WindowonEurasia

'Window on Eurasia' Closing for the Time Being

2011-06-16T04:55:00.002-05:00

Because of family medical matters, I am indefinitely suspending my production of Windows on Eurasia. Over the course of almost seven years, I have thoroughly enjoyed producing more than 5500 of them and especially receiving the many comments from all of you that have made me feel part of a larger community. I thus sign off for the present at least with both regrets and thanks. Paul Goble

Window on Eurasia: Arab Spring Leads Authoritarian Leaders in Post-Soviet Space to Look to Moscow for Support

2011-06-08T09:56:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 8 – Even if conditions in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus are so different from those in the Arab world that a repetition of an Arab Spring there remains unlikely, the authoritarian rulers in these two regions are sufficiently nervous about popular unrest that they are looking to Moscow for possible support in the event of disorders.

Indeed, according to an article by Viktoriya Panfilova in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Russian and Uzbek experts say that the possibility of Russian support under such circumstances will be the focus of talks during President Dmitry Medvedev’s meetings with his Uzbek counterpart Islam Karimov in Tashkent next week (www.ng.ru/cis/2011-06-08/7_karimov.html).

Aleksey Malashenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center explicitly says that “during the negotiations in Tashkent, Islam Karimov will seek to clarify how and to what extent Russia can support Uzbekistan,” an issue that has become more important to the Uzbek leader since the meeting of the Uzbek opposition in Berlin.

“Karimov does not fear the actions of the opposition,” Malashenko says. “Uzbekistan is not Egypt but nevertheless he understands that life is changing. And in this changed environment,” the US is changing its relations with key allies such as Israel. Consequently, for Karimov, “it is important to understand how Moscow will conduct itself.”

That is all the more important for the Uzbek leader because in recent weeks, there have been several developments in Moscow which raise concerns for him. The Duma has discussed introducing a visa requirement for Uzbeks and other Central Asians, and the Russian media have featured articles about Andijan, where Karimov forcibly suppressed his opponents.

At the same time, Panfilova reports, other Russian experts, including Yevgeny Boyko, say that the Uzbek leader has reason for concern about where the West is heading regarding him and his regime. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom recently called for an end to assistance to Tashkent until Karimov guarantees freedom of religion.

This conjunction of Russian and American commentary, Malashenko says, means that Karimov may now be afraid of “the possibility of the development of a more consolidated position between Washington and Moscow concerning his own person,” a joint position that he may fear would threaten his political survival.

Boyko agrees, given that the situation of the Central Asian countries and particularly of Uzbekistan has often been profoundly affected by US-Russian relations. Consequently, the “Nezavismaya gazeta” writer suggests, he may seek to try to restore ties with Russia in order to reinsure his regime.

That is all the more so because the US is likely to pull its forces out of Afghanistan in the medium term and thus be less interested or willing to support Karimov’s regime. Moscow thus could be an increasingly important prop, but Moscow, other analysts say, will want a demonstration of loyalty, including the flow of gas northward to Russia rather than to Asia.

Many commentaries have speculated about the possible spread of the Arab Spring to the authoritarian states of the post-Soviet region, but it may be the case in many of these countries that the fears of the incumbent elites about such a political development will play a more important role in the geopolitics of the area than will any “disorders” that may arise.

Indeed, the fears of elites in these countries about challenges from below may drive them into the hands of Russia or open a new set of opportunities for China given that neither Moscow nor Beijing will put as high a value on human rights as the West, and that geopolitical opportunity is likely to be at the center of discussions in those two capitals as well.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Senator’s Proposal to Restore Katorga as a Punishment Criticized

2011-06-07T06:21:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 7 – A member of the Federation Council has called for the restoration of the tsarist-era system of katorga under which those guilty of especially serious crimes such a terrorism, drug dealing or child murders would be sentenced to harsh physical labor without the possibility of commutation of sentence, or the right of correspondence.

Aleksey Aleksandrov, chairman of the Federation Council’s committee on constitutional law, speaking at a congress of jurists at Moscow State University this past week called for the introduction of the legal category of “evil doer” and the use of the katorga system as punishment for such criminals (svpressa.ru/society/article/44173/).

But Russian legal specialists are appalled by this idea. Lyudmila Alpern, the deputy head of the Center for the Support of the Reform of Criminal Justice, for example, told Andrey Polunin of “Svobodnaya pressa” that “our senators do not have a good idea of what katorga involved” in tsarist times or how it might be applied now.

In tsarist times, Alpern pointed out, there were various categories of katorga, some of which involved servitude of up to 20 years and some less with individuals convicted of certain crimes able to earn their way out of katorga while others were not. Thus the notion of permanent katorga would be an innovation.

During the Soviet period, “katorga did not exist.” Instead, “we had corrective labor camps. Of course, they were connected with a form of punishment which existed in tsarist times. This was group punishment,” a form which Europe dispensed with in the middle of the nineteenth century.” Katorga punishment was and is “amoral,” Alpern said.

The Soviet-era GULAG was much worse than katorga as it did not make allowances for prisoners to have their families with them. “Of course, for families, [it] was a terrible test: children sometimes died and women had great difficulties. But a fact remains a fact: toward the katorga inmate, the authorities acted in a human way.”

The GULAG system “destroyed this, and that was why it was so different from katorga. In the Soviet GULAG, an individual was connected to no one, he was completely deprived of social possibilities and he was made into an absolute slave,” something that had not been true of those sentenced to katorga.

Alpern said that despite the call for the restoration of katorga, the Russian penitentiary system is very different now compared to tsarist times. The main reason is ideological. In tsarist times, the authorities did not try to reeducate or reform anyone, demanding only work and then leaving prisoners more or less on their own in the barracks.

In those barracks, the tsarist-era prisoners set their own rules, were visited and sent food and even clothes and money by Russians beyond the walls because people at that time “understood that everyone could become a katorga inmate and thus called those arrested ‘sufferers’ or ‘unfortunates.’

Today, Alpern continued, “other norms” govern the situation. Jails attempt to reeducate people, but those outside the prison walls are not so inclined to view them as people much like themselves, instead assuming that they are hardened criminals who deserve whatever punishment they are given.

Conditions in Russian prisons have improved since the 1990s when such institutions were inadequately funded, prisoners forced to wear their own clothes, and disease rampant, but Alpern said, Russia still has a long way to go to come up to the standards of the European penal model, although it has made progress.

Talk about restoring katorga does nothing to promote this process, but it may create another real problem for Moscow. Some Siberians are worried that their land could against be “the place for katorga,” something that will make their situation even more a “genuine” katorga than it already is (www.baikal24.ru/page.php?action=showItem&type=news&id=58783).

Window on Eurasia: Salafis Employ Flashmob Technique to Bring 5,000 Young Daghestanis into the Streets

2011-06-07T06:20:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 7 – In a startling demonstration of the spread of new technologies to the North Caucasus, the leaders of the Salafi trend in Islam in Daghestan, one at odds with the dominant Sufi trend there and often associated with political radicalism, used the flashmob technique to bring 5,000 young people into the streets of Makhachaka last week.

In reporting on this event, which was staged in order to demonstrate to visitors from Moscow that people in that republic are not going to sit still for the current situation there much longer, the Islamic Civilization web portal said that this “Islamist flashmob can be called an historic event for Daghestan” (http://www.islamcivil.ru/article.php?aid=647).

“For the first time,” the portal said, “Muslim youth have expressed their unambiguous protest to that disorder which characterizes the republic regarding human rights and civic freedoms” and their support for the Salafis who stand against the dominant Sufi trend of Islam in Daghestan.

According to the organizers, the site continued, “they did not have any certainty that even 1,000 people would come” when they issued their flashmob call. “But no fewer than 5,000 did,” an outcome which shows the flashmob technique works even in relatively backward Daghestan and that Salafi Islam can assemble more than trade unions, United Russia or other groups.

This is such a breakthrough event that it is worth recounting in some detail. During the morning of June 1, young people began to assemble on Makhachkala’s Rodop boulevard. Many people were out because it was the Day of the Defense of Children. But “the Salafi youth decided,” the portal says, “to stage a certain flashmob.”

“Among the people were not evident followers of the other bloc, tariqat Islam,” an indication that this was a Salafi enterprise. When about 3,000 had assembled, the crowd moved up Gamzatov prospect toward the National Library where the Russian President’s Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights was meeting.

According to Daghestani officials, “the Salafis who had assembled at the National Library did not have the right to meet and hence to speak and display placards.” The crowd remained largely silent at the urging of their leader Abbas Kebedov, the leader of the Salafii organization Aklu-s-Sunna val-Jamaa, who asked that they not “give in to provocations.”

At that time, a column of interior ministry OMON troops from the Urals approached. Some in the Salafi crowd then shouted “Allah Akbar,” and the militia formed a defense line apparently fearful of what might happen. If anyone had shot at that moment, there could have been a disaster.

But what happened instead was this: the militia asked the crowd to move away from the National Library, and the Salafi leaders led the group to the Salafi mosque on Kotrov Street.” The crowd moved toward the mosque,” gathering others on the way with “some taking pictures of the march on their mobile telephones.”

After prayers at the mosque, Kebedov arrived along with other Salafi activists. He called on the young people to “preserve” their peaceful approach, “to remain in the mosque and not in any case to go to the forum at the library building,” given that the OMON had brought up armored vehicles.

The Daghestani authorities, Kebedov told the crowd, “do not want a resolution to the difficult situation which exists in the republic.” The only hope therefore is on “delegates from Moscow.” But he continued, “this is our victory; today we have been able to do this.” His speech was “accompanied by shouts of ‘Allah Akbar!’”

The visitors from Moscow “did not come to the mosque as had been decided earlier; insteadof this, five representatives of the Salafi community were delegated to meet with them.” The Salafi representatives were chosen and accompanied Kebedov and others to the forum. According to the Islamic Civilization report, there took place “a sharp and open conversation.”

“Today,” the Salafi representatives said, “five thousand people assembled. Today, they stood peacefully; tomorrow, if nothing is done to stop the situation in Daghestan with kidnappings and murders of innocent people, nothing will stop these young men.” According to the portal, “this monologue, it was clear, had an impact on the guests.”

Window on Eurasia: Non-Russians Winning ‘Memory Wars’ while Russians Still Losing Theirs, Bordyugov Says

2011-06-07T06:19:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 7 – The non-Russian countries in the post-Soviet space are more or less quickly “liberating themselves from the Soviet and Imperial past,” but the Russians have not found a way – or do not want to find one – to do the same thing, according to a leading Moscow specialist on contemporary history.

In yesterday’s “Novaya gazeta,” Gennady Bordyugov, a member of the RIA Novosti council of experts, sums up the findings of his latest book, “Memory Wars on the Post-Soviet Space” (in Russian, Moscow, 2011) by noting that “history is again playing a mean joke with Russia” in this regard (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2011/060/18.html).

Russia’s inability or unwillingness to make progress in this regard, he says, helps to explain why many Russians have reacted so angrily to what is taking place in the CIS countries and the Baltics in recent years, a reaction that many observers since 2005 have characterized as “wars” over memory.

Such observers, Bordyugov continues, in recent times have argued that these wars are calming down, pointing to the March 2008 appeal of Memorial for “peaceful dialogue about the common past” and to the decision of most but of course not all post-Soviet states to mark Victory Day, arguably the most important civic holiday in Russia.

But in fact, the historican says, Russia will continue to face “memory wars” for some time to come, perhaps less often in the realm of foreign relations than within the country itself. Deep disagreements over Stalin, the Lenin Mausoleum, the approaching 400th anniversary of the Romanovs, the centenary of World War I, and the revolution all guarantee that.

In each of these cases and in others as well, he points out, the essence of the divide will be over how to say “farewell” to the Soviet and Imperial pasts or face their “re-animation in new forms.” And all of those debates will be conditioned by the process of “re-Stalinization or de-Stalinization” now taking place.

The commission formed by the Kremlin to oppose “the falsification of history” will defend Soviet traditional assessments of most historical events, but that commission’s approach will be opposed by another Kremlin body, the Council of Human Rights, which has proposed a broad program of de-Stalinization.

Indeed, Bordyugov argues, the methods of these two groups regarding historical memory are remarkably similar. “Representatives of both sides presuppose the continued politicization of history, the suppression of those who think differently, “a unification of approaches to the past,” and so on, first in the schools and then more generally.

