovites,” they now believe.
And as these developments take place, Kashin argues, identities will shift. After the collapse, “the Central Federal District lacking oil will feel itself somewhat worse than it does not, but everything will be fine in the Khanty-Mansiisk district.” And “sooner or later,” people who now call themselves Russians will describe themselves as “some kind of Khanty.”
“Of course, in this hypothetical collapse of Russia, the Far East will become very important for China, Japan and America and perhaps will life quite well. Because, of course, Russia now in essence doesn’t have it, and no one [in Moscow] needs it,” something people there strongly feel.
Twenty years ago, Moscow couldn’t prevent the disintegration of the country. “We saw,” Kashin says, “how the Kremlin reacted in 1991 – it introduced tanks in Vilnius and in Baku. Did that save the Soviet Union? Obviously, not.” And today’s vaunted “power vertical” has no better answer.
Indeed, the construction of that institution may have made the end closer, Kashin suggests. “When there was a strong regional power … the country was more stable. But in that same Vladivostok, when two years ago were revolts of car owners against increased fees, Moscow had to send in the Moscow OMON” because it couldn’t rely on local forces.
“This step means much more as far as the future hypothetical disintegration of Russia is concerned than any declarations of local politicians,” Kashin says.
Recent coverage of Gorbachev’s 80th birthday, Kashin says, has suggested to many in the Russian Federation that “the main beneficiary” of the end of the USSR was Estonia, “which got into the Euro zone first.” Clearly, some of “our oblasts,” such as Petersburg or Novgorod or Kaliningrad, are wondering whether they will be able to follow.
Although few are taking this possibility seriously just as few took Andrey Amalrik’s essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” when it was written, Kashin says, history is moving quickly, and the end of the Russian Federation is likely to take place sometime in the next five years or at least “during the life of our generation.”
In that event, Kashin concludes, Great Russia will be reduced to the space “from Smolensk to Vladimir.” Makhachkala, the capital of Daghestan, “will be on that side of the border. As will Kaliningrad [the already non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation], and as even more will be Vladivostok,” the major port on the Pacific.
Staunton, April 12 – The process of the disintegration of the Russian empire will finally conclude sometime in the next few years until what some may still want to call Great Russia with a capital in Moscow will be limited to the space between Smolensk and Vladimir, according to Oleg Kashin.
But this development, the Russian journalist says, will have less to do with the actions of nationalist groups, Russian or non-Russian, than with the rise of a generation for whom Moscow is increasingly irrelevant to their identities and concerns, much as the Soviet center became irrelevant to the union republics a quarter of a century ago.
In a March 24 speech in Moscow that has been posted online and sparked widespread discussion, Kashin argues that it is instructive to consider Russia today by recalling how people “looked at the Soviet Union in 1983,” a time when “it was difficult to guess that eight years later it would not exist” (www.openspace.ru/society/russia/details/21660/).
Kashin points out that “in the Putin decade, the unity of Russia cased to be an absolute value,” and “for many Russia ceased to be a value in general because these by the millions each year have been leaving” to take up residence abroad, “from which they will not return in the near future.”
As a result of the declining significant of Russia and Moscow as sources of identity and influence, “the centers of the federal districts, and also places like Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg in principle [today] occupy just the same place that Kyiv, Minsk and Tbilisi occupied in the Soviet Union,” that is, as “potential new capitals of other countries.”
Because that is the case, the Yekaterinburg journalist argues, the ongoing disintegration of the Russian Federation is occurring along “purely political lines” and in ways that recall the Belovezha accord by which the leaders of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus put an end to the USSR.
“Somewhere in some park will assemble a few key governors, they will sign a second Beloveshchaya accord, and that will be that,” Kashin continues. “The destruction of the Soviet Union was legally accomplished when the delegations of [the three Slavic republics] left the Supreme Soviet of the USSR” and the latter no longer had a quorum.
The sense of Moscow’s and even the Russian Federation’s growing irrelevance to people in many parts of the Russian Federation is clear to anyone who travels about the country, the journalist says. “It is especially felt” in large regional centers where “Moscow is ceasing to be the place towards which they are oriented as an economic and mental source.”
“We,” Kashin suggests, “are an empire that has not yet fallen apart.” But “sooner or later this process of disintegration must be concluded.” It is “completely wild,” he says, “that in the framework of one country should live such varied, literally, states as St. Petersburg and Daghestan.” This place is “already not one country;” these are “different countries.”
Kashin stresses that this process has less to do with ethnic conflicts than with political ones. “In contemporary Russia,” he suggests, there are no strongly felt inter-ethnic contradictions. If tomorrow the police disappeared from the streets and a public murder day began, it is hardly the case that this would take the form of ethnic cleansings.”
Instead, he argues, these conflicts would be “not inter-ethnic but rather between representatives of different social classes.” And he continues, within any of the national state formations, what is happening now is this: “the new generation of local residents is being educated not in the spirit of separatism [as such] but in that of the denial of Russia.”
