Paul Goble
Staunton, November 7 – The Russian Federation Social Chamber has sent an appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev detailing violations of the rights of numerically small peoples in the regions and seeking a meeting to talk about the neglect some but not all governors show toward these indigenous nationalities.
Pavel Sulyandziga, a member of the Chamber and head of its working group for the development of Siberia and the Far East, noted in this message to Medvedev that “in the Russian state there exists a kind of present-day serfdom in relation to the indigenous peoples when there hunting and fishing areas are handed over to commercial companies.”
In addition the appeal to the Russian president specified that “bureaucrats from the Ministry of Regional Affairs are not able to influence this [process of destroying the livelihoods of these traditional peoples’ because they are un-professional” and often do not understand what is at stake.
Sulyandziga told the Regions Club that he intends to ask the president to focus his attention “on the relations of the heads of Russian Federation subjects to the problems of indigenous peoples,” especially in Buryatia, the Transbaikal kray and Primorsky kray (club-rf.ru/r41/news/17195/).
Although Sulyandziga did not say so, he clearly hopes that Medvedev will add treatment of ethnic minorities to the list of policy areas on which governors are evaluated before they are re-nominated. And if he succeeds in doing so, that will have an impact far beyond the areas where the numerically small peoples of the North live.
The Social Chamber’s efforts in this direction, however, appear unlikely to be successful because the economic forces that governors are typically beholden to are far more influential. But in taking this high-profile step, Sulyandziga may also hope to link his concerns with those of environmental activists who also would like to see their issue be added to the evaluation list.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Daghestan Commission to Help Ex-Militants Re-Enter Peaceful Life
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 7 – Daghestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov has ordered the creation of a special commission to help support “the adaptation to peaceful life” by individuals who have “decided to end their terrorist and extremist activity on the territory” of his republic.
Given reports that more Daghestanis are joining the militants than leaving them in recent months, Magomedov’s proposals appears to have been offered more in the hopes of attracting positive attention from Moscow than of meeting a genuine need in that most unsettled North Caucasus republic (www.ndelo.ru/one_stat.php?id=3692).
But however that may be, the commission has already been formed. It includes, the secretary of the Daghestani Security Council, the chief federal inspector for Daghestan from the apparatus of the Plenipotentiary Representative of the Russian president to the North Caucasus federal district, the ombudsman, heads of ministries and force structures, and religious leaders.
So far, however, the mechanisms that this commission will use “are still not clear.” The republic ombudsman, Ummupazil Omarova said that a special commission is working on this right now because it is so important to “begin dialogue with those who remain in the ranks of the extremists but have not yet been able to commit crimes.”
For such people, she said, “the state must give corresponding guarantees,” and these guarantees must be made a matter of law. Some steps in this direction were taken in 2003-2006 when the Russian Duma declared an amnesty for militants in Daghestan which was then part of the Southern Federal District.
According to Abdurashid Magomedov, the republic interior minister, “the creation of such a commission is a timely and correct decision of the leadership of the republic in the existing situation,” and he said that the force structures will do everything they can to provide “technical support” for its work.
But Makhachkala commentators have already noted that there are only two religious leaders on the commission – Imam Magomedrasul Saaduyev of Makhachkala’s Central Mosque and Abas Kebedov, a representative of the Akhlsunna-va-Dzhamma, who is “considered one of the ideologues of Wahhabism in Daghestan.”
But if Kebedov was chosen for his expertise, he still has not had a chance to give it. He told the media, that “he still had no recommendations on the question of adaptation because there had not been a single working meeting and therefore to say something [about what this commission could or should do] is premature and complicated.”
Kebedov’s concerns that this latest proposal will result in much of anything positive were echoed by Ziyautdin Uvaysov, a prominent Daghestani lawyer and member of the Akhlyu-s-sunna Daghestan organization, in an extensive interview posted on line this weekend (www.ndelo.ru/one_stat.php?id=3672).
Uvaysov who has dealt with the regime and with the various parts of the Muslim community in Daghestan acknowledges that “the relationship of the powers that be to Islam is changing” and that the latter “are seeking to find a common language with those Muslims who identify themselves as Salafi,” the trend that is often associated with radicalism.
But despite this desire to find “a common language,” the lawyer continues, the impression exists that “the bureaucracy has not gone very far into the essence of the problem, that it still is a capture of definite stereotypes, misconceptions and the opinions of not very competent experts.”
That explains why the regime seems to move from one extreme to another in its dealings with Muslims, a pattern that does not inspire either confidence or trust and one that makes it likely that few of those among the militants are likely to heed the call of the new commission, however much hope the Daghestani powers that be invest in it.
Staunton, November 7 – Daghestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov has ordered the creation of a special commission to help support “the adaptation to peaceful life” by individuals who have “decided to end their terrorist and extremist activity on the territory” of his republic.
Given reports that more Daghestanis are joining the militants than leaving them in recent months, Magomedov’s proposals appears to have been offered more in the hopes of attracting positive attention from Moscow than of meeting a genuine need in that most unsettled North Caucasus republic (www.ndelo.ru/one_stat.php?id=3692).
But however that may be, the commission has already been formed. It includes, the secretary of the Daghestani Security Council, the chief federal inspector for Daghestan from the apparatus of the Plenipotentiary Representative of the Russian president to the North Caucasus federal district, the ombudsman, heads of ministries and force structures, and religious leaders.