Another reason for that assumption, Bordyugov suggests, is that “de-Stalinization is a reflection of the new ideological course of Medvedev,” a course that ensures that Russians are “on the eve of a new outbreak of ‘memory wars,’” this time as so often in the past one “subordinate to the struggle for power.”

There is “a way out” of all this, the historian says. It requires an end to the politicization of the Soviet past and to the use of discussions about that past as part of electoral struggles. In fact, there should be “a temporary moratorium on themes that call forth a split in society,” as so many of these issues do.

“A wise policy on history could allow for filling the great and tragic Soviet epoch with a human context, in the contexts of which ‘memory wars’ would become senseless,” Bordyugov argues, something that must be approached with care because “the transition from ‘soviet’ to ‘russian’ is far from completion.

Another means of reducing the intensity of “memory wars,” he says, is “the inclusion of national histories within the broader space of the past.” That too will be hard because “our current political and simply human culture to put it mildly is far from perfection” and thus there will always be a temptation to fight about the past.

But while the obstacles to moving beyond “memory wars” are clear, Bordyugov says, their recollection should not become a reason for not trying to overcome them. Moving beyond them is a precondition for achieving “a humane view of the past,” a view which unlike many positions now on offer avoids both demonization and panegyrics.

Window on Eurasia: Internet Changing Russian Political Humor and Russian Politics as Well, Commentator Says

2011-06-06T04:10:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 6 – Anecdotes about leaders and policies have long been an important part of Russian life, but the Internet is transforming its form and content because falling prices for connectivity are increasing the number of users and rising download speeds are making video clips more widely accessible, according to a Moscow commentator.

On the “Russky zhurnal” portal, Aleksandr Chausov argues that at present Russians are “observing an evolution of the form of jokes about politicians and politics as a whole,” with “the transition from television to the Web and the development of Internet technology being decisive events in this process (www.russ.ru/pole/O-politike-s-yumorom).

As a result of the spread of the Internet, he says, Russians can now watch video clips and look at thousands of images rather than relying primarily on text alone, and “the video clip is understood by an individual much easier than the typical text, however brilliantly it may be written.” As a result, Chausov continues, humor is increasingly taking a visual form.

In addition, the sense of “anonymity and security” that the Web appears to allow “gives rise to the illusion that everything is possible,” and the increasing use of the Internet and especially video in political campaigns invites those who want to make jokes about the politicians who use this format to do the same.

This has led, Chausov says, to the appearance of “a new and unexpected phenomenon” as far as Russian mass culture is concerned: the appearance of “political comics on the Net.” In the West, “so called video comics or computer comics” are not a new phenomenon, And in Russia, they are no full-blown, with most including written texts instead of only oral presentations.

But these are instructive as far as political humor is concerned, Chausov argues. “The most well-known [of these] are the super hero comics.” Russian society “unconsciously is waiting for a hero, someone who will come and save everyone.” That is because, however much they joke about it, Russians view the powers as “a sacral phenomenon.”

That in turn means that “the bearers of power are a little super human. They can be ‘evil doers’ or ‘heroes,’ but all the same they are of a different order than ‘the ordinary man.’” That was true of the “Puppets” series on television, and it is even more clearly manifested on Internet video clips about the current leadership.

However, there is one interesting detail, Chausov says. Vladimir Putin in most of these clips is presented not only as a super hero but also as “’a man like everyone else,’” a unique case in Russian humor. While it is unclear how this combination will play itself out – whether the sacred will conquer the ordinary or the other way around – it likely will affect Russian culture.

In the most hopeful outcome, one likely to become more possible as the Internet grows, this will “take out of the mentality of our society the genetic sense of the sacred nature of power,” something that will open the way for a different relationship between those in power and those in society than has ever existed in Russia up to now.

And that possibility becomes clearer if one understands that “in the Russian segment of the Net, there is a somewhat different approach to politics and politicians than in the United States. There, “politics has already for a long time been to a certain degree a show” and politicians as a result “not only administrators and government managers but showmen.”

Window on Eurasia: Russians Now Feel They are Second Class Citizens in their Own Country, Moscow Writer Says

2011-06-06T04:08:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 6 – Six months after the clashes in Manezh Square, radical Russian nationalists groups are increasing their activity, supported by the increasing number of ethnic Russians who feel that they are second class citizens in their own country because the powers that be are giving more support to North Caucasians and Central Asian immigrants.

In an article in Friday’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta” entitled “Russians Feel a Sense of National Inequality in Their Own Country,” Maksim Glukharev provides a wealth of detail on the activities of radical Russian nationalist groups, pointing out that Moscow has banned only three of “about 30” and allowed the banned groups to operate under different names.

But the most intriguing portion of his article concerns the attitudes among ordinary Russians as opposed to members of elite groups that help explain why an increasing number of the former are supporting the nationalists and why few of the latter are willing to talk about this increasingly dangerous trend (www.ng.ru/politics/2011-06-03/1_nacionalizm.html).

Glukharev suggests that the answers to both questions are to be found in the very different life experiences of the two groups. “It is well known,” he points out, that members of the powers that be in contrast to the population “never personally encounter manifestations of nationalism” by outside groups.

Travelling about in official cars, these elites “do not risk finding themselves” in places where there are “spontaneous” clashes between “extremists and gastarbeiters.” Therefore, they do not risk being accused of being part of disorders simply when they turn out to be witnesses of such events.”

Moreover, while the elites “send their children abroad to study,” other Russians have to send their children to schools which increasingly, albeit informally “are divided into two camps, those for the Russians and those for the Caucasians,” with ever more Russians asking why they are supporting those who are shooting at them.

Glukharev points out that “the activity of the [Russian nationalist radicals] frequently has mass support from the side of ordinary people who observe the complete escape from punishment of representatives of diaspora communities. People,” he says, “feel sharply the injustice of the existing situation.”

Ordinary Russians “do not understand why arrivals from the Caucasus and countries of the near abroad frequently act so boldly, driving about in expensive foreign cards and while ignoring Russian laws engage in firefights in public places?” Where are the law enforcement agencies when these things are happening – and why do they so often let these miscreants go?

When leaders, including Vladimir Putin, deny the obvious, claiming that there is no ethnic dimension to this or that crime, Russians become even angrier because from their point of view it is obvious that there is just such a dimension. “This situation gives rise to that objective component of dissatisfaction which was displayed in the Manezh Square” last December.

That component can be described as the sense that many Russians have that they are being treated less well than members of other ethnic groups and that officialdom is protecting the minorities rather than the ethnic Russians. And not surprisingly, such feelings are being used by “various extremist organizations.”

According to Glukharev, what happened in Manezh Square is “an indicator of deep problems in the attitudes of society -- based, in particular, on a lack of acceptance of the corrupt ties between people from the Caucasus and Asian regions and members of the Russian organs of power.

If this situation is going to change, the “Nezavisimaya gazeta” writer suggests, there must be “at a minimum a discussion in society because in order to resolve such complicated problems, the powers must base themselves on society. But how can they do so when society doesn’t trust them – and has serious reasons for not trusting them?”

After talking about nationalism in Russian society in the wake of Manezh six months ago, the country’s leadership “has not returned to the theme.” The powers that be have an explanation: “any incautious word could provoke new inter-ethnic conflicts. But keeping quiet about these problems is to put one’s head in the sand – and to await the next Manezh.”

Window on Eurasia: Politicians Exploit, Exacerbate ‘Clash of Civilizations’ in Moldova

2011-06-06T04:07:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 6 – In the run-up to local elections in Moldova yesterday, some politicians sought to exploit Chisinau’s March 14th decision to register a Muslim group thereby making it appear that Moldova is riven by “a clash of civilizations” -- even though Moldova has only 300 Muslims and even though few objected when the registration decision was originally made.

In an essay on Win.ru, Irina Katanina sorts out this discussion which has attracted some attention abroad both in its own right and because of what it says about the way in which electoral politics can divide societies along ethno-religious lines when the minority constitutes a larger share of the population (www.win.ru/topic/7383.phtml).

As she points out, the appearance of “the Islamic factor” in these local elections was “unexpected” given that there are so few Muslims there and that “in the majority of districts of Moldova” – the major exception being Turkic Gagauzia – “the construction of Muslim religious facilities would take place relatively peacefully.

In March, the Moldovan justice ministry registered the first Muslim organization in that country, the Islamic League of Moldova. That body, its leader Timur Turdugulov said, is to “protect and defend the rights of Muslims of Moldova. Earlier efforts in 1995 and 2005 to register Muslim groups there had been rejected.

As Katanina points out, “Moldova is an Orthodox country,” with sociological surveys showing that “not less than 96 percent” of its citizens profess Orthodoxy. And she notes as well that even during the 300 years of Ottoman rule, “not a single mosque was built” in what is now Moldova.

Sociologists report that there are “no more than 2000” Muslims in Moldova, and most of these are entrepreneurs from Turkey or Arab countries. Among Moldovan citizens, the scholars suggests, there are only “about 300” Muslims, a large fraction of whom are “new converts,” who have accepted Islam since 1991.

Within Moldova on this issue, the Gagauz occupy a special place. Speaking Turkish and at one point in the past themselves Muslim, the Gagauz “always particularly stress their attachment to Orthodoxy, and it was a Gagauz community organization, the Union of Orthodox Christians of Bujak who was “one of the first” to protest the March registration.

Consequently, while Moldovans elsewhere in the country would probably react quite peacefully to the appearance of a mosque or other Muslim institution, “it is possible to predict,” Katanina says, that “in Gagauzia there would be “stormy even violent action against such construction.”

That pattern makes the protests that have emerged during the electoral campaign elsewhere particularly instructive. Aleksandr Tenase, the former justice minister who signed the registration before his resignation, says that he had no legal basis to refuse given that “the Islamic League is not an extremist organization.”

And he suggested that “the crusade declared by religious leaders was organized by politicians with a single goal” – to attract attention by attacking anything their opponents had done. His view, Katanina says, is shared by “many observers” who point out that “the protests began not in March when the league was registered and not in April when people learned of it.”

Instead it began when the electoral campaign began. “Opposition communists who during the period of their ruloe did not allow Muslims to legalize themselves supported the priests,” with Igor Dodon, a candidate for mayor of Chisinau even declaring that “if he wins the elections, ‘there won’t be a mosque in the capital.’”

Representatives of “the majority of opposition figures, Katanina says, “also spoke out against” registration, ostensibly because “all responsibility for the possible explosive development of the interreligious situation in Moldova should be placed on the actions of the government of Vladimir Filat.”

“In any case,” Katanina concludes, “politicians of all masks who have been drawn into inter-confessional relations in the context of an electoral struggle well recognized the so-called ‘electoral profitability’ of this factor. “ But “apparently,” she continues, they haven’t reflected on how what they are doing may make the solution of real problems even more difficult later.

Window on Eurasia: Nations Far Beyond the North Caucasus May Seek Recognition of Genocides Conducted Against Them, Middle Volga Analyst Says

2011-06-04T07:18:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 4 – In the wake of Georgia’s recognition of the Circassian genocide, the head of the Volga Center of Regional and Ethno-Religious Research says, “it cannot be excluded” that there will soon be similar “campaigns” seeking similar international recognition of Russian-conducted genocides against the peoples of the Middle Volga and Siberia.

In an essay on the “Novoye Vostochnoye Obozreniye” portal yesterday, Rais Suleymanov whose center is part of the Russian Institute of Strategic Research argues that there is no reason to believe that the efforts to secure international recognition of genocide in Russia will be limited to the peoples of the North Caucasus (journal-neo.com/?q=ru/node/6876).

Indeed, he argues, both the purposes of the Circassian “campaign” and the way it was carried out make it likely that enemies of the Russian state will soon seek to repeat the Circassian model elsewhere in the Russian Federation, in the first instance in the Middle Volga and then among the peoples of Siberia.

According to Suleymanov, the use of the charge of genocide by Georgia and especially its President Mikhail Saakashvili is “directed at the intensification of anti-Russian attitudes in the Caucasus and more broadly in the future, in all national republics of Russia, including those in the Urals-Volga region and Siberia.”

Georgia’s action, he says, is intended to change the attitudes of “the current generation of North Caucasus peoples of Russia … toward their own country and citizens of which they are” and make them view it as “a state criminal which did not simply include the Caucasus in its own territory but wiped out their ancestors, driving htem from their historical lands.”

