Moscow’s Unwillingness to Support Russian Nation Reflects Its Own Imperial Agenda
Staunton, October 25 – Like their Soviet predecessors, the current powers that be in the Russian Federation are quite prepared to sacrifice the national interests of the ethnic Russian people in the pursuit of an imperialist agenda, but this sacrifice will not serve either Russian national interests or Moscow’s imperial goals, according to a Kazan sociologist.
Aleksandr Salagayev further argues that “the legal vacuum which characterizes the situation of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation and the position of the powers that be who are ignoring this contradiction is the source of inter-ethnic conflicts with migrants, the extremism of Russian organizations in Russia and the weakness of Russian diasporas abroad.
In a 3200-word essay posted on the Regnum.ru news agency, Salagayev, a specialist on social and political conflicts at the Kazan State Technological University, traces the long and complicated history of the relations between the ethnic Russian nation and the states within which it has existed (www.regnum.ru/news/1337042.html).
Prior to 1917, he notes, “Russians were an imperial nation.” The state’s slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” applied only to them, but the Russian nation included the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the Belarusians, as one might expect an imperial people, as opposed to a nation, to do.
The country’s nationality policy changed dramatically with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks. Their ideas about “proletarian internationalism,” Salagayev argues, instituted “a double standard” with the rights of the non-Russians being protected and the rights of the ethnic Russians as a community being ignored or at least slighted.
While that balance shifted over time, the Kazan scholar says, many now believe that “the main cause of the destruction of the USSR was the weakening of the Russian ethnos and the loss of its role in economic and state-political life which took place after the October 1917 coup” that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In the first years of Soviet power, the communist tilt toward the non-Russians was most pronounced, with the non-Russians being given republics and the ethnic Russians, routinely denounced for “great power chauvinism,” being denied one repeatedly. Salagayev notes that efforts to form a Russian republic were blocked by Soviet leaders in 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926.
After Stalin declared “the final solution of the nationality question in the USSR” in 1934, the Russian nation was redefined. No longer was it “the former oppressor nation” with a historic “debt” to the others, but rather the Russian nation became the elder brother – or as “Leningradskaya Pravda” put it in 1937, “the eldest among equals.”
But despite the rhetorical change, Russians were still expected to provide funding for the non-Russians to help them catch up with modernity, a policy that continued throughout the rest of the Soviet period and one that by “ignoring the interests of the Russian people [was] inevitably accompanied by Russophobia” on the part of the regime.
That is because this attitude “was expressed not so much in the denial of the ‘positive features of the Russian nation and its positive contribution to world history’ as in a fear of the Russian national factor … and the possible resistance from the side of the most numerous people of the communist reconstruction of the country and the world.”
Indeed, KGB and then CPSU leader Yuri Andropov famously observed, Salagayev recalls, that “the chief concern for us is Russian nationalism; as to the dissidents, we would take them all in one night.”
In short, “self-determination of the Russian people was assessed as chauvinism but the self-determination of other peoples was considered as a necessary condition of their national development,” Salagayev says. And as a result, “the national interests and the interests of Russians in autonomous formations were simply ignored.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this policy continued. “Ethnic mobilization” seized “all the ethnic groups” of the country except the ethnic Russians “who despite the actual loss of their imperial status preserve the illusions about their imperial destiny, responsibility for the fate of Russia and other such myths.”
Ethnic mobilization among ethnic Russians thus has been dominated by marginal groups like the RNE and Primorsky partisans and by “the spontaneous ethnic mobilization of Russians” in relatively small cities such as Kondopoga. In his article, Salagayev lists 22 such cases of the latter since 1999.
None of these efforts can be called successful, he says, largely because Moscow opposed all of them. The 1996 law on national-cultural autonomy did not apply to Russians and efforts beginning in 2001 to adopt “a law on the Russian people” were blocked by the powers that be and have come to nothing.
“In thus preserving the imperial ambitions of Russians,” Salagayev continues, “the powers that be are not showing any interest in the fate of the Russian people and in fact are struggling against those who recognize the real situation, calling such people Russian extremists or Russian fascists.”
Moscow continues to subsidize the non-Russian republics at far greater rates than the predominantly Russian areas, but its failure to support the Russian nation is undercutting its own imperial strategy because it is leading ever more ethnic Russians to flee non-Russian areas back to the center of the country.
In Salagayev’s opinion, “the situation is very similar to the policy of support of the national borderlands of the Soviet Union at the expense of the central oblasts which are populated primarily by Russians, a policy which in the final analysis led to the collapse of the USSR. It is obvious that such a policy will preserve the territorial integrity of Russia.”