Young Tatars, for example, are now focusing on Mintimir Shaimiyev’s refusal to sign the federal treaty in 1992 as “a colossal step in the development of national sovereignty an d a step toward future independence.” When this generation takes power there, Kashin says, “Tatarstan just like the Caucasus will cease to be part of Russia.”
Even in nominally ethnic Russian regions, the journalist continues, ever more people feel alienated and apart from Moscow and from Russia. One official in Kirov oblast, for example, said he hoped for a new “big war in the Caucasus” because that would allow more parts of the federation to escape and possibly have “a good life.”
Some may think that Moscow television is unifying people “populating the space from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.” That is nonsense, Kashin says, noting that in his native Kaliningrad, people look to Europe rather than to Moscow, view Russia as foreign. “Moscow is needed only by the Muscovites,” they now believe.
And as these developments take place, Kashin argues, identities will shift. After the collapse, “the Central Federal District lacking oil will feel itself somewhat worse than it does not, but everything will be fine in the Khanty-Mansiisk district.” And “sooner or later,” people who now call themselves Russians will describe themselves as “some kind of Khanty.”
“Of course, in this hypothetical collapse of Russia, the Far East will become very important for China, Japan and America and perhaps will life quite well. Because, of course, Russia now in essence doesn’t have it, and no one [in Moscow] needs it,” something people there strongly feel.
Twenty years ago, Moscow couldn’t prevent the disintegration of the country. “We saw,” Kashin says, “how the Kremlin reacted in 1991 – it introduced tanks in Vilnius and in Baku. Did that save the Soviet Union? Obviously, not.” And today’s vaunted “power vertical” has no better answer.
Indeed, the construction of that institution may have made the end closer, Kashin suggests. “When there was a strong regional power … the country was more stable. But in that same Vladivostok, when two years ago were revolts of car owners against increased fees, Moscow had to send in the Moscow OMON” because it couldn’t rely on local forces.
“This step means much more as far as the future hypothetical disintegration of Russia is concerned than any declarations of local politicians,” Kashin says.
Recent coverage of Gorbachev’s 80th birthday, Kashin says, has suggested to many in the Russian Federation that “the main beneficiary” of the end of the USSR was Estonia, “which got into the Euro zone first.” Clearly, some of “our oblasts,” such as Petersburg or Novgorod or Kaliningrad, are wondering whether they will be able to follow.
Although few are taking this possibility seriously just as few took Andrey Amalrik’s essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” when it was written, Kashin says, history is moving quickly, and the end of the Russian Federation is likely to take place sometime in the next five years or at least “during the life of our generation.”
In that event, Kashin concludes, Great Russia will be reduced to the space “from Smolensk to Vladimir.” Makhachkala, the capital of Daghestan, “will be on that side of the border. As will Kaliningrad [the already non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation], and as even more will be Vladivostok,” the major port on the Pacific.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Russia Must Restore the State by De-privatizing It, Moscow Analyst Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – The privatization of the state into the hands of the elite and the failure of both to meet even minimal social demands has become unsustainable as a result of the economic crisis, sparking not only anger but demands that the state be de-privatized and restored to something like its ostensible purpose, according to a Moscow analyst.
This process, Aleksey Kuzmin, head of the National Prospects Foundation, says, is taking place in many countries now, but it is particularly intense in Russia because the privatization of state power went so far and because, until the recent economic crisis, the population itself was happy enough to be left alone by the state (www.russ.ru/pole/Zadacha-vossozdat-gosudarstvo).
“The split between the society and the elite in Russia was formed in the middle 1990s, but at the start of the 2000s, it became impassable,” Kuzmin points out, adding that “in the Near East and Central Asia,” this division occurred at “approximately the same time” and in much the same way because “the causes are universal.”
“Economic liberalization in the form it took after the 1970s,” Kuzmin continues, spread to Russia and the other post-Soviet states in the 1990s. “It meant the following: the elite and the state threw off from themselves the function of ‘the servant to society,’” an idea that had always involved a certain amount of hypocrisy but now became blatant.
As a result, this “mimicking” “disappeared and the state began to be concerned about economic effectiveness, sometimes proudly call this its ability to compete.” But such an approach benefited only the top of the social pyramid, and everyone else “moderately or immoderately” was thrown to the winds of their own devices.
Everywhere, including in Russia, “the elite privatized the state; that is, the interests of the state began to strictly correspond with the interests of the elite and ceased in any way to correspond to the interests of the entire rest of the population, of that which could be called society.”
In this way and on one and the same territory existed simultaneously “a state together with the elite” and everyone else. “Normal communication between them” ceased to exist. “Vertical mobility” declined to almost nothing. “And the social elevator began to carry [most people] only downward.”
For a time in Russia and so other countries, the population nonetheless displayed a kind of “negative loyalty,” either because its members were being bought off in one way or another or because the institutions of the state no longer interfered in the life of the population and allowed its members to act independently of it.
In this situation, Kuzmin continues, “a very strange social contract is arising: the elite, of course, does not fulfill its basic social obligations but the masses in general relate to this very peacefully. Because each is out for himself with one God for all.” And such an arrangement at least a decade ago seemed stable and sustainable.