So far, however, the mechanisms that this commission will use “are still not clear.” The republic ombudsman, Ummupazil Omarova said that a special commission is working on this right now because it is so important to “begin dialogue with those who remain in the ranks of the extremists but have not yet been able to commit crimes.”
For such people, she said, “the state must give corresponding guarantees,” and these guarantees must be made a matter of law. Some steps in this direction were taken in 2003-2006 when the Russian Duma declared an amnesty for militants in Daghestan which was then part of the Southern Federal District.
According to Abdurashid Magomedov, the republic interior minister, “the creation of such a commission is a timely and correct decision of the leadership of the republic in the existing situation,” and he said that the force structures will do everything they can to provide “technical support” for its work.
But Makhachkala commentators have already noted that there are only two religious leaders on the commission – Imam Magomedrasul Saaduyev of Makhachkala’s Central Mosque and Abas Kebedov, a representative of the Akhlsunna-va-Dzhamma, who is “considered one of the ideologues of Wahhabism in Daghestan.”
But if Kebedov was chosen for his expertise, he still has not had a chance to give it. He told the media, that “he still had no recommendations on the question of adaptation because there had not been a single working meeting and therefore to say something [about what this commission could or should do] is premature and complicated.”
Kebedov’s concerns that this latest proposal will result in much of anything positive were echoed by Ziyautdin Uvaysov, a prominent Daghestani lawyer and member of the Akhlyu-s-sunna Daghestan organization, in an extensive interview posted on line this weekend (www.ndelo.ru/one_stat.php?id=3672).
Uvaysov who has dealt with the regime and with the various parts of the Muslim community in Daghestan acknowledges that “the relationship of the powers that be to Islam is changing” and that the latter “are seeking to find a common language with those Muslims who identify themselves as Salafi,” the trend that is often associated with radicalism.
But despite this desire to find “a common language,” the lawyer continues, the impression exists that “the bureaucracy has not gone very far into the essence of the problem, that it still is a capture of definite stereotypes, misconceptions and the opinions of not very competent experts.”
That explains why the regime seems to move from one extreme to another in its dealings with Muslims, a pattern that does not inspire either confidence or trust and one that makes it likely that few of those among the militants are likely to heed the call of the new commission, however much hope the Daghestani powers that be invest in it.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Even Children of Daghestani Militia Officers Now Joining Islamist Militants, Analyst Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 6– A measure of Moscow’s failure in Daghestan is that even children of Daghestani militiamen are now joining the anti-Russian Islamist militants, an indication that further militant operations, at least of the kind Russian forces seem to be preparing for will backfire and reduce rather than increase security in that republic.
As a result, Denis Kolchin, who writes frequently about the military situation in the Caucasus, argues, Moscow needs to come up with a “creative” new strategy, one that he suggests will have to involve some form of negotiations with the forces of the Caucasus Emirate, if it is to have any chance of coming out on top (www.apn.ru/publications/article23307.htm).
And he argues that if the Russian forces simply launch more offensives in that mountainous and ethnically diverse republic, the outcome will not be the restoration of peace and stability but rather an angrier and more alienated local population and a dramatic increase in the number of Daghestanis who will join the Islamist opposition.
“Officially in the North Caucasus, there is no war,” the Moscow analyst continues, but on October 23rd, for the third time this year, Islamist militants in the North Caucasus came close to destroying an entire unit of Russian siloviki, an outcome that was avoided only by good luck. Indeed, it appears Russian forces learned nothing from the earlier attacks.
To try to cope with the growing strength of the Caucasus Emirate in Daghestan, Kolchin says, Moscow recently has expanded the number of its military and internal security troops there – the analyst gives an order of battle -- and organized, on the Chechen model, three battalions composed of representatives of local nationalities.
This expansion in the size of the pro-Moscow forces suggests that at least some among their commanders are thinking about launching a new offensive, a step that Kolchin says would be disastrous. Unlike in 1996 and 1999, when the Daghestani population supported Moscow against the Chechen rebels, however, “today the situation is different.”
Any military operation, “in whatever form it might take,” would not be capable of “increasing the level of sympathy among the current population.” Younger people are already going into the mountains to fight the Russians, including “even children of militiamen.” Indeed, in September, one of the rebels killed proved to be the son of the Derbent criminal police.
Because of this trend, one that Russian commanders on the ground are very much aware of whatever their superiors say, officials are casting about for some new strategy. One of these is “the Daghestanization of the conflict” through the formation of more local military units along the model of what has been done in Chechnya.
But this is hardly likely to be “a panacea,” Chalpin says. Not only is “a partisan war” continuing in that republic, but there are two other factors limiting the chance this shift would bring success. On the one hand, for the Islamist militants, there is no difference between Russian soldiers and Kadyrov forces – “the mujahidin will kill either” without distinction.
And on the other hand, Daghestan’s ethnic diversity dooms such a strategy to failure. While Chechnya is 93 percent ethnic Chechen, Daghestan has “no core nationality.” Instead, its largest group forms only 29 percent of the population. Hence, “the application of Daghestanization (in practice, fratricidal war) is stupid” and “threatens chaos.
“In short,” Chaplin says, “the situation in the republic will only deteriorate.” And that in turn means that “Moscow must think up something new for the Caucasus” in general and Daghestan in particular. Military actions of whatever kind are not going to be capable of “ending the partisan war” being carried out by the Islamist militants.