The Kazan scholar suggests that there are two possible solutions to this situation, a “radical” one in which ethnic Russian oblasts would be formed and non-Russian republics liquidated, and a “moderate” one in which ethnic Russians would gain the same right to form national cultural autonomies that other nations now have.
Salagayev adds that some combination is likely, and he concludes by suggesting that Moscow must address the Russian question at home if it is to have any hope of protecting compatriots abroad, many of whom have been reduced to the status of “second class citizens” there in a way paralleling that of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation itself.
Russia Can Avoid Second Generation Immigrant Problem, Moscow Demographer Suggests
Staunton, October 24 – Much of the unrest among immigrants in France in recent times has come not from the first generation of immigrants who often feel compelled to accept discrimination as a price for improved economic circumstances rather from the second whose members demand that they be treated equally.
Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Moscow Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics, argues that in Russia, the situation is different and that despite the problems that country is experiencing with the first migrant generation, it is in a position to “make a bet on the children of migrants” (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/118/10.html).
But if that is the upside of Vishnevsky’s analysis, his suggestion that immigrants will change the face of Russia over the next several generations is likely to anger many Russian nationalists and frighten a larger number of ordinary Russians who may be drawn to xenophobic causes.
Few of the adults in the first generation of immigrants will fully integrate into Russian society, he says. “but if they have children or if such children appear already in emigration, their prospects for emigration are entirely different.” If these children learn Russian, “study together with [Russian] children, live together with [Russians], then they will fit into our society.”
As the experience of other countries shows, however, that outcome is not a given. “For this,” Vishnevsky says, “a special long-term policy directed at their integration must be conducted.” But unless Russia adopts such a policy, the decline in the country’s population will not stop.
As his interviewers noted, Vishnevsky recently pointed out that “in 2100, the current population of Russia and its descendents will be converted into a minority; that is, in essence, this will be a different and new population of the country.” Consequently, they suggested, he was talking about the formation of a new and different nation altogether.
Vishnevsky said that such a prospect was not utopian and pointed to the experience of the United States where WASPS are rapidly losing their preponderant position, and he said that “besides that, this is the only possible path for Russia,” however different it is from that country’s past and however much some Russians may object.
In the decade ahead, the problem will become even more acute than it is now, he points out. The number of young mothers will “sharply fall” and as a result, so too will the number of births.” Moreover, there will be “fewer young men,” which means fewer draftees, something the military will oppose but only with a negative impact on the economy.
Russians are not about to become a minority in their own country, Vishnevsky says, “but in the distant perspective, it is impossible to exclude that.” And because that is a possibility, Russians need to think now about how they will integrate the migrants and thereby create a new combined nationality.
What that will look like should be the subject of discussion. What is it that Russians want to preserve: “The preservation of racial identity? Or linguistic and cultural?” These are “different” things. “The racial composition of the population could be changed but the language and culture could remain Russian,” albeit “enriched” by the contributions of the arrivals.
What will happen depends to a very large extent on what Russian politicians decide to do, Vishnevsky argues, and he suggests that the outcome will depend not only on how the Russian powers that be treat immigrants but also what immigrants they encourage and accept, given that migrants is “a collective term.”
There are both permanent immigrants who will have an effect on the country’s demographic future and temporary ones who will play a major role in the economy but who won’t affect, at least not profoundly, the ethnic face of the country. Unfortunately, for policy makers, “there is no clear border” between these two groups.
As far as migration within the Russian Federation is concerned, Vishnevsky points out that “the Caucasus is the only region of Russia where there has been a demographic explosion,” and he argues that this underlies both the political and military dimension of the problem there. In sum, he says, in the North Caucasus, “there are a lot of people and only a little land.”
Vishnevsky said he had profound doubts about the possibility of promoting the return of ethnic Russians to that region as some officials have proposed. There simply are not the kind of jobs Russians want there. And of course, it will be extremely difficult to get predominantly ethnic Russian regions to accept more people from the Caucasus.
At the most global level, Moscow must permit, even encourage, more immigration if it wants to keep the population from falling. The post-1945 babies are now aging, and the number of young mothers is contracting As a result, now Russia needs about 200,000-300,000 immigrants every year. In five years, Vishnevsky says, it will need 500 to 800,000.