However, with the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, it “became obvious” to everyone” that the elite was no longer in a position to “fulfill even those minimal obligations” which it had promised, the Moscow analyst says. And as a result, anger and tensions between the population and the elites have begun to grow.
A particular feature of this situation is the role played by the media. “The television plays a role of mediator in communications [between the elite and the population], one which forms in a unilateral way that picture which the elite needs. But people see not that which is shown on television.
This does not mean that “the importance of the Internet as a space for communication” should be overrated. There are many “real social networks” independent of the Internet which today “operate with a high degree of trust,” much higher in fact than the Internet enjoys, Kuzmin argues.
As a result and in a way many do not yet recognize, he says, while “television is a substitute for communications of the powers that be and the people,” “the Internet is a remarkable substitute for communication among various pieces of society,” a reflection of the atomization of society that liberalization has produced.
But as conditions deteriorate, there will be a demand for “solidarity,” something that will emerge, Kuzmin suggests, first in nominally apolitical institutions and then become political as was the case with Russian trade unions, although just where these clusters will be in the future is uncertain.
.
“To the extent that all elites are completely delegitimized,” Kuzmin continues, “the so-called political opposition is located in exactly the same position as the powers that be.” It “does not have social support or if it does, it does not have the corresponding social and political skills” to make use of it. But then neither does the state, he adds.
“Today,” the Moscow analyst says, “we are at the point either of the continuing collapse of statehood or at the early stage of social and state genesis.” In many countries, people “are creating from scratch the society and the state,” even in countries like the United States as the Tea Party movement shows.
Up to now, “the basic function of the state is the monopoly on force,” Kuzmin points out, but today on the territory of any state are arious forms of force, including structural force” which almost anyone can gain access to. “The state looks on this situation and gives the impression that nothing is happening.”
But a lot is, and the future in Russia and elsewhere is likely to reflect the working out of the complex processes of “de-privatizing” and thus rebuilding the state and reforming society on the basis of broader and deeper forms of trust.
Staunton, April 11 – The privatization of the state into the hands of the elite and the failure of both to meet even minimal social demands has become unsustainable as a result of the economic crisis, sparking not only anger but demands that the state be de-privatized and restored to something like its ostensible purpose, according to a Moscow analyst.
This process, Aleksey Kuzmin, head of the National Prospects Foundation, says, is taking place in many countries now, but it is particularly intense in Russia because the privatization of state power went so far and because, until the recent economic crisis, the population itself was happy enough to be left alone by the state (www.russ.ru/pole/Zadacha-vossozdat-gosudarstvo).
“The split between the society and the elite in Russia was formed in the middle 1990s, but at the start of the 2000s, it became impassable,” Kuzmin points out, adding that “in the Near East and Central Asia,” this division occurred at “approximately the same time” and in much the same way because “the causes are universal.”
“Economic liberalization in the form it took after the 1970s,” Kuzmin continues, spread to Russia and the other post-Soviet states in the 1990s. “It meant the following: the elite and the state threw off from themselves the function of ‘the servant to society,’” an idea that had always involved a certain amount of hypocrisy but now became blatant.
As a result, this “mimicking” “disappeared and the state began to be concerned about economic effectiveness, sometimes proudly call this its ability to compete.” But such an approach benefited only the top of the social pyramid, and everyone else “moderately or immoderately” was thrown to the winds of their own devices.
Everywhere, including in Russia, “the elite privatized the state; that is, the interests of the state began to strictly correspond with the interests of the elite and ceased in any way to correspond to the interests of the entire rest of the population, of that which could be called society.”
In this way and on one and the same territory existed simultaneously “a state together with the elite” and everyone else. “Normal communication between them” ceased to exist. “Vertical mobility” declined to almost nothing. “And the social elevator began to carry [most people] only downward.”
For a time in Russia and so other countries, the population nonetheless displayed a kind of “negative loyalty,” either because its members were being bought off in one way or another or because the institutions of the state no longer interfered in the life of the population and allowed its members to act independently of it.
In this situation, Kuzmin continues, “a very strange social contract is arising: the elite, of course, does not fulfill its basic social obligations but the masses in general relate to this very peacefully. Because each is out for himself with one God for all.” And such an arrangement at least a decade ago seemed stable and sustainable.
However, with the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, it “became obvious” to everyone” that the elite was no longer in a position to “fulfill even those minimal obligations” which it had promised, the Moscow analyst says. And as a result, anger and tensions between the population and the elites have begun to grow.
A particular feature of this situation is the role played by the media. “The television plays a role of mediator in communications [between the elite and the population], one which forms in a unilateral way that picture which the elite needs. But people see not that which is shown on television.
This does not mean that “the importance of the Internet as a space for communication” should be overrated. There are many “real social networks” independent of the Internet which today “operate with a high degree of trust,” much higher in fact than the Internet enjoys, Kuzmin argues.
As a result and in a way many do not yet recognize, he says, while “television is a substitute for communications of the powers that be and the people,” “the Internet is a remarkable substitute for communication among various pieces of society,” a reflection of the atomization of society that liberalization has produced.