Putting it blluntly, Suleymanov says, this effort is intended to “insert into the consciousness an dhistorical memory of young Caucasians the idea that the presence of Russia in the Caucasus is illegitimate,” a view Russians with the exception of “part of the liberal intelligentsia” overwhelmingly reject.

Yana Amelina, the head of the Sector of Caucasus Research of the Russian Institute of Strategic Research, told Suleymanov that she fully agreed that Georgia’s sstep was political and “directed at the further complication of Russian-Georgian relations.” Tbilisi clearly hopes to destabilize the Caucaus and to embarrass Moscow concerning the Sochi Olympics.

Vladimir Belyayev, a professor of political science, sociology and management at the Kazan Technical University, agrees with this analysis as well. And Suleymanov reports that Irina Shebotnev, a member of the Jewish community in the Tatar capital, is angry that anyone would seek to extent the concept of the Holocaust to the Caucasus.

However, there are some supporters of Georgia’s action in the Middle Volga, Suleymanov continues. Rafiz Kashapov, the president of the Naberezhny Chelny section of the Tatar Social Center (TOTs) and a leading Tatar nationalist, says he has backed the Circassian effort since 2005.

Given that others now think the same way or can be made to think that way, Suleymanov argues, “one should not think that the campaign initiated from abroad for the recognition of genocides supposedly committed by Russia (read the Russian people) over the course of its history will be limited to the Circassians only.”

According to him, there is a well-developed political technology that may be applied to other parts of the Russian Federaiton. “Everything will begin,” the Circassian effort shows, with “the foreign and Russian liberal press” writing stories about “mass murders supposedly committed by Russia against the civilian non-Russian population.”

Of course, in the case of the Middle Volga, this will focus on events in the mid-16th century rather than the 19th as in the case of the Circassians, Suleymanov says.

“Then there will be organized in foreign countries inte3rnational scholarly conferences and various ‘round tables’ at which with a wise view will be reported on numerous ‘Holocausts’ committed by Russia agains the Tatars, Bashkirs, and the peoples of Siberia.” There may even be documentary films “about ‘the bloody policy of Russia’ and several ‘scholarly’ books.”

“The goal of the entire ideological campaign will be to change the historical memory and worldview of non-Russian peoples in which their own Russian state, the citizens of which they are will be viewed as an enslaver, a criminal and finally simply as the source of evil,” against which a struggle will be viewed as “liberating and noble.”

The strategy of the foreign world is “obvious,” Suleymanov says. “If part of the population will conceive their own state as illegitimate than this will only make possible the development of internal disintegrating consequences.”

And thus it is “possible that we will soon hear declarations by local separatists of Tatarstan about how horrible it is” that Moscow wants to “hold in Kazan the Universiad 2013 or the world football championship in 2018 – in this case ‘on the bones of the Tatar people,’” rather than the Circassian one.

Window on Eurasia: ‘Nostalgia’ for Stalin among Young Reflects Moscow’s Failure to Offer a Concrete Alternative Vision, Scholars Says

2011-06-03T07:57:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 3 – Young Russians increasingly deify Stalin not only because he represents a system radically different from that of Russia today but also because the contemporary Russian state has failed to offer a specific ideological alternative that is not mired in abstraction, accord to two Russian scholars.

In the course of a St. Petersburg conference last week on “Russian Self-Consciousness and the Space of Russia,” which concluded that this consciousness today is “under the power of destructive myths,” two participants addressed the increasing popularity of Stalin among Russian youth who never lived under the dictator (www.rosbalt.ru/piter/2011/05/28/853135.html).

Dmitry Astashkin, a professor of journalism at Novgorod State University, noted that “alongside attempts to borrow elements of foreign cultures, in contemporary Russian society there is a tendency to return to the Soviet model,” often among those and in places where few might expect it, especially in its extreme forms.

“Stalinist types and the personality of Stalin himself are viewed as the symbol of this model,” Astashkin said, in large measure because of their “radical difference from the present situation of the Russian Federation.” And this is expressed “among the most passionate part of society,” the young.

For Russian youth, he suggested, “Stalin and his activity are being mythologized, and [the dictator himself] is becoming a symbol of non-conformism, set in opposition [by younger Russians] to contemporary culture and the state arrangements” of the Russian Federation at the present time.

“A positive attitude toward Stalin is [thus] step by step ceasing to be found only among pensioners and veterans and is becoming part of the subculture of the youth.” The dictator is now referred to in popular songs, computer games, and in internet forums, a trend that was especially marked in the run-up to the May 9 Victory Day celebrations.

Astashkin suggested that it is “interesting” that “when talking about Stalin, young people are not in a position to operate on their own emotions and recollections,” since they were born after he died. “And that means that young Russians are borrowing ideas about Stalin from their own families.”

In short, “the real Stalin has been transformed into a myth about the Soviet empire, thus having ceased to be a dictator and having become a unique embodiment of a harsh style of administration and a symbol of order and social justice,” values that many young people are attracted to.

Consequently, Astashkin concluded, “until the state offers another path of development, Stalin will remain a resource for national identification” among Russians, something that may keep them in the sway of the past rather than allowing them to move forward into a different future.

A second speaker, Petr Smirnov, a professor at St. Petersburg State University, explored efforts by post-Soviet Russian governments to offer such an alternative basis for identity and pointed to the reasons why they have failed to take, especially among members of the younger generation.

The 1993 Constitution, Smirnov points out, represented “an attempt to offer another platform for national self-identification,” but it failed because it was too abstract. Instead of talking about specifically Russian values, it used language that could apply to any country on earth, thus limiting its utility and impact.

“The abstracted quality” and “all-human” nature of the provisions of the 1993 Constitution thus failed to find resonance among many Russians. According to Smirnov, it would have been better if the Russian Constitution had been formulated in a more distinctively Russian way.

For example, he suggests that instead of talking about human beings in general, the Constitution should have specified that “the highest value in the Russian Federation is recognized as the citizen of Russia, his life, dignity, rights and freedoms. The state is obligated to observe and defend conditions to allow each citizen to realize himself” fully.

Such a formulation, the St. Petersburg professor continues, “would have helped not only to limit the arbitrariness of all branches of state power and to serve as a reliable guide for conducting domestic and foreign policy but would have become the basis for the formation of a single Russian national identity of all ethnic groups within Russia.”

Window on Eurasia: Russia Needs a Centralized Nationalities Policy and a Ministry to Carry It Out, Deputies Say

2011-06-03T07:21:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 3 – The Russian government needs to adopt a nationalities policy for the country as a whole and to establish a special ministry to implement it, several Duma deputies say, pointing not only to the increasing number of ethnic conflicts around the country but also to the increasing and potentially dangerous tendency of the regions to go their own way in this area.

According to the Regions.ru portal, “local officials are hostages to a situation [in which ethnic conflicts are on the rise] and are forced to balance between the danger of accusations of xenophobia and support of nationalities on the one hand, and the danger of a new Kondopoga or Manezh, on the other (www.regions.ru/news/2357902/).

And their situation is becoming ever more problematic, the portal observes, because “the federal center as before is limiting itself to declarative language about the impermissibility of allowing the growth of xenophobic attitudes without offering any concrete decisions.” As a result, “local officials are trying to independently find ways of resolving this problem.”

As it often does on key issues, the portal has surveyed Russian parliamentarians concerning what should be done, and the ones with whom Regions.ru spoke, unanimously backed the idea of “creating in Russia a state organ which would occupy itself with the resolution of questions of nationality policy” rather than ceding power on this to the regions.

Vladimir Gusev, who represents Saratov oblast in the Federation Council, said that the time has come for the government to take up the question of inter-ethnic relations seriously and to create what does not now exist, a clearly defined nationality policy and a central bureaucracy to implement it.

In his view, “a multi-national country without a ministry for nationalities is nonsense.” He said that it was not important what this “organ” should be called, “a ministry, a committee, or a commission.” Rather, “the main thing, Gusev continued, “as is well known is not the form but its content.”

Amir Gallyamov, who represents the Amur oblast in the Federation Council, agreed. “Russia simply needs such an organization.” Without it, youth movements of a radical direction are growing stronger, some of which act against Muslims, others against Orthodox, a third against Russians, a fourth against Jews and so on.”

Gadzhimet Safaraliyev, a United Russia Duma deputy, also supported the idea of creating “a special government organ for nationality policy.” “Such a structure,” he said, existed in Soviet times and was headed in the early years by Joseph Stalin. A new Narkomnats is needed, he said, because the regional development ministry isn’t capable of resolving” all these issues.

Yury Afonin, a KPRF Duma deputy, added his support for such an agency, pointedly noting that “in questions of nationality policy, there is no place for independent activity at the regional level.” These questions “must be dealt with by a corresponding agency in the system of state power” and at the direction of the chief of state.

And Viktor Shudegov, a Just Russia Duma deputy, seconded that view. He said that the time had come to decide on a Russia-wide nationality policy and to set up an institution to ensure it is carried out. “Such agencies already exist at the regional level in a number of Russian Federation subjects, including in Udmurtiya which [he] represents.”

“Somehow or other,” he continued, “certain representatives of our power consider that if there is no federal ministry on nationality questions, then this means that there is no problem in this sphere.” But problems obviously do exist, Shudegov said, and they will continue until a policy is defined and an agency in Moscow set up.

Since Vladimir Putin disbanded the post-Soviet Russian ministry of nationalities a decade ago, there have been period calls for restoring it, but most of them have come now from politicians at the center worried about controlling the periphery but rather from non-Russians who believe such an institution would help them.

That makes this shift potentially significant, although there is a major hurtle to setting up such a ministry that none of these parliamentarians addressed: If such a body is given enough power to implement a nationalities policy, it will be a super-ministry and a threat to all others, but if it is not given such powers, it will simply become yet another bureaucratic structure.

Window on Eurasia: Radical Islam Again on the Upswing in Russia, Satanovsky Says

2011-06-03T06:57:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 3 – The liquidation of Osama bin Laden and Moscow’s military successes in the North Caucasus have inflicted “a serious defeat” to radical Islam in Russia, Yevgeny Satanovsky says, but despite these victories, Islamist radicals are regrouping themselves and present an ever greater threat to the Russian Federation.

In an interview published in the current issue of Lechaim.ru,” the president of the Moscow Institute of the Near East says that this development within Russia parallels but is not the product of the successes he says Islamists have been having across the Middle East in recent months (www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/230/interview1.htm).

Satanovsky says that he looks with concern “at the situation in Kabardino-Balkaria and in Daghestan, in the republics of the Middle Volga and in major Russian cities,” particularly because it appears the Russia is falling “into lethargy” regarding Islamic extremism and appears to be forgetting that “dragons are reborn,” even if there are only a few teeth left.

Given what he sees and given the threat that comes from Muslims of the Russian Federation who have studied abroad, the Russian specialist on the Middle East, said that it would be a good idea to think about building “a kind of ‘iron curtain’ … for particular groups of people returning to Russian from those Arab and Islamic countries” where there is turbulence.

In addition, he argues, the Russian authorities need to conduct “a serious filtration of the muftiats and begin systematic work with the Muslim population in order that there will appear a certain alternative view to those attitudes which are being introduced into Russia from the outside” at the present time.

Satanovsky suggests that it would be a particular mistake to conclude that there is any link between the destruction of Islamist radicals in the North Caucasus and the death of bin Laden. “No connection exists,” he says, adding that “this is simply a war, a war for years and decades, a war on many fronts.”

“And when on one of the fronts a breakthrough takes place, one should not expect that this will immediately have an impact on another front.” Moreover and perhaps most disturbingly, Satanovsky continues, the movements inspired or affected by the Islamists may take a variety of forms, some very different from what one might expect.

“The ‘golden youth’ from the republics of the North Caucasus and the Middle Volga, living on the territory of Russia, studying at the Institute of Oriental Studies, and appearing on television openly say that ‘the Russian project’ is finished. That is, today here is still Russia but tomorrow will be some kind of jamaar, emirate or separate state.”

Other commentators such as Roman Silantyev, the outspoken specialist on Islam in Russia who has close ties to the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian government, share Satanovsky’s view, but other specialists warn against taking such an apocalyptic view on this issue.