And such “creativity,” not much in evidence among Russian officials now, “probably” will have to involve “dialogue” with the militants, something that the current Moscow line precludes. But unless such conversations begin – and the parallel with the US battle with the Taliban in Afghanistan suggests itself – the war will only continue and may get worse.
Staunton, November 6– A measure of Moscow’s failure in Daghestan is that even children of Daghestani militiamen are now joining the anti-Russian Islamist militants, an indication that further militant operations, at least of the kind Russian forces seem to be preparing for will backfire and reduce rather than increase security in that republic.
As a result, Denis Kolchin, who writes frequently about the military situation in the Caucasus, argues, Moscow needs to come up with a “creative” new strategy, one that he suggests will have to involve some form of negotiations with the forces of the Caucasus Emirate, if it is to have any chance of coming out on top (www.apn.ru/publications/article23307.htm).
And he argues that if the Russian forces simply launch more offensives in that mountainous and ethnically diverse republic, the outcome will not be the restoration of peace and stability but rather an angrier and more alienated local population and a dramatic increase in the number of Daghestanis who will join the Islamist opposition.
“Officially in the North Caucasus, there is no war,” the Moscow analyst continues, but on October 23rd, for the third time this year, Islamist militants in the North Caucasus came close to destroying an entire unit of Russian siloviki, an outcome that was avoided only by good luck. Indeed, it appears Russian forces learned nothing from the earlier attacks.
To try to cope with the growing strength of the Caucasus Emirate in Daghestan, Kolchin says, Moscow recently has expanded the number of its military and internal security troops there – the analyst gives an order of battle -- and organized, on the Chechen model, three battalions composed of representatives of local nationalities.
This expansion in the size of the pro-Moscow forces suggests that at least some among their commanders are thinking about launching a new offensive, a step that Kolchin says would be disastrous. Unlike in 1996 and 1999, when the Daghestani population supported Moscow against the Chechen rebels, however, “today the situation is different.”
Any military operation, “in whatever form it might take,” would not be capable of “increasing the level of sympathy among the current population.” Younger people are already going into the mountains to fight the Russians, including “even children of militiamen.” Indeed, in September, one of the rebels killed proved to be the son of the Derbent criminal police.
Because of this trend, one that Russian commanders on the ground are very much aware of whatever their superiors say, officials are casting about for some new strategy. One of these is “the Daghestanization of the conflict” through the formation of more local military units along the model of what has been done in Chechnya.
But this is hardly likely to be “a panacea,” Chalpin says. Not only is “a partisan war” continuing in that republic, but there are two other factors limiting the chance this shift would bring success. On the one hand, for the Islamist militants, there is no difference between Russian soldiers and Kadyrov forces – “the mujahidin will kill either” without distinction.
And on the other hand, Daghestan’s ethnic diversity dooms such a strategy to failure. While Chechnya is 93 percent ethnic Chechen, Daghestan has “no core nationality.” Instead, its largest group forms only 29 percent of the population. Hence, “the application of Daghestanization (in practice, fratricidal war) is stupid” and “threatens chaos.
“In short,” Chaplin says, “the situation in the republic will only deteriorate.” And that in turn means that “Moscow must think up something new for the Caucasus” in general and Daghestan in particular. Military actions of whatever kind are not going to be capable of “ending the partisan war” being carried out by the Islamist militants.
And such “creativity,” not much in evidence among Russian officials now, “probably” will have to involve “dialogue” with the militants, something that the current Moscow line precludes. But unless such conversations begin – and the parallel with the US battle with the Taliban in Afghanistan suggests itself – the war will only continue and may get worse.
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Social Fabric is Disintegrating, Narochnitskaya Warns
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 6 – Russians outside the major cities are undergoing a process of lumpenization, of the loss of all social ties, that is as serious as the destruction of the peasantry of the 1930s and threatens the country’s future development, according to Natalya Narotchnitskaya, head of the Moscow-supported Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
In an interview in “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” Narochnitskaya painted a picture of Russia in tones that are even darker than those employed by people she routinely denounces as Russophobes in order to warn her readers that “Russia simply will not survive another revolution” (kp.ru/daily/24583.4/752496/).
Narochnitskaya begins by arguing that it is a mistake to think of Russia as a single homogenous space. “Siberia, the Kuban, Moscow and the Caucasus,” she says, “are different epochs, different cultures, and even different civilizations! We are living at one and the same time in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.”
Moreover, she continues, Russians and those who rule over them have to deal simultaneously with “the problems of the palaces and the problems of the huts, with advanced science and high culture, and archaic systems and an appalling lack of culture.” And that is “an enormous task for any power.”
“You cannot apply one and the same economic doctrines across the entire country.” But at the same time, she argues, you cannot ignore what people expect, and over history, Russians have assumed that just such an approach is necessary and that it is the only basis for overcoming national problems.
These divisions, Narochnitskaya continues, have been intensified, even exacerbated by the radical income differentiation thatpost-Soviet development has promoted. And she insists that the division between the richest and the poorest there is “not 20 times” as many say but rather “100 to 150 times,” a ratio that is hardly “divine.”
And that in turn has been compounded by the increasing acceptance of the notion that in economics, it is always the individual who makes progress rather than the state. “That is not the case,” she says, arguing that such ideas are a reflection of the characteristic of the Russian “educated” who think that it is a matter of “good tone” to always criticize the state.