But as conditions deteriorate, there will be a demand for “solidarity,” something that will emerge, Kuzmin suggests, first in nominally apolitical institutions and then become political as was the case with Russian trade unions, although just where these clusters will be in the future is uncertain.
.
“To the extent that all elites are completely delegitimized,” Kuzmin continues, “the so-called political opposition is located in exactly the same position as the powers that be.” It “does not have social support or if it does, it does not have the corresponding social and political skills” to make use of it. But then neither does the state, he adds.
“Today,” the Moscow analyst says, “we are at the point either of the continuing collapse of statehood or at the early stage of social and state genesis.” In many countries, people “are creating from scratch the society and the state,” even in countries like the United States as the Tea Party movement shows.
Up to now, “the basic function of the state is the monopoly on force,” Kuzmin points out, but today on the territory of any state are arious forms of force, including structural force” which almost anyone can gain access to. “The state looks on this situation and gives the impression that nothing is happening.”
But a lot is, and the future in Russia and elsewhere is likely to reflect the working out of the complex processes of “de-privatizing” and thus rebuilding the state and reforming society on the basis of broader and deeper forms of trust.
Window on Eurasia: Latifundias Threaten Moscow, the Third Rome, Just as They Did the First, Expert Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – The emergence of enormous agricultural holding companies in the Russian Federation is not only destroying much of the social infrastructure of the rural portions of that country but also threatening Russian society as a whole, according to a leading Moscow specialist on rural economics.
In an interview to “Svobodnaya pressa,” Aleksandr Nikulin, the director of the Center of Agrarian Research of the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, explains how this situation has come about and why it threatens the Third Rome just as Pliny the Elder warned that it threatened the First (svpressa.ru/society/article/41718/).
As Nikulin’s interviewer Kirill Zubkov says, the recent tragic events in Kushchevskaya, “where a local criminal community created ‘a state within a state,’” highlight some of the most obvious dangers of the emergence in Russia of “an analogue of Latin American latifundia with the total lack of rights of the peasants and the death squadrons.”
But the Moscow expert provides a less sensationalist but far more disturbing picture of what is going on, one that positions what is taking place in rural Russia today not just in terms of the Russian and Soviet pasts but also relative to certain international trends in agricultural economics and organization.
Nikulin notes that there are “two basic types of agrarian production:” the amily farm and the agrarian enterprise where “production is achieved through the use of a hired workforce.” Latifundias are “a special case” of the latter and represent a kind of “super-large agrarian enterprise.”
At the end of the Soviet period, there wer approximately 25,000 kokhozes and sovkhozes, and reformers wanted “entirely” correctly Nikulin says to create a more diverse agriculture that would include family farms as well as larger agrarian enterprises as part of a plan to overcome “the multitutde of problems” of rural people.
Two decades later, there are now “approximately 260,000 farmers” in the Russian Federation. And their appearance led many “ideologues of liberal reforms” to believe that “after a few years” there would be a Stolypin-style rural population at the center of which would be strong individual family farms.
That has not happened, Nikulin says, and such farmers “produce only about seven percent of the total of agrarian production.” Worse, many new social problems in rural areas have emerged, and “tens of thousands” of supposed farmers do not engage in agricultural activities at all.
Indeed, the Moscow expert continues, “only about 20,000 farmers (of 260,000) are farmer-entrepreneurs in the Western sense,” while “more than 100,000” of these people are involved in subsistence agriculture rather than production for sale. Consequently, one must look elsewhere for the major producers.
Part of the reason for the failure of these reforms lay in the difficulties of the 1990s, the lack of the kind of institutions and assistance the transformation the reformers wanted required, Nikulin says. And part of it lies with the fact that collective forms of agriculture “displayed a surprising vitality” over this period.
Not only were these institutions larger and thus capable of using mechanization more effectively, but they “were not agrarian enterprises. Instead, they were means of organization of rural communities” which provided “all the social infrastructure – schools, roads, water supplies, and hospitals.”
Until 1998, Russian capitalists showed little interest in rural areas because agriculture did not appear to be a profit center. But the default changed that by making Russian farm products more attractive to the domestic market and even to the international one. As a result and because almost everything else had been privatized by then, investors moved into the rural aras.
Beginning at that time, however, investors began forming large agro-holdings of as much as 400,000 hectares, holdings that dwarf all other forms of agriculture. There are now “more than 700” of these, and as in many other countries, these “farms” are setting the weather for all the others, including family farms.
Until the economic crisis hit in 2008, investors around the world engaged in a speculative race to buy enormous amounts of rural land, sometimes in their own countries but often in others. Thus, The Chinese have bought land in Africa and the Russian Far East, European and US concerns in South America, and European and American firms in Ukraine
As a result of these various trends, Nikulin says, “over the last decade, a land and property redivision has taken place in rural Russia, one analogous to that which took place in the 1990s in the industrial and raw materials sectors.” And as in both of them, “colossal, vertically integrated” corporations have emerged as the dominant players.
But in agriculture, these entities have proved much less successful because they have ignored the local conditions and the specific requirements of farming. As a result, the Russian landscape is littered with a cemetary of these ‘agro-dinosaurs,’” institutions that existed a few years and then declared bankruptcy.