Aleksey Malashenko, a Carnegie Moscow Center scholar, for example, calls such suggestions, especially with regard to the Middle Volga an invitation to “a witch hunt.” In his view, there is no extremism of the kind Satanovsky describes. Indeed, he says, “it is silly to talk about a Salafite threat” (www.ansar.ru/analytics/2011/06/01/16407).

Window on Eurasia: Kulikov Urges Kremlin to Create New Body to Direct All Force Structures in Times of Trouble

2011-06-02T12:30:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 2 – Army General Anatoly Kulikov has called on the Kremlin to creqate a new body, modelled the National Counter-Terrorism Committee and centered in the military’s general staff, to coordinate the activities of all force structures during emergency situations, natural or man-made.

Kulikov made his proposal at the Military Commanders Club during a conference at the end of May on coordinating force structures during emergency situations. At that time, the general “recommended that the president and government create in the [Army’s] General Staff a permanent organ to coordinate the actions of force structures during emergency situations.”

At present, the Emergency Situations Ministry has primary responsibility for reacting to “technogenic and natural catastrophes, fires, accidents” and similar phenomena, and the Interior Ministry has responsibility for control of any demonstrations or protests. Kulikov’s ideas would give the military a major voice over both (www.ng.ru/politics/2011-05-30/3_kartblansh.html).

The general noted at the meeting that “a certain time ago, the Russian Security Countil had become the coordinating organ among the force structures, but in fact, coordination of actions is being realized only on the basis of decisions taken by the president of the country” rather than in a continuous way.

That is a mistake, Kulikov continued, arguing that “the coordinating organ must be a permanently functioning one like the National Counter-Terrorist Committee.” He added that “the General Staff has already agreed that on its base should be established an operational staff attached to the coordination committee of the Security Council.”

Once those arrangements are made, he said, “the General Staff will fulfill its basic function not only in the sphere of defense but in the sphere of security as well,” something it is “ideally” situated to do by means of the coordination “of the actions of the force structures, including the collection of information, the processing of data, the setting of tasks,” and so on.

As “Nezavisimaya gazeta” notes it its report on Kulikov’s remarks, the general’s formulation, “the General Staff has expressed agreement” is “an interesting way to put the question given that on May 6, President Dmitry Medvedev signed directive 590 which significantly broadened the purview of the Security Council.

That directive specified that the Council “is an independent subdivision of the Presidential Administration with the rights of an administration” and defined its functions as including “the guaranteeing of national security, the organization of the defense of the country, including the construction and development of the Armed Forcdes, other forces, and so on.”

Thus,, that directive means the Security Council “de jure already is playing a coordinating role in ensuring national security and the defense of the country.” What then is Kulikov talking about, especially since he calls for “an operational staff for emergency situations at the coordination committee of the Security Council. But there is no such committee.”

The Security Council has seven inter-agency commissions, “Nezavisimaya” reports, “one of which, for military security is headed by Army General Yury Baluyevsky,” an opponent of the defense ministry. Consequent, “if an operational staff for emergency situations were established” there, it would mean that the Security Council and not the General Staff would “by law play the coordinating role.”

That explains part of Kulikov’s proposal, but it also appears to reflect his rather broader understanding of emergency situations, an understanding that includes not just natural and technogenic disasters but also crimes and protests that threaten to get out of hand, possibly to the point of undermining state power.

If protests like the one in Manezh Square in December were to spread, “Nezavisimaya” continues, “then by themselves neither the interior ministry nor the emergency situations ministry would be able to cope.” But that still leaves open the question as to whether the General Staff could do so more effectively.

It is thus likely that Kulikov’s floating of this idea reflects not only the tensions that have always existed between the Russian military and other force structures but also the concerns of some in the senior officer corps and elsewhere that conditions in the Russian Federation are deteriorating to a point that they may have to play a most unfamiliar role sometime soon.

Window on Eurasia: Inequality, Poverty Characterize Post-Soviet States, Statistics Show

2011-06-02T11:00:00.001-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 2 – Even though the top ten percent of the population of the post-Soviet states are wealthier than they ever were in the past, three out of every four residents of the Russian Federation are now poor, according to official statistics, with the situation being even worse in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Azerbaijan and only a little better in Belarus.

In an article in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Anastsiya Bashkatova reports on what she describes as “the shocking findings about the inequality of incomes and poverty” in five post-Soviet states, a situation which has made “Russia and its nearest neighbors in the CIS brothers in social unhappiness” (www.ng.ru/economics/2011-06-02/4_antisocial.html).

That is because, Bashkatova continues, “the share of citizens with mid-range incomes in the largest economies of the CIS is several times lower than in socially oriented states,” an outcome that shows that “in essence, on the post-Soviet space have been built anti-social models of the economy.”

The economies of the five countries the experts reported on in “Voprosy statistiki” – Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Azerbaijan – share that in common with “the overwhelming majorities” of their populations belong to “the most needy and least secure stratas” and with “the highly paid either forming a minority or being absent statistically.”

Comparing the social pyramids in these countries with those typical of socially oriented countries is truly disturbing, the “Nezavisimaya gazeta” journalist says. In the latter, she points out, there are almost no citizens among the truly poor, those with less than average incomes form “about 20 percent,” those in the middle “about 60 percent,” and those well-paid 20 percent.

“Not one of the CIS countries listed,” she notes, “corresponded to this pattern of developed countries or was even close to it,” according to the analysis published in the Rosstat journal of data from 2008. Instead, they had far more poor and far fewer in the middle as far as income is concerned.

Indeed, “according to the data of sociologists and statisticians, in Russian there really is almost no middle class, because about 96 percent of Russians are poor and are distinguished from one another only by the level of impoverishment.” Only one percent is well-off by income, the investigators found.

The situation in Belarus is marginally better, “but in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Azerbaijan,” it is worse with “more than 90 percent” of the population part of the needy or low paid segments. In other CIS countries, the situation may be even worse. And the researchers say that all are “very far from the optimal market model of distribution.”

Moreover, they argue, according to the “Nezavisimaya gazeta” report, that the situation is even worse than that because their figures were based on income requirements set by the governments of these countries, requirements that are “much lower than in developed countries” and thus allow the regimes involved to claim more progress than they have in fact made.

“If one applies to the CIS countries western measures of minimum wages,” Bashkatova writes, “then Russia along with its nearest neighbors falls more clearly in the group of the poor nations of the third world,” an indictment of their governments and a likely source of growing social tensions.

Window on Eurasia: Tajik Officials Have Closed 1500 Mosques Since Start of 2011

2011-06-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 2 – In the latest of a series of moves that recall the Soviet approach to Islam in Central Asia, Tajikistan has closed some 1500 mosques, in many cases at least nominally because their leaderships have failed to secure registration, health and tax documents that Dushanbe has been reluctant to give even when imams have applied for them.

The Islamsng.com portal reported yesterday that the Tajik government “continues to interfere in the religious life” of a republic where Islam and politics are not only thoroughly intermixed but one where the clashes in neighboring Afghanistan are continuing to shake the foundations of the state (islamsng.com/tjk/news/1994).

According to the report, Dushanbe has closed 1500 mosques this year, citing their owners for failing to have the necessary tax documents, permissions from the fire and health services, and official permission from district administrations – even though one imam, Inomjon Saidov, said that he had been trying to get such documents for two years.

Over the last two decades and largely because of the weakness of government institutions, the portal continued, mosques have appeared “on every large street” in Dushanbe and other Tajik cities. Most never registered with the authorities, and consequently, even more mosques are likely to be closed in the coming months.

Expert observers say, the news service continues, that “religious oppression [in Tajikistan] began seven years ago.” At first, women were banned from visiting mosques, then mosques were blocked from calling people to pray via loudspeakers, and children were prevented from wearing the hijab.

Then, last year, Dushanbe began insisting that all Tajiks studying at Islamic institutions in foreign countries return home and be checked to ensure that they were not importing radical ideas. And earlier this year, the Tajik government set up a special commission to ensure that imams have good morals, “rich religious knowledge,” and observe the laws.

Moreover, and perhaps most seriously, the government commission insisted that the imams be “laconic” and not preach more than 15 minutes at mosque ceremonies. In some cases, it appears, the imams have even been asked to clear their sermons in advance with government officials.

These restrictions recall the Soviet approach to mosques, an approach that undermined itself by driving many believers into what came to be known as “underground” or “parallel” Islam. And according to Islamsng.ru, experts believe that the current approach of the Tajikistan government may have the same effect and threaten “the security of the state.”

That is all the more likely because these actions are probably going to escape criticism from other governments who are inclined to look with favor or at least not to oppose any action that can be presented however implausibly as a move against Islamist radicalism and who view Tajikistan as a potential bulwark against the spread of Taliban-style violence northward.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Plans Re-Adaptation Program for Up to 10,000 North Caucasians Who’ve Studied in Muslim Countries

2011-06-01T15:50:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 1 – “Up to 10,000” young people from the North Caucasus are studying or have studied Islam abroad where they have received “doubtful ideological positions,” the Russian presidential plenipotentiary for the region says, and officials are working on a program to re-adapt them to life inside the Russian Federation.

In an interview in today’s “Vedomosti,” Aleksandr Khloponin says that Moscow “cannot prevent” people from travelling abroad given that “Russia has a visa-free regime with many countries.” But officials must make sure that they do not bring back and spread harmful ideas (www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/261264/programma_po_vosstanovleniyu_chechni_vypolnena_aleksandr).

“According to our estimates,” Khloponin adds, there are “from 1000 to 10,000 of our youth studying or who have studied on the territories of countries” where they “can receive” potentially harmful ideas. Among these countries, “in particular” he continues, are Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey.

“In this connection, we now are developing a program of adaptation of young men who are returning from there. This task has been given to the Ministry of Regional Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Migration Service.” And before the end of the year, there is to be created “a data base” on who had studied what and where.

According to Khloponin, “it is natural that an individual who spends five years in a country where the the laws of shariat operate has an absolutely different understanding of life. We will help this individual. He should not give up his convictions, but he must understand that it is necessary to live according to the rules of the country to which he has returned.”

If the returnee does not change his views, Khloponin continues, “we will think about how to control his further activity. This individual must not work in the educational sector with children or conduct enlightenment activity in mosques. We will work with the Muslim spiritual administrations: they must exercise control within the limits of their competence.”

Asked whether such actions do not violate human rights, Khloponin responded that those who suggest that should consider the problems he faces and recognize that “there is nothing illegal in our actions, we are only proposing a program of adaptation. Ifg you want to work in a private company, fine, no one will interfere.”

Most of Khloponin’s interview was devoted to other issues, to his insistence that the basic task of restoring the Chechen Republic has been “in practice” achieved and that his current challenge is “to develop the economy of this and all other Caucasus republics” in order to find jobs for 400,000 unemployed young men.

Most of his remarks on those issues repeat what he has said before. But Khloponin makes four other comments that deserve attention. First, he downplayed the role of foreigners in financing the militants, saying “why should anyone seek money from Western foundations when it is possible to force local entrepreneuers to pay tribute and obtain a great deal more money?”

Second, he insists, it is now time to end the assignment of positions on the basis of ethnicity. “In order to preserve or not destroy” a shaky peace, he said, Russian officials, including himself, have been willing to “close our eyes” to this practice, one htat “all healthy thinking people” understand is “a survival of the past.” It must be ended gradually.

Third, Khloponin says, he faces a serious challenge to ensure that “in the formation of [party] lists for the upcoming elections, there are not included people who are close to the criminal structures or band formations.” As far as United Russia is concerned, he suggests, the Peoples Front will play a key role in that.

And fourth, he concludes, his being both a plenipotentiary representative of the president and a vice prime minister helps him do his work more effectively. Consequently, Khloponin suggests that in his opinion, it would be well to think about arranging things in the same way in other federal districts.

Window on Eurasia: Kirill Seeks to Tighten Control over Church by Dividing Up Existing Bishoprics

2011-06-01T15:11:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 1 – Patriarch Kirill is continuing to divide up the existing bishoprics within the Russian Orthodox Church in order to strengthen his control of local parishes, some of whom have gone their own way in the much larger sees inherited from the Soviet past, according to a leading Moscow specialist on religious affairs.