USSR’s Collapse Left 180 Ethnic Conflicts in Its Wake
Staunton, October 24 – The disintegration of the Soviet Union left approximately 180 places, many along borders put in place by Stalin, where ethno-national tensions are high and where in approximately 20 cases they have already broken out in violence, according to Vladimir Zorin, a Moscow ethnographer who served as Russia’s last minister for nationality affairs.
In an interview with “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” Zorin, who is now deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology but served as nationalities minister until Vladimir Putin disbanded that agency, outlines why Russians should be concerned about that reality (kp.ru/daily/24578/748669/).
On the one hand, Zorin told the paper’s Galina Sapozhnikova, it is a mistake to become too alarmed by the recent upsurge in ethnic violence. Such violence tends to surge in the summer months, and experts have concluded that there has been “a stabilization in [Russia’s] social-political situation [over the last 10-15 years] including in the area of inter-ethnic relations.”
That is not to say, he continues, that there are no problems with “migrant-ophobia, Caucasus-ophobia and anti-Semitism,” but “these are marginal phenomena” rather than being a matter of “state policy” or reflecting “the point of view of the majority of the population” of the Russian Federation.
But on the other hand, Zorin insists, there is a real basis for concern “because conflicts are the borderlands of the former USSR are not resolved and have acquired a delayed status and can at any moment break out anew,” as events in Kyrgyzstan over the last several months have demonstrated.
Moscow experts, the ethnographer continues, had taken note of “a significant growth in tensions” there already last year and had predicted a disaster which “to one’s great regret has taken place.” One reason the expert community was sure that would happen is because of the cyclical pattern of ethnic conflicts.
“In the 1990s,” Zorin points out, “there was also an inter-ethnic conflict in this region And conflicts of this kind have a tendency to display a cyclical return after 15 to 20 years. A young generation grows up which has experienced terror, denigration and fear, and it wants revenge” – a pattern that is not limited to the Uzbek south of Kyrgyzstan.
Russians are “not indifferent about how the Russian-language population in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and any other new independent state feels,” Zorin continues, “just as residents of these countries absolutely are not indifferent if Tajiks and Uzbeks are killed [in the Russian Federation]. All this is very interconnected.”
Among “the first-order Russian risks,” the former nationalities minister says, are “the growth of tension on the borders of our countries and especially in the countries of the CIS. Many of these conflict situations were laid down by the national-territorial delimitation carried out” by Stalin, who believed “this ‘cocktail of peoples’ would strengthen the country.”
“The roots of the Osh conflict, the second series of which we observed in May 2010, are to be found there,” Zorin says. He adds that “experts have counted such zones (of various degrees of tension, numbers, and size of territory) are approximately 180.” Not all have exploded by “20 of them have already been realized in various forms, in armed and unarmed conflicts.”
Thus, Zorin argues, the division of the Soviet Union was not only a tragedy as Putin has said but the cutting apart of something living as Mikhail Gorbachev argued. At the same time, however, it was not the Russians who “redrew” the borders, the stability of which had been “the capstone of stability” in post-war Europe.”
He points to the case of Kosovo, where the West recognized border changes, arguing that “if the world goes along the path of the Kosovo variant and begins to support separatism, this could have unpredictable consequences.” But like most Russian commentators, he does not discuss Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, at least directly.
In response to a question about the possibility of “solving” such conflicts, Zorin argues that “it is impossible” to return to the status quo ante. Instead, what is “most important is to extinguish the armed stage” of the conflict, a step that he suggests is “a major success” given the difficulty of getting the sides to make a compromise.
Not all potential disputes have to break out into violence, he says, but that can happen “if they will be used by political forces for the resolution of specific ambitious tasks and if the powers that be, acting in an illiterate fashion, do not begin to consider the ethno-political factor in the resolutions which they take.”
“For example,” Zorin says, “everyone knows about the Transdniestria situation. But they forget that in this same Moldova, there was also a Gagauz problem. It has been resolved; a formula has been found. [And] that means it is possible to find other formulas” for other conflicts.
One of the best means, Zorin suggests, is the use of federalism. In the 1990s, Moscow pushed Georgia to become a federation “but [then-President Zviad] Gamsakhurdia did not want to listen to anyone.” And as a result, Russia, “where the most numerous people forms 80 percent of the population, retained a federal system,” but the other states did not create one.
Fears among Russian leaders about new ethnic conflicts are very real, of course. And one indication of that is the comment of Vladislav Surkov, the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, to a meeting in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Friday (www.interfax.ru/politics/news.asp?id=161634).