The latifundia which remain, however, are having serious “social and political consequences,” Nikulin says. The big firms have little interest in maintaining the collateral institutions like schools and hospitals on which rural life depends. As those institutions perish because of a lack of support, so too will the rural portion of the country.
The short-term, profit-driven approach of the agro-holdings means that their managers consider those who work for them not individual farmers but “a faceless wage work force.” To keep such people in line, these firms use “private security companies” and are lobbying for various means to hold workers to the land much as under serfdom.
“Historical experience shows,” he continues, “that there were rural places completely fall under the control of latifundia owner oligarchs, the entire society tends toward decline and emptying out.” That is what Pliny the Elder warned about in Rome, and unless Russia adopts “a tough social and economic policy” for its rural areas, the same could happen to it.
Staunton, April 11 – The emergence of enormous agricultural holding companies in the Russian Federation is not only destroying much of the social infrastructure of the rural portions of that country but also threatening Russian society as a whole, according to a leading Moscow specialist on rural economics.
In an interview to “Svobodnaya pressa,” Aleksandr Nikulin, the director of the Center of Agrarian Research of the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, explains how this situation has come about and why it threatens the Third Rome just as Pliny the Elder warned that it threatened the First (svpressa.ru/society/article/41718/).
As Nikulin’s interviewer Kirill Zubkov says, the recent tragic events in Kushchevskaya, “where a local criminal community created ‘a state within a state,’” highlight some of the most obvious dangers of the emergence in Russia of “an analogue of Latin American latifundia with the total lack of rights of the peasants and the death squadrons.”
But the Moscow expert provides a less sensationalist but far more disturbing picture of what is going on, one that positions what is taking place in rural Russia today not just in terms of the Russian and Soviet pasts but also relative to certain international trends in agricultural economics and organization.
Nikulin notes that there are “two basic types of agrarian production:” the amily farm and the agrarian enterprise where “production is achieved through the use of a hired workforce.” Latifundias are “a special case” of the latter and represent a kind of “super-large agrarian enterprise.”
At the end of the Soviet period, there wer approximately 25,000 kokhozes and sovkhozes, and reformers wanted “entirely” correctly Nikulin says to create a more diverse agriculture that would include family farms as well as larger agrarian enterprises as part of a plan to overcome “the multitutde of problems” of rural people.
Two decades later, there are now “approximately 260,000 farmers” in the Russian Federation. And their appearance led many “ideologues of liberal reforms” to believe that “after a few years” there would be a Stolypin-style rural population at the center of which would be strong individual family farms.
That has not happened, Nikulin says, and such farmers “produce only about seven percent of the total of agrarian production.” Worse, many new social problems in rural areas have emerged, and “tens of thousands” of supposed farmers do not engage in agricultural activities at all.
Indeed, the Moscow expert continues, “only about 20,000 farmers (of 260,000) are farmer-entrepreneurs in the Western sense,” while “more than 100,000” of these people are involved in subsistence agriculture rather than production for sale. Consequently, one must look elsewhere for the major producers.
Part of the reason for the failure of these reforms lay in the difficulties of the 1990s, the lack of the kind of institutions and assistance the transformation the reformers wanted required, Nikulin says. And part of it lies with the fact that collective forms of agriculture “displayed a surprising vitality” over this period.
Not only were these institutions larger and thus capable of using mechanization more effectively, but they “were not agrarian enterprises. Instead, they were means of organization of rural communities” which provided “all the social infrastructure – schools, roads, water supplies, and hospitals.”
Until 1998, Russian capitalists showed little interest in rural areas because agriculture did not appear to be a profit center. But the default changed that by making Russian farm products more attractive to the domestic market and even to the international one. As a result and because almost everything else had been privatized by then, investors moved into the rural aras.
Beginning at that time, however, investors began forming large agro-holdings of as much as 400,000 hectares, holdings that dwarf all other forms of agriculture. There are now “more than 700” of these, and as in many other countries, these “farms” are setting the weather for all the others, including family farms.
Until the economic crisis hit in 2008, investors around the world engaged in a speculative race to buy enormous amounts of rural land, sometimes in their own countries but often in others. Thus, The Chinese have bought land in Africa and the Russian Far East, European and US concerns in South America, and European and American firms in Ukraine
As a result of these various trends, Nikulin says, “over the last decade, a land and property redivision has taken place in rural Russia, one analogous to that which took place in the 1990s in the industrial and raw materials sectors.” And as in both of them, “colossal, vertically integrated” corporations have emerged as the dominant players.
But in agriculture, these entities have proved much less successful because they have ignored the local conditions and the specific requirements of farming. As a result, the Russian landscape is littered with a cemetary of these ‘agro-dinosaurs,’” institutions that existed a few years and then declared bankruptcy.
The latifundia which remain, however, are having serious “social and political consequences,” Nikulin says. The big firms have little interest in maintaining the collateral institutions like schools and hospitals on which rural life depends. As those institutions perish because of a lack of support, so too will the rural portion of the country.
The short-term, profit-driven approach of the agro-holdings means that their managers consider those who work for them not individual farmers but “a faceless wage work force.” To keep such people in line, these firms use “private security companies” and are lobbying for various means to hold workers to the land much as under serfdom.