In a comment reported by “Kommersant,” Roman Lunkin, the director of the Moscow Institute of Religion and Law, says that Patriarch Kirill’s decision to form new eparchates, in the North Caucasus earlier this year and across the former Soviet space this week is intended to “strengthen” the patriarchate’s powers in localities (www.kommersant.ru/doc/1650916).

In the larger sees which have now been divided, Lunkin continues, “the parishes often live on their own because the ruling hierarch cannot physically follow what is taking place in all of them.” Consequently, the formation of the new bishoprics will increase the powers of the bishops over parishes and of the patriarch over the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole.

Moreover, because all the new bishops are “people devoted to [Kirill],” Lunkin suggests, this increase in their number will reduce the chance for the formation of any serious opposition group within the church and mean that Kirill will have a power vertical within the church equivalent to the one Vladimir Putin built in the Russian political system.

As Pavel Korobov of “Kommersant” ponts out, “the restructuring of the territorial-administrative structure of the Russian Orthodox Church began … in March … when the Synod took a decision to create several new bishoprics in the North Caucasus” in place of the two – centered in Stavropol and Baku – that had supervised parishes in that region.

This week, Kirill and the Synod took the following additional steps in this direction. First, they divided the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Estonia into two parts, creating a new bishop for Narva and environs and removing this heavily ethnic Russian region from the control of Metropolitan Kornilii of Tallinn and All Estonia.

Second, the patriarch and his advisors divided what had been the Mordovian and Saransk bishopric into two new “church-territorial units, the Krasnoslobodskaya and Ardatskaya bishoprics.” Third, they reorganized the Tobolsk-Tyiumen bishopric, removing from its supervision the territory of Khanty-Mansiisk AO and the Yamarlo-Nenets AO, and forming two new bishoprics, the Khanty-Mansiisk and Sugurtskaya and the Salekhard and Novo-Urengoy.

And fourth, Kirill and the Synod restructured the Krasnoyarskaya and Yeniseyskaya bishopric, forming in its place a Yenisey and Norilsk bishopric and a Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk bishopric. As a result of these changes, the ROC of the Moscow Patriarchate now has 164 bishoprics to supervise some 30,000 parishes, many beyond the borders of Russia itself.

In announcing these changes, Vladimir Vigilyansky, press spokesman for Patriarch Kirill, noted that “in Greece, there is a bishop in every city, but we have a structure inherited from Soviet times when one city of a bishopric was separated from another by a thousand kilometers and when parishioners did not who was their ruling hierarch.”

“The reduction in the size of the bishoprics,” he continued, “will improve administration.” Moreover, by increasing the number of bishoprics and bringing their borders into closer correspondence with those of the state, the ROC may be in an even better position to influence politics.

But such explanation may not be the whole story or even the most important part of it. On the one hand, Lidiya Orlova writes in today’s “NG-Religii,” the church has no shortage of bishops but also no shortage of ambitious priests, many of whom “carry a marshal’s baton” in their cassocks (religion.ng.ru/events/2011-06-01/3_arhierei.html).

And on the other, as Kirill himself a most experienced church apparatchik certainly knows from his own life in Soviet times, there are few better ways to make the power of Moscow beyond challenge than by dividing up larger units on the Russian periphery that might at some point constitute a challenge and staffing the new smaller units with loyalist.

Window on Eurasia: 21st Century to be ‘Century of the Majority,’ Tishkov Says

2011-06-01T14:23:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 1 – “If the 20th century was the century of minorities,” the director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology says, “the 21st century will be the century of the majority in the sense of recognizing its interests, demands and rights,” a view likely to please Russian nationalists even as it frightens national minorities in that country.

In a comment posted on the “Russky zhurnal” portal, Valery Tishkov, often the object of attack by Russian nationalists, argues that this is the case because “either at the level of the state or at the level of particular regions within countries, minorities turn out to be in a situation of the ruling majority” (www.russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/XXI-vek-priznaet-prava-bol-shinstva).

“All contemporary states,” Tishkov points out, “have a complex ethnic, religious and racial composition,” and consequently, “all contemporary nations display a cultural complexity.” Of course, “that was the case earlier but it wasn’t recognized” because it was assumed that all members of such nations were the same.

“Only with the development of democracy and with the acquisition of a voice of the so-called silent groups of minorities” did it turn out, Tishkov said, that various “territorial, cultural and historical identities” existed within the nation. And this sense of variety was exacerbated by the arrival of immigrant groups.

The experience of various European countries shows that “a particular challenge became not eethnic migration but migration connected with a different religious culture.” Indeed, Tishkov says, “it was more difficult to adapt or integrate not so much people different by language, tradition, phenotype or skin color as by membership in a different religion.”

This religious “barrier,” the Russian ethnographer argues, “is much more different to overcome” because “people almost never shift from one religion to another, and Islam in general harshly punishes and does not accept the possibility of departure let alone a transfer to another religion.”

This difficulty, Tishkov argues, has generated a certain “panic” with many commentators even suggesting that “the policy of multiculturalism is to blame, that it was a mistake and so on,” a view that has contributed to “the activation of conservative, ultra-right forces and political parties.”

The countries where this has happened most clearly are “the countries of Euro-Atlantic civilization, inclusing Eastern Europe and the territory of the former USSR in certain parts of which democracy has existed already for a long time.” But it is particularly obvious where democracy is in the process of development.

As there become “greater possibilities to insist on their rights in the frameworks of various international conventions, declarations, and chargers about the rights of minorities or about the rights of citizens which belong to ethnic, racial or religious minorities,” members of these groups will not surprisingly make use of them.

This pattern of development, Tishkov says, is “connected not only with political democratization but also with economic development,” especially since economic development has attracted immigration flows. “Countries which do not accept migrants have not been characterized by particular success in their development.”

At the same time, of course, immigration brings with it certain “political, social or emotional-ideological risks,” all the more so because “it is rarely acknowledged by politicians that [most countries, including Russia] have benefited more from immigration than they have lost.”

Integrating immigrants is a challenge, Tishkov says. “The formula, e pluribus unum, is used in many countries,” and “many democracies are constructed on the formula of unity in multiplicity, but sometimes doubt is cast on this formula and in opposition to it appears the idea that it is necessary to make all the same even to the point of forming a mono-culture.”

“But this is unreal,” he continues, and suggests that “democracy must be build on the recognition of diversity, of the rights, demands and interests of people and citizens which are connected with their culture and with their ethnic or religion origin” even as “a common civic solidarity must be affirmed.”

In the case of the Russian Federation, Tishkov says, “one is speaking in this case about a [non-ethnic] Russia identity, about an all-Russian patriotism. Here the formula is not ‘ether-or’ (either you are an [ethnic] Russian or a [non-ethnic] Russian; or you are a Chechen or you are a [non-ethnic] Russian, but ‘both-and.’”

“And this must be reflected not only in administrative-government arrangements but also in questions of access to power,” Tishkov says. “It must not be the case that one group, the bears of one nationality declare themselves a state-forming ethnos or people and usurp in their favor all power.”

Officialdom must reflect “the composition of the population of the country,” albeit “there must not be quotas,” the ethnographer says. And he suggests that this century will be a century of majorities because “either at the level of the state or in particular regions,” minorities will be majorities and thus will be interested in defending majoritarian principles.

Moreover, Tishkov says, “minorities [at the present time] have international protection, they are able to organize themselves, to advance themselves and to make demands up to the level of international Strasbourg Courts” and thus it is no longer the case that majorities always “outvote” minorities.

If Tishkov is correct and the 21st century will be “the century of the majority,” that could present even more threats to existing states that “the century of minorities” did because many minorities will want to make sure that they are majorities and thus seek the formation of their own states rather than integration into existing ones.

Window on Eurasia: Russians See Themselves as Both ‘the Greatest and the Most Oppressed of Nations,’ Moscow Commentator Says

2011-05-31T15:22:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 31 – Russians “at one and the same time feel themselves to be the greatest and the most oppressed nation on earth,” a situation that a Moscow commentator says reflects their “uncritical approach to themselves, the powers, and state propaganda” and that is the continuing source of many of their country’s most intractable problems.

In an essay in today’s “Gazeta,” Boris Tumanov explores the origins and the consequences of these “two unchanged and mutually exclusive leitmotifs” of Russian thought and suggests that even “the dialectic” will not help most people to understand why Russians feel the way they do (www.gazeta.ru/comments/2011/05/31_a_3633993.shtml).

“On the one hand,” he begins, the situation in which Russians find themselves in post-Soviet Russia, a country in which they form the overwhelming majority of the population and find themselves subordinate to “Russian state traditions including the mania for geopolitical greatness” allows them to view themselves “without irony” as the “state forming” nation.

And consequently, “when Russians are told in this situation that ‘Russia has risen from its knees,’ Russians for completely understandable reasons conceive this as being exclusively their due.” They ascribe “in a natural way” to “the current powers and to Vladimir Putin personally” the fact that they have begun “to live better and more happily.”

Any effort to cast doubt on this “idyl” or to point up “existing shortcomings” which any objective individual would have to acknowledge Russia, like any other country, has, Tumanov suggests, is considered by Russians to be the work of “born Russophobe who are working in the service of the enemies of Russia.”

But this belief that Russians are “the greatest of nations, the Moscow commentator says, “organically coexists with equally categorical assertions” by the Russians themselves that “Russians are the most oppressed nation in Russia, that Russians are dying out with their birthrate falling and morality growing, with Russians becoming impoverished” and so on.

Unfortunately, while believing these things to be true, most Russians do not have any understanding of whom they should address complaints about these things and “who is the guilty party of all these misfortunes,” even though they should recognize that such responsibility falls “above all on those people who administer” Russia.

That is not something Russians want to do because of their feeling that they are the greatest of nations and that their leaders are the best, and it is not something that intermediate leaders want to do because they recognize that there is little they can do about most of these problems.

But periodically, one or another politician, especially in the run up to elections, suggests that the issue should be addressed. Now that has happened again, Tumanov says, pointing to the proposal from Communist Duma deputy Vladimir Fedotkin to hold a parliamentary discussioin on “the conditions of life and fate of the Russian people.”

Such hearings, of course, Tumanov argues, “will become in fact a recognition of the fact that ten years of ‘stability, flowering, and getting up from one’s knees’ have led the Russian people to such a condition that it is time to reflect about its further fate and immediately improve the conditions of its life.”

The absurdity of this situation will be obvious because “our deputies will be forced to acknowledge the impoverished situation in which Russians, that is in essence, the overwhelming majority of the population are situated,” but they will find it almost impossible to take any real steps.

That is because “the people’s representatives and above all the United Russia party leaders even under torture will not agree to recognize their direct responsibility for the current misfortunes of the Russians and will always be looking for someone else on whom they can place all the blame.”

What is thus likely to happen? Tumanov suggests that there will be declarations about the Russians “as the state forming people” and possibly other “privileges for Russians,” although these too will remain “on paper” lest they spark a new “inter-ethnic catastrophe” among the country’s various ethnic groups.

Even the discussion promises to worsen ethnic relations, Tumanov says, even though the Russians themselves “will remain satisfied for the next two or three years” and then all this “will begin again,” with no end in sight all the more so because many Russians will be all too inclined to see the non-Russians as their oppressors, just as they did in Soviet times.

One of Russia’s greatest problems remains excessive drinking which in turn reduces life expectancy, Tumanov says, “It is necessary to drink less. But this assertion can be true only for those people who recognize their responsibility at a minimum for their own fate and still better for the fate of their society.”

“In other words, for those Russians who do not await from the powers that be instruction about how to love it, what to think and how to conduct onself and which are not seeking the causes of their own lack of well-being in the machinations of mythical ‘internal and external enemies,’” including “the non-Russians.”

Russia’s tragedy, Tumanov suggests, will continue “as long as the unnatural symbiosis between the insane deification of the powers” and the acceptance of existing conditions as beyond anyone’s control” exists among the majority of Russians. That time, unfortunately, is not yet, the commentator concludes.

Window on Eurasia: Turkic Nogays Seek Their Own Ethnic Territory in the North Caucasus

2011-05-31T07:36:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 31 – Despite the efforts, including the use of police power, by the Daghestani authorities to stop it, the Congress of the Nogays of Russia took place in their eponymous district in Daghestan and demanded that their historical homelands in Stavropol, Daghestan and Chechnya be reunited in a common Nogay motherland.