In words that recall Winston Churchill’s declarations about the permanence of British rule in India, Surkov said that “everyone must know that the Caucasus was and forever will remain a constituent part of Russia,” something about which he suggested “the leadership of Russia has not the slightest doubt.”
By Paul Goble
source:
http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20272&Itemid=72
Aleksandr Salagayev further argues that “the legal vacuum which characterizes the situation of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation and the position of the powers that be who are ignoring this contradiction is the source of inter-ethnic conflicts with migrants, the extremism of Russian organizations in Russia and the weakness of Russian diasporas abroad.
In a 3200-word essay posted on the Regnum.ru news agency, Salagayev, a specialist on social and political conflicts at the Kazan State Technological University, traces the long and complicated history of the relations between the ethnic Russian nation and the states within which it has existed (www.regnum.ru/news/1337042.html).
Prior to 1917, he notes, “Russians were an imperial nation.” The state’s slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” applied only to them, but the Russian nation included the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the Belarusians, as one might expect an imperial people, as opposed to a nation, to do.
The country’s nationality policy changed dramatically with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks. Their ideas about “proletarian internationalism,” Salagayev argues, instituted “a double standard” with the rights of the non-Russians being protected and the rights of the ethnic Russians as a community being ignored or at least slighted.
While that balance shifted over time, the Kazan scholar says, many now believe that “the main cause of the destruction of the USSR was the weakening of the Russian ethnos and the loss of its role in economic and state-political life which took place after the October 1917 coup” that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In the first years of Soviet power, the communist tilt toward the non-Russians was most pronounced, with the non-Russians being given republics and the ethnic Russians, routinely denounced for “great power chauvinism,” being denied one repeatedly. Salagayev notes that efforts to form a Russian republic were blocked by Soviet leaders in 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926.
After Stalin declared “the final solution of the nationality question in the USSR” in 1934, the Russian nation was redefined. No longer was it “the former oppressor nation” with a historic “debt” to the others, but rather the Russian nation became the elder brother – or as “Leningradskaya Pravda” put it in 1937, “the eldest among equals.”
But despite the rhetorical change, Russians were still expected to provide funding for the non-Russians to help them catch up with modernity, a policy that continued throughout the rest of the Soviet period and one that by “ignoring the interests of the Russian people [was] inevitably accompanied by Russophobia” on the part of the regime.
That is because this attitude “was expressed not so much in the denial of the ‘positive features of the Russian nation and its positive contribution to world history’ as in a fear of the Russian national factor … and the possible resistance from the side of the most numerous people of the communist reconstruction of the country and the world.”
Indeed, KGB and then CPSU leader Yuri Andropov famously observed, Salagayev recalls, that “the chief concern for us is Russian nationalism; as to the dissidents, we would take them all in one night.”
In short, “self-determination of the Russian people was assessed as chauvinism but the self-determination of other peoples was considered as a necessary condition of their national development,” Salagayev says. And as a result, “the national interests and the interests of Russians in autonomous formations were simply ignored.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this policy continued. “Ethnic mobilization” seized “all the ethnic groups” of the country except the ethnic Russians “who despite the actual loss of their imperial status preserve the illusions about their imperial destiny, responsibility for the fate of Russia and other such myths.”
Ethnic mobilization among ethnic Russians thus has been dominated by marginal groups like the RNE and Primorsky partisans and by “the spontaneous ethnic mobilization of Russians” in relatively small cities such as Kondopoga. In his article, Salagayev lists 22 such cases of the latter since 1999.
None of these efforts can be called successful, he says, largely because Moscow opposed all of them. The 1996 law on national-cultural autonomy did not apply to Russians and efforts beginning in 2001 to adopt “a law on the Russian people” were blocked by the powers that be and have come to nothing.
“In thus preserving the imperial ambitions of Russians,” Salagayev continues, “the powers that be are not showing any interest in the fate of the Russian people and in fact are struggling against those who recognize the real situation, calling such people Russian extremists or Russian fascists.”
Moscow continues to subsidize the non-Russian republics at far greater rates than the predominantly Russian areas, but its failure to support the Russian nation is undercutting its own imperial strategy because it is leading ever more ethnic Russians to flee non-Russian areas back to the center of the country.
In Salagayev’s opinion, “the situation is very similar to the policy of support of the national borderlands of the Soviet Union at the expense of the central oblasts which are populated primarily by Russians, a policy which in the final analysis led to the collapse of the USSR. It is obvious that such a policy will preserve the territorial integrity of Russia.”