“Historical experience shows,” he continues, “that there were rural places completely fall under the control of latifundia owner oligarchs, the entire society tends toward decline and emptying out.” That is what Pliny the Elder warned about in Rome, and unless Russia adopts “a tough social and economic policy” for its rural areas, the same could happen to it.
Window on Eurasia: One in Three East of the Urals Now Identifies as a Siberian, Irkutsk Priest Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – Approximately one in every three residents of the Russian Federation east of the Urals now identifies as a Siberian, an identification that will intensify into fullblown nationhood unless Moscow arranges to dispatch more ethnic Russians from European portions of the country there, according to a Russian Orthodox churchman in Irkutsk.
In a comment on the debate over whether Siberians constitute a nation, a sub-ethnos or only a regional identity, Archpriest Vyacheslav Pushkarev says that “Sibiryaks” now form 30 to 35 percent of the population east of the Urals, making them the second largest ethnos in that region (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/04/06/sibiryaki_eto_subetnicheskaya_obwnost/).
According to Pushkarev, the situation regarding identity in Siberia and the Far East is far more complicated than most of the participants in the debate over whether Siberians are a nationality or not suspect, the result of both the complex history of the settlement of that region and recent changes.
“In Siberia and the Far East,” he writes, “a situation evolved in which in reality live side by side two major ethnoses and a mass of small ones.” The first “and still the dominant one” are the Great Russians, people “who as a rule are children of recent resettlers who came or were sent to [the region] in the 1950s to the 1970s.”
“These people spent all their childhood and each summer as guests of their grandmothers in Central Russia and the South of the country” and viewed “life in Siberia” as “atemporary phenomenon … constantly dreaming and now dreaming of returning to the historic Motherland of their fathers and mothers.”
And it is this group of people who make up the 100,000 who annually leave Siberia and the Far East every year, departures that mean that those who “call themselves [ethnic] Russian people and are proud of their origins.” They now form roughly half of the population of the region, but their share is constantly declining.
“The second major ethnos,” the archpriest says, “is a mass of people who now call themselves and for a long time have felt themselves to be Sibirians.” This is “already an accomplished fact.” They are “justbegining to understand themselves as a single community, but this process is developing very quickly.”
These “Siberians” represent now approximately 30-35 percent of the total population.[They] are descendents of voluntary settlers whocame to Siberia from the 17th to the end of the 19th century and of course as well the children of numerous mixed marriages [with indigenous nationalities] in various generations.”
They “did not have a childhood in the South,” and “they do not connect their future with the Core Russia because no one is waiting for them there and all that they have was given to them by Siberia. Why do they call themselves Siberians? Because by blood they are already far from Russians and are distinguished even by their anthropological type.”
“In addition,” Pushkarev writes, as the authority of the Great Russian nation has fallen, those who are the products of mixed marriages but who do not want to identify as Buryats, Yakuts or Udygeys are interested in an identity that reflects their unique character as a people in between.
“The people in these districts are now not very religious, and religion does not unify them,” Pushkarev says. “Geography does.” That feeling is intensified by the sense that many of them feel that “for Moscow,” the residents of this enormous land are only servants of the interests of the center.
“To call themselves Siberians,” the archpriest says, “is just as natural and comfortable as it is for Anglo-Saxons to call themselves Canadians, Australians or Americans.” And that is all the more so “under conditions when the [ethnic] Russian people does not have special rights and even its own territory,”while small non-Russian peoples do.
In this way as in many others, the Siberians resemble the small peoples of Siberia with whom they are interrelated. “For the Siberians, the small peoples of Siberia are part of their blood and their history and therefore they are closer to them than to the Great Russians and only they can be seriously concerned about the rapid dying out of communities of local people.”
Pushkarev says that “Siberians now are becoming the leading force in Siberia since they intend to live in it in the future and therefore their self-determination and self-advancement will continue, and no political science commentaries or ethnographic definitions are going to help” change that.
The only thing that would help, the Russian Orthodox priest says, would be “the flooding of Siberia and the Far East with Great Russians”—“a minimum of 100 million “would be needed,” he says – and the shifting of the political capital of the country “closer to the center of the entire Russian Federation so that each will feel that it near and common” to all.
Unless these things happen – and they aren’t, Pushkarev observes – “then the phenomenon of the Siberians as a nationality will become an anthropological and political fact with all the snuring centrifugal consequences up to the loss by the Russian Federation of the territories of Siberia and the Far East.”
“This is where the truth is,” the archipriest concludes, “and not in assertions that the Siberians supposedly do not exist. One must not close one’s eyes to an accomplished fact,” as some Moscow commentators are doing, people who are “far from an understanding of the essence of the problem” beyond the Urals.
Staunton, April 11 – Approximately one in every three residents of the Russian Federation east of the Urals now identifies as a Siberian, an identification that will intensify into fullblown nationhood unless Moscow arranges to dispatch more ethnic Russians from European portions of the country there, according to a Russian Orthodox churchman in Irkutsk.