But Narochnitskaya’s sharpest words concern the decay of Russian social life outside the major cities. “In the rural areas,” she says, “what is taking place is not simply the impoverishment but the lumpenization o fhte nation! The destruction of industry however backward it was is the de-industrialization of the country.”
She argues that “there cannot be any modernization if we lose out working habits,” suggesting that “by its social and cultural consequences for the nation, lumpenization is a catastrophe equal to the destruction of the Russian peasantry in the 1930s” by Stalin through collectivization.
Prior to 1917, Russian peasants had been poor but they had “preserved their social connections, psychology and the worldview of a definite stratum which reproduced itself while preserving society as a whole. But a lumpen is someone who has fallen out of his stratum and does not have any attachment to it.”
“This is a very dangerous social phenomenon. Such a worker will not struggle for his rights” because that is not what he is about. Instead, he will, especially as a result of the “unceasing propaganda of hedonism” to which Russians have been subjected assume that he deserves what he does not have and that he can take it even if it does not belong to him.
That danger can be seen if one travels only a short distance from Moscow. If one takes a highway out of the capital for only 100 kilometers and then turns off on a side road, after only about “five kilometers, a medieval world begins.” But it is a medieval world with television whose advertisements suggest that a good life is only a short distance away.
Many people think that the entire West is hedonistic, Narochnitskaya continues, and that this is the way of the future. But “this is the biggest misconception,” she insists. “Don’t forget that the Puritans with their religious relationship to the fulfillment of their debts build America. The relationship to work in the West in general is very serious.”
As she has done in the past, Narochnitskaya also sharply criticizes both the Russian opposition for its own radicalism and running after the West and the image of the West that many Russians have as a place where there are no problems and where miracles are achieved without work.
Such thinking, she suggests, leads Russians to vacillate between an apathetic acceptance that nothing can be done, a cynicism about the ability of anyone to do anything about problems, and a belief that the best way to achieve their goals is all at once by a revolutionary act rather than by reforms.
In conclusions, Narochnitskaya cites Trubetskoy’s observation that “we don’t need reforms, we need everything or nothing” as an example of this attitude and then warns that whatever may have been true in the past, Russia now, as a result of the lumpenization of so much of the population, “simply won’t survive another revolution.”
Staunton, November 6 – Russians outside the major cities are undergoing a process of lumpenization, of the loss of all social ties, that is as serious as the destruction of the peasantry of the 1930s and threatens the country’s future development, according to Natalya Narotchnitskaya, head of the Moscow-supported Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
In an interview in “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” Narochnitskaya painted a picture of Russia in tones that are even darker than those employed by people she routinely denounces as Russophobes in order to warn her readers that “Russia simply will not survive another revolution” (kp.ru/daily/24583.4/752496/).
Narochnitskaya begins by arguing that it is a mistake to think of Russia as a single homogenous space. “Siberia, the Kuban, Moscow and the Caucasus,” she says, “are different epochs, different cultures, and even different civilizations! We are living at one and the same time in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.”
Moreover, she continues, Russians and those who rule over them have to deal simultaneously with “the problems of the palaces and the problems of the huts, with advanced science and high culture, and archaic systems and an appalling lack of culture.” And that is “an enormous task for any power.”
“You cannot apply one and the same economic doctrines across the entire country.” But at the same time, she argues, you cannot ignore what people expect, and over history, Russians have assumed that just such an approach is necessary and that it is the only basis for overcoming national problems.
These divisions, Narochnitskaya continues, have been intensified, even exacerbated by the radical income differentiation thatpost-Soviet development has promoted. And she insists that the division between the richest and the poorest there is “not 20 times” as many say but rather “100 to 150 times,” a ratio that is hardly “divine.”
And that in turn has been compounded by the increasing acceptance of the notion that in economics, it is always the individual who makes progress rather than the state. “That is not the case,” she says, arguing that such ideas are a reflection of the characteristic of the Russian “educated” who think that it is a matter of “good tone” to always criticize the state.
But Narochnitskaya’s sharpest words concern the decay of Russian social life outside the major cities. “In the rural areas,” she says, “what is taking place is not simply the impoverishment but the lumpenization o fhte nation! The destruction of industry however backward it was is the de-industrialization of the country.”
She argues that “there cannot be any modernization if we lose out working habits,” suggesting that “by its social and cultural consequences for the nation, lumpenization is a catastrophe equal to the destruction of the Russian peasantry in the 1930s” by Stalin through collectivization.
Prior to 1917, Russian peasants had been poor but they had “preserved their social connections, psychology and the worldview of a definite stratum which reproduced itself while preserving society as a whole. But a lumpen is someone who has fallen out of his stratum and does not have any attachment to it.”
“This is a very dangerous social phenomenon. Such a worker will not struggle for his rights” because that is not what he is about. Instead, he will, especially as a result of the “unceasing propaganda of hedonism” to which Russians have been subjected assume that he deserves what he does not have and that he can take it even if it does not belong to him.
That danger can be seen if one travels only a short distance from Moscow. If one takes a highway out of the capital for only 100 kilometers and then turns off on a side road, after only about “five kilometers, a medieval world begins.” But it is a medieval world with television whose advertisements suggest that a good life is only a short distance away.
Many people think that the entire West is hedonistic, Narochnitskaya continues, and that this is the way of the future. But “this is the biggest misconception,” she insists. “Don’t forget that the Puritans with their religious relationship to the fulfillment of their debts build America. The relationship to work in the West in general is very serious.”