The Kazan scholar suggests that there are two possible solutions to this situation, a “radical” one in which ethnic Russian oblasts would be formed and non-Russian republics liquidated, and a “moderate” one in which ethnic Russians would gain the same right to form national cultural autonomies that other nations now have.
Salagayev adds that some combination is likely, and he concludes by suggesting that Moscow must address the Russian question at home if it is to have any hope of protecting compatriots abroad, many of whom have been reduced to the status of “second class citizens” there in a way paralleling that of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation itself.
Russia Can Avoid Second Generation Immigrant Problem, Moscow Demographer Suggests
Staunton, October 24 – Much of the unrest among immigrants in France in recent times has come not from the first generation of immigrants who often feel compelled to accept discrimination as a price for improved economic circumstances rather from the second whose members demand that they be treated equally.
Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Moscow Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics, argues that in Russia, the situation is different and that despite the problems that country is experiencing with the first migrant generation, it is in a position to “make a bet on the children of migrants” (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/118/10.html).
But if that is the upside of Vishnevsky’s analysis, his suggestion that immigrants will change the face of Russia over the next several generations is likely to anger many Russian nationalists and frighten a larger number of ordinary Russians who may be drawn to xenophobic causes.
Few of the adults in the first generation of immigrants will fully integrate into Russian society, he says. “but if they have children or if such children appear already in emigration, their prospects for emigration are entirely different.” If these children learn Russian, “study together with [Russian] children, live together with [Russians], then they will fit into our society.”
As the experience of other countries shows, however, that outcome is not a given. “For this,” Vishnevsky says, “a special long-term policy directed at their integration must be conducted.” But unless Russia adopts such a policy, the decline in the country’s population will not stop.
As his interviewers noted, Vishnevsky recently pointed out that “in 2100, the current population of Russia and its descendents will be converted into a minority; that is, in essence, this will be a different and new population of the country.” Consequently, they suggested, he was talking about the formation of a new and different nation altogether.
Vishnevsky said that such a prospect was not utopian and pointed to the experience of the United States where WASPS are rapidly losing their preponderant position, and he said that “besides that, this is the only possible path for Russia,” however different it is from that country’s past and however much some Russians may object.
In the decade ahead, the problem will become even more acute than it is now, he points out. The number of young mothers will “sharply fall” and as a result, so too will the number of births.” Moreover, there will be “fewer young men,” which means fewer draftees, something the military will oppose but only with a negative impact on the economy.
Russians are not about to become a minority in their own country, Vishnevsky says, “but in the distant perspective, it is impossible to exclude that.” And because that is a possibility, Russians need to think now about how they will integrate the migrants and thereby create a new combined nationality.
What that will look like should be the subject of discussion. What is it that Russians want to preserve: “The preservation of racial identity? Or linguistic and cultural?” These are “different” things. “The racial composition of the population could be changed but the language and culture could remain Russian,” albeit “enriched” by the contributions of the arrivals.
What will happen depends to a very large extent on what Russian politicians decide to do, Vishnevsky argues, and he suggests that the outcome will depend not only on how the Russian powers that be treat immigrants but also what immigrants they encourage and accept, given that migrants is “a collective term.”
There are both permanent immigrants who will have an effect on the country’s demographic future and temporary ones who will play a major role in the economy but who won’t affect, at least not profoundly, the ethnic face of the country. Unfortunately, for policy makers, “there is no clear border” between these two groups.
As far as migration within the Russian Federation is concerned, Vishnevsky points out that “the Caucasus is the only region of Russia where there has been a demographic explosion,” and he argues that this underlies both the political and military dimension of the problem there. In sum, he says, in the North Caucasus, “there are a lot of people and only a little land.”
Vishnevsky said he had profound doubts about the possibility of promoting the return of ethnic Russians to that region as some officials have proposed. There simply are not the kind of jobs Russians want there. And of course, it will be extremely difficult to get predominantly ethnic Russian regions to accept more people from the Caucasus.
At the most global level, Moscow must permit, even encourage, more immigration if it wants to keep the population from falling. The post-1945 babies are now aging, and the number of young mothers is contracting As a result, now Russia needs about 200,000-300,000 immigrants every year. In five years, Vishnevsky says, it will need 500 to 800,000.
USSR’s Collapse Left 180 Ethnic Conflicts in Its Wake
Staunton, October 24 – The disintegration of the Soviet Union left approximately 180 places, many along borders put in place by Stalin, where ethno-national tensions are high and where in approximately 20 cases they have already broken out in violence, according to Vladimir Zorin, a Moscow ethnographer who served as Russia’s last minister for nationality affairs.