In a comment on the debate over whether Siberians constitute a nation, a sub-ethnos or only a regional identity, Archpriest Vyacheslav Pushkarev says that “Sibiryaks” now form 30 to 35 percent of the population east of the Urals, making them the second largest ethnos in that region (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/04/06/sibiryaki_eto_subetnicheskaya_obwnost/).
According to Pushkarev, the situation regarding identity in Siberia and the Far East is far more complicated than most of the participants in the debate over whether Siberians are a nationality or not suspect, the result of both the complex history of the settlement of that region and recent changes.
“In Siberia and the Far East,” he writes, “a situation evolved in which in reality live side by side two major ethnoses and a mass of small ones.” The first “and still the dominant one” are the Great Russians, people “who as a rule are children of recent resettlers who came or were sent to [the region] in the 1950s to the 1970s.”
“These people spent all their childhood and each summer as guests of their grandmothers in Central Russia and the South of the country” and viewed “life in Siberia” as “atemporary phenomenon … constantly dreaming and now dreaming of returning to the historic Motherland of their fathers and mothers.”
And it is this group of people who make up the 100,000 who annually leave Siberia and the Far East every year, departures that mean that those who “call themselves [ethnic] Russian people and are proud of their origins.” They now form roughly half of the population of the region, but their share is constantly declining.
“The second major ethnos,” the archpriest says, “is a mass of people who now call themselves and for a long time have felt themselves to be Sibirians.” This is “already an accomplished fact.” They are “justbegining to understand themselves as a single community, but this process is developing very quickly.”
These “Siberians” represent now approximately 30-35 percent of the total population.[They] are descendents of voluntary settlers whocame to Siberia from the 17th to the end of the 19th century and of course as well the children of numerous mixed marriages [with indigenous nationalities] in various generations.”
They “did not have a childhood in the South,” and “they do not connect their future with the Core Russia because no one is waiting for them there and all that they have was given to them by Siberia. Why do they call themselves Siberians? Because by blood they are already far from Russians and are distinguished even by their anthropological type.”
“In addition,” Pushkarev writes, as the authority of the Great Russian nation has fallen, those who are the products of mixed marriages but who do not want to identify as Buryats, Yakuts or Udygeys are interested in an identity that reflects their unique character as a people in between.
“The people in these districts are now not very religious, and religion does not unify them,” Pushkarev says. “Geography does.” That feeling is intensified by the sense that many of them feel that “for Moscow,” the residents of this enormous land are only servants of the interests of the center.
“To call themselves Siberians,” the archpriest says, “is just as natural and comfortable as it is for Anglo-Saxons to call themselves Canadians, Australians or Americans.” And that is all the more so “under conditions when the [ethnic] Russian people does not have special rights and even its own territory,”while small non-Russian peoples do.
In this way as in many others, the Siberians resemble the small peoples of Siberia with whom they are interrelated. “For the Siberians, the small peoples of Siberia are part of their blood and their history and therefore they are closer to them than to the Great Russians and only they can be seriously concerned about the rapid dying out of communities of local people.”
Pushkarev says that “Siberians now are becoming the leading force in Siberia since they intend to live in it in the future and therefore their self-determination and self-advancement will continue, and no political science commentaries or ethnographic definitions are going to help” change that.
The only thing that would help, the Russian Orthodox priest says, would be “the flooding of Siberia and the Far East with Great Russians”—“a minimum of 100 million “would be needed,” he says – and the shifting of the political capital of the country “closer to the center of the entire Russian Federation so that each will feel that it near and common” to all.
Unless these things happen – and they aren’t, Pushkarev observes – “then the phenomenon of the Siberians as a nationality will become an anthropological and political fact with all the snuring centrifugal consequences up to the loss by the Russian Federation of the territories of Siberia and the Far East.”
“This is where the truth is,” the archipriest concludes, “and not in assertions that the Siberians supposedly do not exist. One must not close one’s eyes to an accomplished fact,” as some Moscow commentators are doing, people who are “far from an understanding of the essence of the problem” beyond the Urals.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Some Russian Orthodox Seek Common Cause with Protestants Against Islam, Russian Evangelical Leader Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 10 – Because of the success Protestant missionaries have had in traditionally Muslim regions in the Russian Federation, some in the Orthodox Church want to make common cause with them against Islam, a view that the leader of the Evangelical Church there rejects.
In an interview published in the current issue of “NG-Religii,” Bishop Sergey Ryakhovsky, the president of the Russian United Union of Evangelical Christians, says that he is against such an approach that just as he is against “crusades in any of their manifestation” (religion.ng.ru/events/2011-04-06/1_episkop.html).
Ryakhovsky says that it is a fundamental tenet of his church that an individual is either a Christian or he is not and that ethnic or denominational differences are secondary to that fundamental requirement, but he adds that he does not want his church to become embroiled in a clash with followers of other faiths.
The recent murder of Bishop Artur Suleymanov in the North Caucasus, Ryakhovsky continues, “was not a war of Islam with Christianity,” however much some may want to treat it in that way. “In the Russian Caucasus,” he points out, “the number of imams killed is an order of magnitude greater than that of Christian pastors.”