As she has done in the past, Narochnitskaya also sharply criticizes both the Russian opposition for its own radicalism and running after the West and the image of the West that many Russians have as a place where there are no problems and where miracles are achieved without work.
Such thinking, she suggests, leads Russians to vacillate between an apathetic acceptance that nothing can be done, a cynicism about the ability of anyone to do anything about problems, and a belief that the best way to achieve their goals is all at once by a revolutionary act rather than by reforms.
In conclusions, Narochnitskaya cites Trubetskoy’s observation that “we don’t need reforms, we need everything or nothing” as an example of this attitude and then warns that whatever may have been true in the past, Russia now, as a result of the lumpenization of so much of the population, “simply won’t survive another revolution.”
Window on Eurasia: Lenin Lives in Russian Writing Only to Die Again, Moscow Critic Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 6 – Russians continue to argue about Stalin and other Communist leaders, but in such debates, Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, has been left largely “somewhere on the side,” a reflection of the often unrecognized fact that he, unlike the others, plays a variety of roles for the current generation, according to a Moscow scholar.
That may be changing, Aleksandr Chantsev argues in the current “Neprikosnovennyy zapas,” given that his works are now being republished and an entire virtual community devoted to his memory has emerged, and consequently, it is time to consider the actual role Lenin continues to play in the lives of Russians (magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/4/ch16.html.
Unlike those who want Lenin out of the mausoleum and are angry that more than 70 percent of all Lenin monuments in the Russian Federation remain in place 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union (www.pravmir.ru/lenin-navsegda/), Chantsev, a philologist, considers the imagery of Lenin found in literary works as a key to understanding his role in Russian life now.
As far as the Soviet system is concerned, Chantsev begins, “everything is clear – we don’t want it, but they are reviving it.” That sense, he continues, leads to debates about Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Trotsky, but somehow “Lenin turns out to be left somewhere on the side,” historically distant, preserved in amber, “half-condemned but half rehabilitated.”
What is striking, the critic notes, is that Lenin has become an object onto which have many displaced many things which are far from the original meaning of the man and his historical role. “The main thing” turns out to be “images of childhood,” not just because of Bonch-Bruyevich’s stories but also because people now associate Lenin with their early years.
The literary record of the last 20 years suggest that “behind all these ‘Leninist subjects’ stands special relations with the object. The motives are clear: they have a more psychological basis: the denial of communist ideals in the Soviet period, the ridiculing of the former idol in the first years of perestroika and then … one of the symbols of the denial of current Russian reality.
In reality, Chantsev argues, “Lenin here is important not in and of himself; he is much more significant for what he embodies – and it is from this the continuing presence of his image arises. This is intensified still further by the formulaic images of Lenin created in the Soviet period which are used by contemporary authors for [his] desconstruction.”
And that is terribly important, Chantsev suggests because “after 70 years of defenseless existence under the pressure of official idiologisms, Russian writing with the help of these measures is undertaking an attempt at a late vaccination against the virus of Lenin – and it is not for nothing that in texts [about him] there are so many references to illness.”
Consequently, while Lenin still lives in Russian writing and consciousness, his existence is a “strange” one, somewhere “between life and death.” He plays the role of Osiris, of someone who dies in order to be reborn only to die again. And however angry many may be about his re-appearance, such a pattern is intended to ensure that his like will not come again.
“Unlike the image of Stalin … in our days,” Chantsev says, “when at spiritual séances out of the past are called forth terrible heroes of myths … on should not be surprised by such a frequent appearance of Lenin” or fail to understand that his return is required in such forums in order that it not happen in real life.
Lenin must “yet again be reborn in order that, having finally died, he can leave his meta-historical mausoleum and move from the status of ‘the most living of all living’ into the form of an ordinary historical personage.” And because that is the requirement, Chantsev concludes, “in the immediate future, Lenin will appear yet again in many books, films, and songs.”
Staunton, November 6 – Russians continue to argue about Stalin and other Communist leaders, but in such debates, Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, has been left largely “somewhere on the side,” a reflection of the often unrecognized fact that he, unlike the others, plays a variety of roles for the current generation, according to a Moscow scholar.
That may be changing, Aleksandr Chantsev argues in the current “Neprikosnovennyy zapas,” given that his works are now being republished and an entire virtual community devoted to his memory has emerged, and consequently, it is time to consider the actual role Lenin continues to play in the lives of Russians (magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/4/ch16.html.
Unlike those who want Lenin out of the mausoleum and are angry that more than 70 percent of all Lenin monuments in the Russian Federation remain in place 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union (www.pravmir.ru/lenin-navsegda/), Chantsev, a philologist, considers the imagery of Lenin found in literary works as a key to understanding his role in Russian life now.
As far as the Soviet system is concerned, Chantsev begins, “everything is clear – we don’t want it, but they are reviving it.” That sense, he continues, leads to debates about Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Trotsky, but somehow “Lenin turns out to be left somewhere on the side,” historically distant, preserved in amber, “half-condemned but half rehabilitated.”
What is striking, the critic notes, is that Lenin has become an object onto which have many displaced many things which are far from the original meaning of the man and his historical role. “The main thing” turns out to be “images of childhood,” not just because of Bonch-Bruyevich’s stories but also because people now associate Lenin with their early years.
The literary record of the last 20 years suggest that “behind all these ‘Leninist subjects’ stands special relations with the object. The motives are clear: they have a more psychological basis: the denial of communist ideals in the Soviet period, the ridiculing of the former idol in the first years of perestroika and then … one of the symbols of the denial of current Russian reality.