More than 3,000 people assembled at the stadium in Terkli-Mekteb under slogans like “Our Motherland is the Nogay Steppe,” “Rebirth or Disappearance?” “Our Ancestors were Heroes; Are You?” and “Indifference is Equivalent to Betrayal” and demanded “self-determination within the framework of a single administrative territorial unit.”

Specifically, Kavkaz-Uzel.ru reported, the May 29 meeting called for declaring the RSFSR degree of 1957 “anti-constitutional and anti-people” because that Moscow action left the Nogays divided in three different federal units and without one of their own (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/186275/).

More immediately, the participants demanded that the Russian procuracy examine the Daghestani law on livestock to see if it corresponds to federal legislation. According to that law, “the lands where the Nogays live” and have from time immemorial used for agricultural purposes are being taken from them for industrial development.

And the residents of the Nogay district in Daghestan used this meeteing to call for general popular elections of the head of that district. Elections to the district assembly, which will “then choose the head of the district are expected in the fall,” according to the Kavkaz-Uzel.ru report.

The news agency also reported that “the approach to the stadium where the Congress of the Nogays of Russia took place was blocked and under militia guard,” a reflection of the opposition “a number of representatives of the powers that be had expressed” beforehand (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/186269/).

The opposition of these officials is completely understandable given the challenge that the Nogays represent. Although they number only about 47,000 in the Russian Federation itself, the Turkic-speaking Nogays claim that there are “approximately five million Nogays” living abroad, mostly in Turkey and the Middle East.

That means that like the Circassians who want the formation of a common Circassian Republic and who have support from diaspora communities and like the Turkic-speaking Balkars who have been making demands about greater protection from Moscow in Kabasrdino-Balkaria, the Nogays are in a position to trigger more tension and instability in the North Caucasus.

It is thus likely that some in Makhachkala and Moscow will try to present the Nogays as they have the Circassians and Didos as agents for Georgian or Western interests, but in fact, the Nogays, just like the others, have real grievances which the Russian Federation has so far shown little interest in addressing.

And at the very least, the Nogay demand for the restoration of a single Nogay territory is certain to have a chilling effect on the push by some in the Russian capital to do away with existing ethnic republics by reminding everyone involved that many non-Russians see these institutions as the key to their survival and that some who lack them hope to get them back.

Window on Eurasia: Is Siberia Becoming Russia’s Catalonia?

2011-05-31T07:00:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 31 – Ever since the Olympic Games in Barcelona, the world has grown accustomed to the slogan “Catalonia is not Spain,” a St. Petersburg writer says, and uses an essay in that city’s “Nevskoye vremya” to ask “how great is the probability of hearing something similar about Siberia?”

For a long time, Denis Terentyev says, most political analysts viewed Siberian separatists as “a marginal movement,” one “whose goal is a prior unattainable, and thus quite unlike “the more or less serious” movements in the Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Urals Republic” because “Siberian separate from Russia could not exist” (www.nvspb.ru/stories/sibir-otdelno-45365).

Siberian separatism received a great deal of attention ten to fifteen years ago, Terentyev notes, even though “the movement of independence in Siberia did not arise then” and has not disappeared so. Instead, in recent years, “unique actions of civil disobedience have seized the entire region,” with it becoming the done thing to identify as a Sibirian in the census.

Terentyev suggests that these people are in fact Russians and have identified as such in the past, but he notes that “Irkutsk journalists say that the number of ‘separatists’ is really about 80 to 90 percent” of the population and that now “in local business the first question addressed to a potential partner is whether he is a Siberian or a Muscovite.”

A “Muscovite,” the writer continues, “can be someone from Petersburg, Bryansk or Balashikha – for the locals he is a symbol of ‘the colonial regime.’” The reason for the rise of this new nationality, Terentyev says is “as a reaction to the actions of the center” which have taken the wealth of the region and given far too little back.

In Siberian schools, “teachers tell the children that their native kray is fabulously wealthy, that here are 85 percent of the reserves of Russian natural gas, 60 percent of the oil, 75 percent of the coal and 70 percent of the aluminum.” And they accurately note that “a large part of the earnings [from these sectors] is taken by Moscow.”

One Irkutsk editor told him, Terentyev says, that “the center is beginning to understand the danger of what is taking place.” Its response is what one might expect: Representatives of the center have “had conversations [with him and other editors] about the undesirability of publications on the theme of Siberian separatism.”

The impact of such “conversations” is obvious, that editor said, from the way in which the media there have treated the case of former OMON officer Aleksandr Budnikov, who received a suspended sentence of two years for “extremist” comments posted on the Internet but who now faces four years in prison for seeking to separate Siberia from Russia by force.

The latest charges were filed after Budnikov and “several hundred of like-minded people” decided to seek the recall of their representatives in the Duma and Federation Council, the editor said, because as he said, “these people are not expressing our interests and the Constitution allows us to recall them.”

But Terentyev says, the ban Moscow wants extends far beyond this case. “In the newspapers, it has become not acceptable to write that the history of Siberia even before the Novosibirsk militiaman was full of attempts at self-determination,” and that in 1918, Siberia existed as an independent state albeit for only a short time.

In the nineteenth century, in fact, Anton Chekhov “note3d that Siberians are not like other Russians,” and today,, “as a result of the poor image of Russians in the world, it is more honorable to call oneself a Siberian,” all the more so because Siberians blame Moscow for their problems and see the rise of China with its high rises and paved roads.

On their side of the Sino-Russian border, the residents of Siberia see decaying peasant huts and “even federal highways that are not paved.” Not surprisingly, Terentyev says, “local residents draw the conclusion that Moscow is guilty in everything.” But he concludes that they should remember that “with separation, the problems of Siberia would only deepen.”

However that may be, Siberian activists are continuing to press for greater autonomy or even more. As one comment appended to Terentyev’s essay noted, “Siberians are already prepared to hold a referendum on uniting Siberia with the United States” (ru-ru.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_112982375434933&ap=1).

And another Siberian activist drew another conclusion. Yes, Siberians look like Russians, and they share many characteristics with them. But they are not engaged in “trading off the Motherland” as Muscovites are because unlike in the capital, “in the provinces it is impossible to do that” (sibirnet.ru/node/84).

Window on Eurasia: Gasprinsky, Reformer who Viewed Russia’s Muslims as a Single Nation, Held Up as Model

2011-05-28T09:07:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 28 – This year marks the 160th anniversary of the birth of Ismail-bey Gasprinsky, the Crimean Tatar leader who sought to unite the Muslims of the Russian Empire on a reformist rather than revolutionary basis in pre-parliamentary times. And some Muslim leaders in the Russian Federation are holding him up as a model for today.

This week, at a Moscow conference on “Ismail Gasprinsky and the Birth of the Unity of Russian Muslims,” academic specialists and Muslim leaders discussed his legacy and argued that Gasprinsky’s ideas can make a significant contribution to “the formation of an all-Russian civic identity” and to “the formation of a legal state” (www.islamrf.ru/news/umma/events/16181/).

Aydar Khabutdinov, a professor at the Kazan branch of the Russian Academy of Jurisprudence, recalled in an article published in advance of the conference that during Soviet times, communist officials did everything they could either to suppress Gasprinsky’s ideas or to blacken his reputation (www.islamrf.ru/news/culture/legacy/15887/).

“Even my generation of 40-year-olds,” Khabutdinov continued, “well remember how the ideas of Gasprinsky about the unity of Russia’s Muslims were denied in the name of regional and tribal divisions” and about how his writings about Koranic justice and legality were simply suppressed altogether.

A major reason for this, the Kazan professor suggested, is that Gasprinsky promoted ideas which represented a serious challenge to the Soviet state. “He taught young people to search and acquire knowledge and to generously devote themselves to the Motherland and the nation,” defining the latter as the Muslim community as a whole.

“Young radicals denounced Gasprinsky for his willingness to work with the powers that be, but [the Crimean Tatar thinker] was convinced that it would be possible to create a better future only by the labor of a free man and not by force” as many of his opponents within the umma and more generally believed.

“Bloody Russian history of the last century went in a different direction” than the one Gasprinsky advocated, Khabutdinov continued. But if the future of Russia and its growing Muslim community are to be better, then it is absolutely necessary to recover and then implement the great reformer’s ideas.

“It was no accident that Ismail-bay Gasprinsky became ‘the father of the epoch’ of the national development of Russia’s Muslims,” the Kazan scholar argues. Born on March 8, 1851, Gasprinsky grew up informed by the liberal ideas which “saved many countries of Europe from revolution.” Unfortunately, Khabutdinov said, “our Motherland was not among them.”

Most of Gasprinsky’s life was spent at a time when there was no parliament in Russia, and consequently, he devoted himself to using the press to advance his ideas. He founded the newspaper “Tercuman” in 1883, “the first stable newspaper in the history of Russia’s Muslims” and an outlet that helped define both the language and ideas of many of them.

His paper was explicitly directed toward “the consolidation around itself of representatives of all groups of the national elite, including the bourgeoisie, the spiritual leadership, the intelligentsia and the nobility,” and “in the absence of the opportunity to form political parties before 1917, it “filled the function of professional politicians and social leaders.”

As Khabutdinov noted, “the idea of the nation was one of the key concepts of the 19th century,” and Gasprinsky “borrowed from the philosophical doctrine of the Slavophiles the idea about ‘nationality as a collective personality having its own special calling” but extended it to argue that all the Muslims of Russia were members of one nation.

By the early years of the 20th century, Gasprinsky had developed a political program for this Turko-Tatar nation, a program that included by “typically bourgeois demands such as political and civic freedoms, a constitutional state and so on as well as legal acts and norms defining it as ‘a millet.’”

In Gasprinsky’s view, the Kazan scholar wrote, this millet would be “a special ethnic structure in the framework of the imperial state, one having a special legal status, a concentration around spiritual assemblies, a nationally-proportional system of the formation of organs of power and so on.” In short, he sought “a single religious autonomy” for the Muslims of Russia.

And he argued that “each nation must be a juridical person, have its own economic institutions (banks, cooperatives, etc.) an autonomous system of education, enlightenment and charitable organizations, and also a political structure,” something that could be achieved by education in a common Turkic language and social efforts rather than revolution.

Gasprinsky, Khabutdinov said, “frequently stressed that the era of medieval khans had passed and that Muslims from subjects of medieval states must be transformed into citizens of a state of Modern Times.” To that end, he called for overcoming “centuries-old fatalism” and a prejudice against re-interpreting the past.

Indeed, in the views of the jadids of that time, Gasprinsky had created their present must as the Tatar thinker Marjani had “returned to the Tatars their past. And when Gasprinsky died in August 1914, Muslims from across the Russian Empire mourned his passing even as Russia headed in a very different direction than the one he wanted.

The question that needs to be addressed today, Khabutdinov concluded, is “will we be able to fulfill the injunctions of ismail-bay and construct a better future for ourselves and for our children?”

Window on Eurasia: Muscovites Live a Decade Longer than Do Russians beyond the Ring Road

2011-05-28T08:13:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 28 – Muscovites currently live on average nearly ten years longer than do Russians outside the capital, a reflection of differences in education, income and governmental support and yet another way in which residents of the capital city, on whom so many base their assessment of Russia as a whole, are in fact becoming almost another nation.

In an article posted on the “Svobodnaya pressa” portal yesterday, Svetlana Gomzikova points out that residents of the Russian capital and especially the most senior members of the elite have life expectancies equal to those in Switzerland and the US while other Russians have life expectancies typical of the developing world (svpressa.ru/society/article/43699/).

For the Russian Federation as a whole, United Nations statistics say, life expectancy for men is now 58.7 years and for women 71.8 years. These figures are 16 years lower than life expectancy for men in the United States and nine years lower than that for women in the US, and the Russian numbers are lower than all of the former Soviet republics, except Kazakhstan.

But these global Russian figures conceal as much as they reveal, Gomzikova suggests. Men living in Moscow have a life expectancy of 67.3 years, and Russian men living in the Central Administrative District of the Russian capital have a still longer live expectancy, 70.4 years. Women living there can expect to live 78.8 years.

The reason for that, demographers say, is in people there have “a high level of education and income [and] have greater possibilities to concern themselves with health.” Their conclusion, Gomzikova says, is “partially confirmed” by the fact that men in the south and southeastern parts of the capital have live expectancies two to three years less than for the city as a whole.