Bishop Arthus, the Russian Evangelical leader continues, “lived very peaceably with his neighbors who professed Islam and was a man respected in their eyes as a man of the Book and a just figure. The same situation obtains in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan,” Ryakhovsky adds, because “we teach believers to be respectful toward all people, their culture [and] traditions.”
Bishop Ryakhovsky adds that he has longstanding and good relations with the leaders “of the majority of the major centralized Muslim structures of Russia,” relations that have allowed the realization of “joint projects in the majority in the social sphere and in the area of strengthening inter-ethnic and inter-confessional peace in our country.”
None of these leaders, the bishop adds, has ever criticized him or the Protestant community “for aggressiveness or anything else. But it is natural that the successes [that the Protestant churches have enjoyed in Russia] has generated jealousy … Not everyone likes this [and] it is usually easier to cry with the weeping than be glad with the joyous.”
One young Russian Orthodox priest recently approached him, Ryakhovsky recounts, and said that “his goal was to convert to Orthodoxy as many Protestants as possible in order that they then under Orthodox banners would convert Muslims to Orthodoxy.” He said that the success of the Protestants and their “charisma” made such an approach desirable.
After making this comment, the bishop says, the young priest turned away without waiting for an answer. Apparently, Ryakhovsky adds, the priest did not learn much Greek in seminary. Had he, the bishop said, he would have known that charisma is “a gift of God” and that one must search for it in oneself rather than “attempt to find it in others.”
What makes this exchange so intriguing is that it represents a break in the Moscow Patriarchate’s efforts to freeze out the Protestants whom it often calls “sects” just as Patriarch Kirill is expanding dialogue with the Catholics and that such attitudes reflect the sense even among the Orthodox that all Christians must come together to fight the growth of Islam.
How far either of these trends can go, of course, remains very much a matter of debate. On the one hand, many Orthodox priests and bishops oppose anything resembling ecumenism as recent events in Izhevsk. And on the other, a too public effort to unite Christians against Muslims in Russia would likely backfire, leading to even greater unity among the latter.
Staunton, April 10 – Because of the success Protestant missionaries have had in traditionally Muslim regions in the Russian Federation, some in the Orthodox Church want to make common cause with them against Islam, a view that the leader of the Evangelical Church there rejects.
In an interview published in the current issue of “NG-Religii,” Bishop Sergey Ryakhovsky, the president of the Russian United Union of Evangelical Christians, says that he is against such an approach that just as he is against “crusades in any of their manifestation” (religion.ng.ru/events/2011-04-06/1_episkop.html).
Ryakhovsky says that it is a fundamental tenet of his church that an individual is either a Christian or he is not and that ethnic or denominational differences are secondary to that fundamental requirement, but he adds that he does not want his church to become embroiled in a clash with followers of other faiths.
The recent murder of Bishop Artur Suleymanov in the North Caucasus, Ryakhovsky continues, “was not a war of Islam with Christianity,” however much some may want to treat it in that way. “In the Russian Caucasus,” he points out, “the number of imams killed is an order of magnitude greater than that of Christian pastors.”
Bishop Arthus, the Russian Evangelical leader continues, “lived very peaceably with his neighbors who professed Islam and was a man respected in their eyes as a man of the Book and a just figure. The same situation obtains in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan,” Ryakhovsky adds, because “we teach believers to be respectful toward all people, their culture [and] traditions.”
Bishop Ryakhovsky adds that he has longstanding and good relations with the leaders “of the majority of the major centralized Muslim structures of Russia,” relations that have allowed the realization of “joint projects in the majority in the social sphere and in the area of strengthening inter-ethnic and inter-confessional peace in our country.”
None of these leaders, the bishop adds, has ever criticized him or the Protestant community “for aggressiveness or anything else. But it is natural that the successes [that the Protestant churches have enjoyed in Russia] has generated jealousy … Not everyone likes this [and] it is usually easier to cry with the weeping than be glad with the joyous.”
One young Russian Orthodox priest recently approached him, Ryakhovsky recounts, and said that “his goal was to convert to Orthodoxy as many Protestants as possible in order that they then under Orthodox banners would convert Muslims to Orthodoxy.” He said that the success of the Protestants and their “charisma” made such an approach desirable.
After making this comment, the bishop says, the young priest turned away without waiting for an answer. Apparently, Ryakhovsky adds, the priest did not learn much Greek in seminary. Had he, the bishop said, he would have known that charisma is “a gift of God” and that one must search for it in oneself rather than “attempt to find it in others.”
What makes this exchange so intriguing is that it represents a break in the Moscow Patriarchate’s efforts to freeze out the Protestants whom it often calls “sects” just as Patriarch Kirill is expanding dialogue with the Catholics and that such attitudes reflect the sense even among the Orthodox that all Christians must come together to fight the growth of Islam.
How far either of these trends can go, of course, remains very much a matter of debate. On the one hand, many Orthodox priests and bishops oppose anything resembling ecumenism as recent events in Izhevsk. And on the other, a too public effort to unite Christians against Muslims in Russia would likely backfire, leading to even greater unity among the latter.
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