In reality, Chantsev argues, “Lenin here is important not in and of himself; he is much more significant for what he embodies – and it is from this the continuing presence of his image arises. This is intensified still further by the formulaic images of Lenin created in the Soviet period which are used by contemporary authors for [his] desconstruction.”
And that is terribly important, Chantsev suggests because “after 70 years of defenseless existence under the pressure of official idiologisms, Russian writing with the help of these measures is undertaking an attempt at a late vaccination against the virus of Lenin – and it is not for nothing that in texts [about him] there are so many references to illness.”
Consequently, while Lenin still lives in Russian writing and consciousness, his existence is a “strange” one, somewhere “between life and death.” He plays the role of Osiris, of someone who dies in order to be reborn only to die again. And however angry many may be about his re-appearance, such a pattern is intended to ensure that his like will not come again.
“Unlike the image of Stalin … in our days,” Chantsev says, “when at spiritual séances out of the past are called forth terrible heroes of myths … on should not be surprised by such a frequent appearance of Lenin” or fail to understand that his return is required in such forums in order that it not happen in real life.
Lenin must “yet again be reborn in order that, having finally died, he can leave his meta-historical mausoleum and move from the status of ‘the most living of all living’ into the form of an ordinary historical personage.” And because that is the requirement, Chantsev concludes, “in the immediate future, Lenin will appear yet again in many books, films, and songs.”
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Moscow Should Rely on Cossacks in North Caucasus, Khloponin Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 4 – Aleksandr Khloponin, the Presidential Plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus Federal District, said last week that his “first task” must be to support and rely on the Cossack revival as part of Moscow’s effort to return ethnic Russians to that troubled part of the country.
And while, as Sergey Markedonov makes clear in a new analysis, the Cossack movement of today is best described as “neo-Cossackry,” the history of tensions between the indigenous peoples of that region and the Cossacks who were the shock troops of Russian expansion there makes this a problematic, even dangerous tactic (www.politcom.ru/10977.html).
Khloponin’s plans make Markedonov’s analysis especially timely given that the neo-Cossacks he described are more Russian nationalist and likely to prove more hostile to the non-Russian nationalities of the North Caucasus than were the Cossacks who moved south into that region in the 18th and 19th centuries.
As Markedonov, currently a visiting scholar at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, makes clear, the new Cossacks are not so much a continuation of the older groups but rather a new phenomenon altogether, one that draws on Cossack ideas but that lacks the corporate sense and social conditions in which the pre-1917 Cossacks existed.
The neo-Cossack movement emerged in the early 1990s, Markedonov says, as “a reaction to the growth of ethnic nationalism in the North Caucasus republics under conditions of the crisis and disintegration of the USSR.” As a result, the Kuban and Terek “neo-Cossacks” began “to play the role of a certain counterweight to the ethnocracies being formed there.”
Markedonov details the struggle of revived Cossack units with the non-Russian republics in that region during the early 1990s, struggles that sometimes resulted in violent clashes and deaths, featured calls for the establishment or re-establishment of Cossack territories from imperial times, but ultimately led to no real changes.
Initially, ethnic Russians in the North Caucasus supported the idea of creating a Cossack Republic, with “almost 65 percent” in one poll backing that idea. Several Cossack communities proclaimed such republics, but the Russian authorities were unprepared to support them, preferring instead to rely where possible on the leaders of existing republics.
Although there was a brief uptick in local interest in the creation of a special Cossack territory, the so-called Terek Oblast, at the start of Moscow’s military efforts in Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, no such “’second Transdniestria’” was formed, in large measure because of the rapid outflow of the ethnic Russian population from the North Caucasus.
Over the course of the last decade, Markedonov continues, “the neo-Cossacks as a political project” have more or less disappeared as an issue. One measure of that is that their center has become Stavropol kray which historically was never a center of Cossack activity but rather of “peasant colonization.”
And indicative of this decline in their political prospects, the Moscow analyst say, has been “a change of the political language” that their leaders have employed. “The language of demands [that was common in the early 1990s] has been completely replaced by the language of requests for permission.”
Markedonov suggests that among the other causes for the decline of the Cossack project in the region was the inability of the Cossacks to find “strategic or even tactical allies,” even though some were available because most of their leaders “put ‘purity of blood’ above pragmatism,” costing them support from groups like the Nogays.
At the same time, by the 1990s, “the Russians and Cossacks had ceased to be considered ‘elder brothers’” by the non-Russians. And the Cossacks never learned to use the language of human rights and thus were condemned to be viewed as “revaunchist” and as something “not about the future but about the past.”
Moreover, Markedonov continues, it quickly became apparent that “the process of the Sovietization of the Cossack Russian population of the North Caucasus had been much deeper than among the ‘titular’ ethnic groups,” something that limited their ability to restore the past or even build on it by uniting either with ethnic Russians or with others.
But perhaps most important, the Russian analyst says, “the neo-Cossacks of the North Caucasus did not receive the necessary ‘signals’ from the center.” Moscow was not interested in fully integrating the region into Russian lands, preferring instead to work with when possible the non-Russian ethnocratic regimes.
And that had another consequence: it became obvious to many in the Russian capital that “many leaders of ‘the Cossack project’ were ready to struggle not against the principles of ethnocracy as such but only against ethnocracies that were not ‘theirs.’” Consequently, supporting the Cossacks would create a new problem rather than solve an old one.