In addition, the “Svobodnaya pressa” journalist says, there are “significant differences in the mortality of the adult population depending on the level of education and the character of work: the level of mortality among workers and peasants is higher than among those who are engaged in mental work.”

Russian sociologists calculate that “mortality in Russia falls for men by nine percent and for women by seven percent for each additional year of schooling.” And that allows one to conclude, Gomrikova suggests, that “the growth of Russian mortality is the result of the growth of mortality in the less educated strata of the population.”

That has prompted demographers to argue that the Russian authorities now very concerned about demography should focus their efforts not so much on boosting the birth rate than on improving behavior and solving social problems – despite all the difficulties such a shift in approach would entail.

But despite the relatively low life expectancies among Russians, experts like Vladimir Khavinson, the head of the St. Petersburg Institute of Bio-Regulation and Gerontology say, Russia increasingly faces a problem that other countries are having to confront as well: the aging of the population and the increasing share of pensioners relative to workers.

That problem is all the greater in Russia because it has one of the lowest pension ages in the world. Given that the more educated and urbanized population lives longer, that in turn means that less educated workers are going to be forced to support larger numbers of older but more educated Russians, a situation that could generate new political conflicts.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Must Pursue ‘Rossification’ of Immigrants, Expert Says

2011-05-27T11:43:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 27 – As many as 40 percent of all immigrant workers in the Russian Federation would like to regularize their status and become full members of the community there, an expert on migration says, but neither the Russian state nor most members of Russian society are prepared to take the steps needed to meet them half way.

In part, this reflects a reaction to demagogic commentaries which have dramatically overstated the size of the problem Russia now faces, Vladimir Mukomel, a sociologist who is part of the Strategy 2020 expert group, but in part, it represents an unwillingness to pursue what he calls “Rossianization” rather than “Russificaiton” (svpressa.ru/society/article/43689/).

In an interview with “Svobodnaya pressa” journalist Kirill Zubkov, Mukomel comments first of all on some of the figures which have prompted Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov and other politicians to call for parliamentary hearings on the influx of people they suggest “do not have Russian memory” and “for whom the Russian land is something alien.”

According to Mukomel, “migration is not a problem with which one must struggle but it also is not a panacea for all problems.” It may solve some problems but only at the cost of creating others. And consequently, any discussion of how to address migration must consider both costs and benefits.

By 2030, he points out, Russia is “threatened by something worse than depopulation.” It is threatened by a decline of more than 12 million people of working age, even as the total decline of the population will be only 2.8 million. That means workers increasingly will have to support more non-workers, mostly the elderly, than in the past.

It is thus not clear, Mukomel says, “on whose account Russian pensions will live, given that the percent that they will form in the population is growing while the percentage of workers is falling.” And that will be even more true in the future, when after 2018, the current relative stabilization of Russia’s population ends and a new and more rapid decline begins.

Putting things in the simplest terms, the sociologist continues, “Russia needs new workers immediately, and Russia needs new citizens over time if Russia wants to have a future for itself.”

Many suggest that the solution is to be found in the mass influx of immigrants, but “migration is not a panacea.” And what is necessary is finding a way that allows for “the adaptation of migrants to Russian society – at least in the case of those migrants who want to settle in Russia and become equal citizens of the country.”

The total number of them, like the total number of migrants in the Russian Federation, is often exaggerated, Mukomel insists. There are about 160,000 who seek permanent residence, while something on the order of four million come for seasonal or temporary work and then return home.

The figures politicians toss about are far too large unless one counts all those now in the Russian Federation who were born elsewhere. “For the post-Soviet space, sucha method of accounting is unacceptable. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens of Russia were born and for a long time lived in the former Soviet republics.

“If one follows the logic” of those who invoke the larger figure, Mukomel says, then one has to include in it such people as “Minister of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliyev, who was born on the territory of what is now independent Kazakhstan. Moreover, the younger daughter of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Ekaterina, who was born in Dresden, also is an immigrant.”

While exact statistics are not available, the expert says, sociologists believe that “on average from 25 to 40 percent of the labor migrants who have come to Russia for work are prepared to be integrated” into Russian society.” In fact, many of them already have done so, although they are not in a position to regularize themselves legally.

The reasons for that, he suggests, lie in “the most complete lack of preparedness of [Russian] state structures” to do so as well as the unfortunate reality that “Russian society itself is not ready for the integration of immigrants,” despite the fact that most come from former Soviet areas and speak Russian.

As a result, Mukomel continues, “words about ‘the lack among those who come of Russian memory’ are also untrue: across the entire post-Soviet space, the Russian language is taught up to now and enjoys, for example in Tajikistan, serious demand” because “everyone understands” that one needs Russian if one is to work in Russia.

In other words, his interviewer says, “one is speaking about a certain variant of Russification?” To which Mukomel replies: “I would prefer the term ‘Rossification.’ In the final analysis, the entire history of Russia is the history of Russification, the integration into Rusian society of immigrant masses.”

“Karamzin, Chaadayev, Dal, even Pushkin,” Mukomel oints out, “are all descendents of migrants,” something that “should not be forgotten.” And as far as suggestions that new arrivals supposedly “will not defend the motherland,” one should remember such figures as Barklay de Tolli, Bagration, Totleben and tens of thousands of others” who nobly fought for it.

Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Once Proud River Fleet Near Collapse

2011-05-27T08:26:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 27 – Russia’s river fleet on which Moscow in the past has relied to move bulk cargo given the shortage of reliable highways and rail lines is near a state of collapse, threatening the country’s economy and, because of the ecological problems its aging ships present, ability to export many things to European markets.

The Russian Federation has more than 100,000 kilometers of internal waterways deep enough for barge and other shipping traffic, but, Vladimir Rechmensky writes in this week’s “Argumenty nedeli,” the use of this network over the last 20 years has only fallen” and now involves less than two percent of all bulk transport (www.argumenti.ru/society/n290/108373).

According to the calculations of the Volga State Academy of Water Transport, shipping bulk cargo by water is 30 to 40 percent cheaper than moving the same amount by railway or highway, but because the amount now being carried is so small a percentage, Rechmensky says, “globally thinking manager-bureaucrats are not turning their attention” to the rivers.

Russia’s river fleet has always faced problems, experts say, because “in the best case,” the rivers are open for traffic only five months a year, meaning that they must make a profit for the entire year based on less than half a year’s operation. In addition, fuel costs have risen dramatically, and the lack of dredging has reduced the size of the available water network.

Because so little new money is going into this sector, Rechmensky continues, most of the ships are not equipped with contemporary geo-positioning systems. Instead of using GLONASS and GPS, as most other shippers now do, Russian captains are forced to navigate using maps which are updated only “once every three years,” a situation that can lead to accidents.

According to academic experts, the “Argumenty nedeli” journalist says, “at present, the state of the water arteries of the country is at the level it was at in the 1940s and 1950s. [They] and those working in this sector look with tears in their eyes at the step by step destruction of a system that was at one time capable of work.”

Except for yachts and high-end tourist vessels, the Russian river transport system is attracting ever less interest and support, and as a result, “the aging of port and hydro-technical arrangements and the river fleet itself is exceeding the rate of its rebuilding,” with many ships now beyond their projected lifespan and most “older than 30 years.”

With enough funding, these aging ships could be kept operational for several more decades, Rechmensky says, giving as an example a ship in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet which was launched in 1913. But if that is the case for domestic shipping, it is not sufficient when those barges try to carry goods to European ports.

Older ships and barges, Rechmensky points out, “do not correspond to the demands of ecological security” that European countries make and consequently they are not welcome in European ports, limiting the ability of Russia to export bulk cargoes in the most cost-efficient way.

To bring Russia’s river fleet up to international standards, the country would have to replace more than 80 percent of its vessels, some 8000 in all. Given current investment patterns, that is unlikely to happen, and as a result, Russia’s river fleet is “slowly but truly degrading” to the detriment of the country.

Window on Eurasia: Rise of Siberian Nationality a ‘Positive’ Development, Presidential Plenipotentiary Says

2011-05-27T05:58:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 27 – Viktor Tolokonsky, the presidential plenipotentiary for the Siberian Federal District, says that the increasing number of residents of that region who identify as Siberians rather than Russians is “a positive and valuable phenomenon” because it is an indicator of a definite kind of patriotism.”

At the same time, he insisted, “this does not mean that Siberian wants any special status or autonomization” or that it is “a sign of separatism,” adding that he “considers himself a Siberian,” although he did not say, Siberian news outlets pointed out, whether he had identified himself in that way in the recent census (news.vtomske.ru/news/33877.html).

Tolokonsky’s remarks in Tomsk represent a second and far more significant expression of support for “Siberian” as a nationality by a senior Russian official. Earlier, Aleksandr Surinov, the head of Rosstat, the state statistics agency, said that the 2010 census could show “a new nationality – Siberian” (sibir.rian.ru/society/20110525/82087475.html).

There are at least three reasons why Tolokonsky may have made this remark, any of which appears likely to have far-reaching consequences for the future of Russia east of the Urals. First of all, he may simply have wanted to try to put himself among the leaders of an increasingly numerous group in order to draw on its power to put pressure on Moscow.

The rising tide of Siberian anger about Moscow’s exploitation of the region and especially its failure to send enough money back to it is currently epitomized by a campaign Siberian regionalists have launched to demand more funds for building roads in the region at least relative to the amount being spent in European Russia.

Second, the presidential plenipotentiary may have made this comment as part of pre-election maneuvering, seeking to ensure that those who identify as Siberians do not, as they appear to be doing, conclude that they are no friends in the power vertical and thus decide to vote for opponents of United Russia in the upcoming elections.

Or third, Tolokonsky may have made his statement about Siberian nationality to try to weaken it by suggesting that Siberianness is limited to the Siberian Federal District rather than to all of Russia east of the Urals and that the Russian government can embrace it as part of what some might call “repressive tolerance.”

If the first of these reasons points to the way in which a political figure might use such an identification to advance his own political agenda, the second and third could in fact serve Moscow’s interests by defusing somewhat the oppositional nature of Siberian identity or even splitting the movement.

But however that may be, Tolokonsky’s remark underscores the fact that Siberian identity is not nearly as marginal a phenomenon as many in Moscow have assumed and calls attention to two realities that many analysts there pointed to when Vladimir Putin first created the federal districts.

On the one hand, these commentators noted at the time, the presidential plenipotentiaries represented a serious potential problem. If they were not given enough power to rein in those below them, they would simply represent yet another bureaucratic layer rather than a serious step toward increased bureaucratic efficiency.

And on the other, they pointed out, dividing Russia into fewer than ten federal units in place of the more than 80 that had existed up to that point could trigger the disintegration of the country. As several commentators pointed out, no country with more than 15 units had ever come apart while an increasing number with fewer have done so.

It seems unlikely that those calculations were on Tolokonsky’s mind when he made these comments, but it is almost certain that they will be on the minds both of Siberians thinking about their future and of Muscovites concerned about the evolution of the Russian Federation over the next decade.

Window on Eurasia: Silantyev Says ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Muslims in North Caucasus are Extremists

2011-05-25T13:12:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 25 – Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian state, says that there are currently “hundreds of thousands of Wahhabis and their sympathizers” among the Muslim communities of the republics in the North Caucasus.

Given Silantyev’s track record, one that has often infuriated Muslims who see him as an enemy of their faith and leaders, this figure and the others he offers should not be viewed as definitive. Indeed, as the Russian specialist acknowledges, there is no way to know such things with real precision.

But there are three reasons why his words in this regard are nonetheless important. First, they suggest that many in Moscow are very worried about the growth of Islamic extremism which Silantyev and they often lump together under the term “Wahhabis,” even though the followers of that trend do not call themselves that.

Second, his remarks and the coverage they are receiving suggest that the Wahhabis as Russians understand them may be becoming more active despite all the claims to the contrary that Russian officials and pro-Moscow political and social figures in the North Caucasus have claimed over the last year.

And third, Silantyev’s words suggest that some in Moscow, including leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, are pressing for a new crackdown against Muslim groups not only in the North Caucasus but more generally, an effort that would be likely to provoke a sharp reaction from Muslims and could serve to unify them even more than they are now.

Silantyev told Interfax that Wahhabis form “about five percent” of all Muslims in the Russian Federation, with their share rising to 10 to 15 percent in the North Caucasus. “When there will be more than 40 percent,” he continued, “one can calculated that they have already won” (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=40864).