In an interview with “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” Zorin, who is now deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology but served as nationalities minister until Vladimir Putin disbanded that agency, outlines why Russians should be concerned about that reality (kp.ru/daily/24578/748669/).
On the one hand, Zorin told the paper’s Galina Sapozhnikova, it is a mistake to become too alarmed by the recent upsurge in ethnic violence. Such violence tends to surge in the summer months, and experts have concluded that there has been “a stabilization in [Russia’s] social-political situation [over the last 10-15 years] including in the area of inter-ethnic relations.”
That is not to say, he continues, that there are no problems with “migrant-ophobia, Caucasus-ophobia and anti-Semitism,” but “these are marginal phenomena” rather than being a matter of “state policy” or reflecting “the point of view of the majority of the population” of the Russian Federation.
But on the other hand, Zorin insists, there is a real basis for concern “because conflicts are the borderlands of the former USSR are not resolved and have acquired a delayed status and can at any moment break out anew,” as events in Kyrgyzstan over the last several months have demonstrated.
Moscow experts, the ethnographer continues, had taken note of “a significant growth in tensions” there already last year and had predicted a disaster which “to one’s great regret has taken place.” One reason the expert community was sure that would happen is because of the cyclical pattern of ethnic conflicts.
“In the 1990s,” Zorin points out, “there was also an inter-ethnic conflict in this region And conflicts of this kind have a tendency to display a cyclical return after 15 to 20 years. A young generation grows up which has experienced terror, denigration and fear, and it wants revenge” – a pattern that is not limited to the Uzbek south of Kyrgyzstan.
Russians are “not indifferent about how the Russian-language population in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and any other new independent state feels,” Zorin continues, “just as residents of these countries absolutely are not indifferent if Tajiks and Uzbeks are killed [in the Russian Federation]. All this is very interconnected.”
Among “the first-order Russian risks,” the former nationalities minister says, are “the growth of tension on the borders of our countries and especially in the countries of the CIS. Many of these conflict situations were laid down by the national-territorial delimitation carried out” by Stalin, who believed “this ‘cocktail of peoples’ would strengthen the country.”
“The roots of the Osh conflict, the second series of which we observed in May 2010, are to be found there,” Zorin says. He adds that “experts have counted such zones (of various degrees of tension, numbers, and size of territory) are approximately 180.” Not all have exploded by “20 of them have already been realized in various forms, in armed and unarmed conflicts.”
Thus, Zorin argues, the division of the Soviet Union was not only a tragedy as Putin has said but the cutting apart of something living as Mikhail Gorbachev argued. At the same time, however, it was not the Russians who “redrew” the borders, the stability of which had been “the capstone of stability” in post-war Europe.”
He points to the case of Kosovo, where the West recognized border changes, arguing that “if the world goes along the path of the Kosovo variant and begins to support separatism, this could have unpredictable consequences.” But like most Russian commentators, he does not discuss Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, at least directly.
In response to a question about the possibility of “solving” such conflicts, Zorin argues that “it is impossible” to return to the status quo ante. Instead, what is “most important is to extinguish the armed stage” of the conflict, a step that he suggests is “a major success” given the difficulty of getting the sides to make a compromise.
Not all potential disputes have to break out into violence, he says, but that can happen “if they will be used by political forces for the resolution of specific ambitious tasks and if the powers that be, acting in an illiterate fashion, do not begin to consider the ethno-political factor in the resolutions which they take.”
“For example,” Zorin says, “everyone knows about the Transdniestria situation. But they forget that in this same Moldova, there was also a Gagauz problem. It has been resolved; a formula has been found. [And] that means it is possible to find other formulas” for other conflicts.
One of the best means, Zorin suggests, is the use of federalism. In the 1990s, Moscow pushed Georgia to become a federation “but [then-President Zviad] Gamsakhurdia did not want to listen to anyone.” And as a result, Russia, “where the most numerous people forms 80 percent of the population, retained a federal system,” but the other states did not create one.
Fears among Russian leaders about new ethnic conflicts are very real, of course. And one indication of that is the comment of Vladislav Surkov, the first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, to a meeting in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Friday (www.interfax.ru/politics/news.asp?id=161634).
In words that recall Winston Churchill’s declarations about the permanence of British rule in India, Surkov said that “everyone must know that the Caucasus was and forever will remain a constituent part of Russia,” something about which he suggested “the leadership of Russia has not the slightest doubt.”
By Paul Goble
source:
http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20272&Itemid=72
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