It is possible that Khloponin’s remarks represent a shift, but Markedonov suggests that is probably not the case. “Under conditions when North Caucasus policy has been reduced to slogans and toasts, it is not surprising that instead of systemic analysis,” Russian officials like him are saying “the Cossacks will confidently write their own history in the 21st century.”
But at least some Cossacks may see those words as just the signal they have not received in the past, and that could create serious problems in the region -- even if it is not “the signal” that anyone, including Khloponin, thought he was sending by his rather incautious remarks during a Cossack meeting last week.
Staunton, November 4 – Aleksandr Khloponin, the Presidential Plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus Federal District, said last week that his “first task” must be to support and rely on the Cossack revival as part of Moscow’s effort to return ethnic Russians to that troubled part of the country.
And while, as Sergey Markedonov makes clear in a new analysis, the Cossack movement of today is best described as “neo-Cossackry,” the history of tensions between the indigenous peoples of that region and the Cossacks who were the shock troops of Russian expansion there makes this a problematic, even dangerous tactic (www.politcom.ru/10977.html).
Khloponin’s plans make Markedonov’s analysis especially timely given that the neo-Cossacks he described are more Russian nationalist and likely to prove more hostile to the non-Russian nationalities of the North Caucasus than were the Cossacks who moved south into that region in the 18th and 19th centuries.
As Markedonov, currently a visiting scholar at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, makes clear, the new Cossacks are not so much a continuation of the older groups but rather a new phenomenon altogether, one that draws on Cossack ideas but that lacks the corporate sense and social conditions in which the pre-1917 Cossacks existed.
The neo-Cossack movement emerged in the early 1990s, Markedonov says, as “a reaction to the growth of ethnic nationalism in the North Caucasus republics under conditions of the crisis and disintegration of the USSR.” As a result, the Kuban and Terek “neo-Cossacks” began “to play the role of a certain counterweight to the ethnocracies being formed there.”
Markedonov details the struggle of revived Cossack units with the non-Russian republics in that region during the early 1990s, struggles that sometimes resulted in violent clashes and deaths, featured calls for the establishment or re-establishment of Cossack territories from imperial times, but ultimately led to no real changes.
Initially, ethnic Russians in the North Caucasus supported the idea of creating a Cossack Republic, with “almost 65 percent” in one poll backing that idea. Several Cossack communities proclaimed such republics, but the Russian authorities were unprepared to support them, preferring instead to rely where possible on the leaders of existing republics.
Although there was a brief uptick in local interest in the creation of a special Cossack territory, the so-called Terek Oblast, at the start of Moscow’s military efforts in Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, no such “’second Transdniestria’” was formed, in large measure because of the rapid outflow of the ethnic Russian population from the North Caucasus.
Over the course of the last decade, Markedonov continues, “the neo-Cossacks as a political project” have more or less disappeared as an issue. One measure of that is that their center has become Stavropol kray which historically was never a center of Cossack activity but rather of “peasant colonization.”
And indicative of this decline in their political prospects, the Moscow analyst say, has been “a change of the political language” that their leaders have employed. “The language of demands [that was common in the early 1990s] has been completely replaced by the language of requests for permission.”
Markedonov suggests that among the other causes for the decline of the Cossack project in the region was the inability of the Cossacks to find “strategic or even tactical allies,” even though some were available because most of their leaders “put ‘purity of blood’ above pragmatism,” costing them support from groups like the Nogays.
At the same time, by the 1990s, “the Russians and Cossacks had ceased to be considered ‘elder brothers’” by the non-Russians. And the Cossacks never learned to use the language of human rights and thus were condemned to be viewed as “revaunchist” and as something “not about the future but about the past.”
Moreover, Markedonov continues, it quickly became apparent that “the process of the Sovietization of the Cossack Russian population of the North Caucasus had been much deeper than among the ‘titular’ ethnic groups,” something that limited their ability to restore the past or even build on it by uniting either with ethnic Russians or with others.
But perhaps most important, the Russian analyst says, “the neo-Cossacks of the North Caucasus did not receive the necessary ‘signals’ from the center.” Moscow was not interested in fully integrating the region into Russian lands, preferring instead to work with when possible the non-Russian ethnocratic regimes.
And that had another consequence: it became obvious to many in the Russian capital that “many leaders of ‘the Cossack project’ were ready to struggle not against the principles of ethnocracy as such but only against ethnocracies that were not ‘theirs.’” Consequently, supporting the Cossacks would create a new problem rather than solve an old one.
It is possible that Khloponin’s remarks represent a shift, but Markedonov suggests that is probably not the case. “Under conditions when North Caucasus policy has been reduced to slogans and toasts, it is not surprising that instead of systemic analysis,” Russian officials like him are saying “the Cossacks will confidently write their own history in the 21st century.”
But at least some Cossacks may see those words as just the signal they have not received in the past, and that could create serious problems in the region -- even if it is not “the signal” that anyone, including Khloponin, thought he was sending by his rather incautious remarks during a Cossack meeting last week.
Window on Eurasia: Russians Fear ‘Fifth Column’ of Jihadi Terrorists among Gastarbeiters
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 4 – Moscow is seeking to impose tighter control over labor migration from CIS countries in general and Tajikistan in particular not only to ensure that Russian laws are obeyed but also to prevent the arrival of Jihadi terrorists within that flow who could form “a fifth column” inside the Russian Federation.
Such an approach, commentator Dmitry Pankratov argues, is “more than justified since under the mask of labor migrants an enormous number of people have come to Russia who are not involved with construction … but with the creation on the territory of another state of individual cells of Islamic groups of an extremist type.”
Moreover, he continues, international experience shows that in an increasing number of cases around the world, those who commit terrorist acts of various kinds in one country received training in another state and then arrived in their target country under the cover of migrants or other “legitimate” activities (www.paruskg.info/2010/11/03/34809#more-34809).
In his article, Pankratov describes the activities on one Tajik Jihadist who moved to Tyumen, recruited other Tajiks there to his ideas and financed his activities with the sale of illegal drugs. But he implies that the case he describes is typical rather than exceptional and that Jihadist elements can be found elsewhere among Gastarbeiter in other Russian cities.
How widespread this phenomenon has become is impossible to know, but this report and others like it – including one on the recruitment of suicide bombers by Islamist radicals in Tajikistan (www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6787) -- will further exacerbate Russian suspicions about and xenophobic attitudes toward the growing migrant population.
That presents the Russian powers that be with a serious problem. On the one hand, the Russian economy needs immigrant labor given the country’s declining population. Moreover, Moscow wants to maintain good relations with and hence influence in Muslim countries, both those from which the migrants come and others further afield.
And on the other, there appear to be some in the Russian capital who are prepared to play up such ethnic tensions not only to distract attention of social class problems but also out of the belief that the anti-immigrant sentiment now sweeping through Western Europe provides Russia with the perfect occasion to crack down on immigrants itself.
In recent weeks, Russian courts have ordered the disbanding of the organization of Tajik immigrant workers in the Russian Federation, the number of clashes between migrants and Russians appear to have increased, and anti-immigrant groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigraiton (DPNI) have stepped up their activities.
The onset of colder weather across Russia will likely limit the growth of such phenomena in the next few months, with many migrants returning home or staying out of sight and with Russians in turn focusing on coping with the weather rather than with whatever threats they believe immigrant workers from Muslim countries pose.
But Pankratov’s article and the many others like it in the Russian media suggest that Russian society may be moving toward an explosion early next spring, an explosion in which the powers that be will either have to enforce the Constitution and laws against their own citizens or side with the anger and fears of the latter against the migrant workers.
Beyond any doubt, Moscow as have governments elsewhere will try to find a middle course, cracking down on illegal immigrants and saying that it will defend legal ones. But that position is likely to prove increasingly difficult to sustain given generalized fears among Russians that Gastarbeiters as a group are the sources of terrorism and drugs.
Staunton, November 4 – Moscow is seeking to impose tighter control over labor migration from CIS countries in general and Tajikistan in particular not only to ensure that Russian laws are obeyed but also to prevent the arrival of Jihadi terrorists within that flow who could form “a fifth column” inside the Russian Federation.
Such an approach, commentator Dmitry Pankratov argues, is “more than justified since under the mask of labor migrants an enormous number of people have come to Russia who are not involved with construction … but with the creation on the territory of another state of individual cells of Islamic groups of an extremist type.”
Moreover, he continues, international experience shows that in an increasing number of cases around the world, those who commit terrorist acts of various kinds in one country received training in another state and then arrived in their target country under the cover of migrants or other “legitimate” activities (www.paruskg.info/2010/11/03/34809#more-34809).
In his article, Pankratov describes the activities on one Tajik Jihadist who moved to Tyumen, recruited other Tajiks there to his ideas and financed his activities with the sale of illegal drugs. But he implies that the case he describes is typical rather than exceptional and that Jihadist elements can be found elsewhere among Gastarbeiter in other Russian cities.
How widespread this phenomenon has become is impossible to know, but this report and others like it – including one on the recruitment of suicide bombers by Islamist radicals in Tajikistan (www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6787) -- will further exacerbate Russian suspicions about and xenophobic attitudes toward the growing migrant population.
That presents the Russian powers that be with a serious problem. On the one hand, the Russian economy needs immigrant labor given the country’s declining population. Moreover, Moscow wants to maintain good relations with and hence influence in Muslim countries, both those from which the migrants come and others further afield.
And on the other, there appear to be some in the Russian capital who are prepared to play up such ethnic tensions not only to distract attention of social class problems but also out of the belief that the anti-immigrant sentiment now sweeping through Western Europe provides Russia with the perfect occasion to crack down on immigrants itself.
In recent weeks, Russian courts have ordered the disbanding of the organization of Tajik immigrant workers in the Russian Federation, the number of clashes between migrants and Russians appear to have increased, and anti-immigrant groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigraiton (DPNI) have stepped up their activities.
The onset of colder weather across Russia will likely limit the growth of such phenomena in the next few months, with many migrants returning home or staying out of sight and with Russians in turn focusing on coping with the weather rather than with whatever threats they believe immigrant workers from Muslim countries pose.
But Pankratov’s article and the many others like it in the Russian media suggest that Russian society may be moving toward an explosion early next spring, an explosion in which the powers that be will either have to enforce the Constitution and laws against their own citizens or side with the anger and fears of the latter against the migrant workers.
Beyond any doubt, Moscow as have governments elsewhere will try to find a middle course, cracking down on illegal immigrants and saying that it will defend legal ones. But that position is likely to prove increasingly difficult to sustain given generalized fears among Russians that Gastarbeiters as a group are the sources of terrorism and drugs.
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