In the North Caucasus, he continued, Daghestan has the largest number of Wahhabis with some 30,000 people being followers of that trend. In Ingushetia, Silantyev suggested, there are “approximately 10,000. Among “the most problematic republics” is Kabardino-Balkaria, and there are also “a large percentage of radicals” among the Muslims in Stavropol kray.

In Chechnya, the specialist said, Ramzan Kadyrov has done a lot to improve the situation, “but [despite his efforts] the problem remains.” As for supporters and sympathizers, he continued, their numbers are in “the hundreds of thousands,” a large share of the total population in that troubled region.

Asked about the level of Wahhabist penetration of mullahs and imams in the Russian Federation, Silantyev said that “there is no separate statistic on this,” but in the words of Interfax, he “expressed the opinion that it is ‘much less than half,’” leaving it to his listeners to determine just how much less.

“At the same time,” Silantyev continued, “there is an opinion that among the religious leaders, the percent of radicalization is higher than among ordinary Muslims ‘because Wahhabis in the first instance work with spiritual leaders and there is thus a high percentage of imams who sympathize with them.’”

But it is impossible to know just how many of these are showing sympathy or open support for the Wahhabis are actual converts because many of them “being subject to pressure from the side of the bandits,” speak in favor of the Wahhabis “out of a feeling of fear for their own lives,” something the Russian authorities should try to remedy.

Window on Eurasia: Kyiv Urged to Declare 1944 Deportation of Crimean Tatars an Act of Genocide

2011-05-25T12:18:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 25 – The Georgian parliament’s decision last week to declare the Russian repression of the Circassians 150 years ago a genocide, a decision that has infuriated Moscow, could have a far broader impact than even its critics have suggested. Indeed, it could lead other groups victimized in the past to seek similar declarations from governments in the region now.

That possibility is suggested by the proposal of the Ukrainian Peoples Party this week that the Ukrainian government declare the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944 “an act of genocide and a crime against humanity,” something for which international law specifies that there is no statute of limitations (http://www.qha.com.ua/haber2.php?id=6511).

Oleg Fomushkin, the head of the Crimean section of that party, said that “at the moment [of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in May 1944], “51 percent of Crimean Tatar men had ben mobilized and were fighting in the ranks of the Red Army and [an additional] 11 percent fought in partisan units.”

As a result, the Ukrainian Peoples Party continued, Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the first instance involved “older people, women and children” rather than those who might as Moscow then charged have collaborated with the invading German forces against the Soviet Union.

“In this way, the actions of the Communist powers, in terms of the UN Convention ‘On the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide and Punishment for It’ falls under the definition of genocide since for the Crimean Tatars were intentionally created conditions which were calculated to lead to the full or partial destruction” of that people.

According to researchers, during “only the first years” of exile in Central Asia, Siberia and the Urals, “almost half” of the Crimean nation was lost” to premature deaths. Moreover, that exile continued for almost all until the end of 1989 and continues for more than 150,000 to this day, making genocide charges in this case especially explosive.

Moreover, for almost half a century, the Crimean Tatars were “deprived of the rights of ethnic self-identification” by the Soviet authorities who refused to allow them to call themselves Crimean Tatars and who prohibited the use of the Crimean Tatar language in schools and kindergartens as part of an effort to destroy any future for that nation.

Over the last week, Russian media outlets have been full of attacks on the Georgian decision. (See, among others, www.fondsk.ru/news/2011/05/25/mifologija-genocida-cherkesskij-vopros-i-plany-saakashvili.html, novopol.ru/-saakashvili-razyigral-cherkesskuyu-kartu--text101859.html, www.win.ru/school/7268.phtml and www.politcom.ru/12010.html).

But almost all of them have focused only on the impact of Tbilisi’s decision on the North Caucasus rather than discussing the ways in which the Georgian Parliament’s declaration that the Russian Empire committed a genocide against the Circassians has broader implications for the Russian Federation and indeed for Eurasia as a whole.

An exception to this is an article by a pro-Russian journalist in Ukraine who in an article posted online today explicitly considers the ways in which the Circassian decision may have an impact on the Crimean Tatars and through the Crimean Tatars on other groups inside the borders of the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet states.

In an essay posted on the Materik.ru portal, Vladislav Gulyevich, a commentator for Kyiv’s “Chas Pik” weekly, argues that “Crimea and the project of Greater Circassia are steps along the path to the conquest of the entire Caucasus region” by the Western powers with Russian influence there being excluded (www.materik.ru/rubric/detail.php?ID=12688).

The success of such an enterprise, he argues, would hurt “not only Russia but also Turkey which would find itself in the position of ‘a loser who had not fought.’” And that, Gulyevich argues, makes the ideas of Ismail Gasprinsky “about the unity of Slavs and Turks“ especially important and a possible barrier to the further unraveling of Russia and its neighbors.

Gasprinsky’s name and works may not be widely known in many quarters, but that appears likely to change in the coming weeks, given his ideas on this point which Gulyevich outlines with approval and given a conference this week in Moscow on the great Crimean Tatar thinker on his 160th birthday (www.islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusanons/16178/).

That conference as well as Gasprinsky’s ideas are likely to make the issue of the Soviet genocide of the Crimean Tatars not only the focus of political debates in Kyiv and Moscow but also lead other peoples, themselves victimized by Russian imperialism, to seek recognition from other governments of what was done to them.

Window on Eurasia: Historical Analogies Matter in Russia Because Lessons Aren’t Learned, Crimes Aren’t Punished and Mistakes Aren’t Overcome, Pavlova Says

2011-05-25T11:38:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 25 – Unlike in Western countries which have law-based states, historical analogies are particularly important and suggestive in Russia because there “the lessons of the past are not learned, crimes by the state are not punished, and mistakes are not overcome,” according to Grani.ru commentator Irina Pavlova.

That reality, she argues in her latest commentary, makes especially worrisome “the essential similarity” between what is going on in the Russian political system now and what took place in Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1937, the year that opened the way to what is often called “the great terror” (grani.ru/opinion/m.188681.html).

In advance of the December 1937 elections to the Supreme Soviet, Pavlova notes, Andrey Zhdanov, then a candidate member to the Politburo, said it was necessary to achieve “the furthest most strengthening of the political activity of the masses and the inclusion of new strata of the toilers in the work of the administration of the state,” adding that the Bolshevik Party must “guarantee its leading role in the front of ‘social organizations and the society of the toilers.”

Two weeks ago, in advance of the Duma elections scheduled for December 2011, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced the establishment of an All-Russian Peoples Front and said in Volgograd [formerly Stalingrad] that “namely the United Russia Party must lead the preparation of the masses for the elections.”

Several days later, Putin said that “we are creating the All-Russian Peoples Front in order that there will be a demand for all constructive ideas” from various parts of society and that there will be “an additional chance for the immediate direct participation [of the masses] in the development of the most important government decisions.”

In 1937, Pavlova continues, “only ‘social organizations and societies of toilers’ could nominate candidates for the Supreme Soviet, and the chief jurist of the USSR at that time, Andrey Vyzhinsky, said that these groups are those which put “as their task the active participation in socialist construction of the USSR and also the support of the strengthening of the defense of the country.”

Those qualities at the time deprived groups like religious parishes “which were permitted to exist only for ‘the satisfaction of their religious requirements,” of a similar right to nominate candidates.

At present, Pavlova says, citizens “inclined toward opposition” are similarly excluded. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, said that opposition figures like Eduard Limonov, Mikhail Kasyanov and Boris Nemtsov could not join the new peoples front because “as far as I am aware, these persons do not share either the strategic or tactical goals of United Russia.”

“In 1937,” Pavlova continues, “mass popular enthusiasm was observed.” That enthusiasm was then directed against Stalin’s opponents. Indeed, it was at the same party plenum that a decision was approved to “transfer the cases of Bukharin and Ryzhkov to the NKVD” and to go after regional leaders who displayed “a cult of personality.”

During the 1937 election campaign, there was much talk about “wreckers” and “enemies of the people.” Now, the “main” subject, according to President Dmitry Medvedev is “the struggle with corruption,” a struggle that is supposed to involve, just like its predecessor, “the most varied forces” and be directed at those viewed as the opponents of the Kremlin.

Pavlova points out that as a result, “in 1937, the mass election campaign became a cover for the conduct of a government policy of repression.” Today, there are differences, but the current situation “ever more recalls one before a storm” that must “somehow or other” break out as part of a resolution.

Obviously historical analogies do not explain everything, Pavlova says, but she asks a series of pointed questions on the basis of her comparison: “Will the struggle with corruption turn out to be a new edition of the cadres reform of 1937?” Will the current leadership which is riddled with thieves be replaced by “young ‘nashists,’ ready to struggle for modernization?”

And even more seriously, “will ‘a cadres reform’ of the 2011 model develop in such a way, if it does take place, that it will lead to a broad struggle with ‘extremists,’ ‘extra-systemic liberals’ and other citizens” the regime’s leaders view as “disloyal.” The danger is real enough, she suggests, to justify real alarm.

Window on Eurasia: Despite Promises, Russian Draftees are Fighting and Dying in the North Caucasus

2011-05-24T12:56:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 24 – Despite repeated promises by senior Moscow officials and the explicit provisions of several laws, Russian draftees are being sent to fight and die in the hotspots of the North Caucasus, a situation a major Moscow paper is calling attention to and one likely to spark both more resistance to the draft and more questions about Russia’s policies in that region.

The deaths of several draftees in Ingushetia have prompted “Moskovsky komsomolets” to declare in a headline that “The Russian Army is Outside the Law” because the defense ministry has declared that such personnel “must not be involved in counter-terrorist operations” (www.mk.ru/politics/article/2011/05/19/590609-rossiyskaya-armiya-vne-zakona.html).

Indeed, the widely published ministerial decree specifies that draftees are not even to be positioned “in the zone” of such counter-terrorist operations. Apparently, the paper continued, “the command of the military unit does not know anything about this order. Or how else can one explain the fact” that this set of deaths of draftees is not the first?

A source in the military procuracy told the paper that “such violations are taking place everywhere,” even though commanders know the order and investigators have addressed many of these situations, a process that is complicated because commanders often do what they can to hide the facts of these and other violations of the military code.

The major reason commanders want to use draftees is that such personnel cost less and are far more numerous than professional soldiers, but another experts say is that the latter are far more prepared to speak up for their rights than are the draftees. If the pay of the professionals is late, for example, they raise such a fuss that commanders hurry to address the problem.

Because the command is unwilling to investigate these violations, activists have appealed to the Counter-Terrorist Committee and also to the Federation Council, but they have either been ignored or “given to understand that about the Russian Army today one can speak only as about the dead – either something good or nothing at all.”

However, the numerous cases of the violation of the defense minstry’s own orders and of the rights of draftees almost certainly will increase calls for a shift to a professional military, something Russia would find hard to pay for unless it significantly reduced the size of its armed forces, or an increase in the amount of draft resistance.

And in the current environment, these two trends appear to be coming together. In St. Petersburg over the weekend, for example, some 150 people staged a demonstration under the banner “Say No to the Draft” during which speakers called for the creation of a purely professional military (ingria.info/lenta/347-2011-05-22-08-50-40).

This meeting is likely to lead to others, all the more so because it was organized by groups with sections elsewhere and by political parties, including Yabloko, which are likely to be interested in using this issue to attract attention and support in the run up to the 2011 and 2012 elections.

Window on Eurasia: Middle Class ‘Fleeing’ Russia, Moscow Experts Say

2011-05-24T12:28:00.003-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 24 – Members of the middle class, including both entrepreneurs and intellectuals on whom the future of democratic development in the Russian Federation depends, are now fleeting that country in ever-increasing numbers, a trend that both testifies to Russia’s current problems and casts a shadow over its future.

In the current issue of the Moscow weekly “New Times,” Natalya Alyarinskaya and Dmitry Dokuchayev report that according to Russian officials, 1.25 million Russians, “chiefly businessmen and representatives of the middle class,” have left the country over the last three years (http://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/39135).

Their departure, the two journalists say, is “almost as large as the first which took place after the October coup in 1917 when about two million people left” Russia. And the devote the remainder of their article to exploring the answers as to “why these people are leaving Russia and whether it is possible to stop this exodus?”

The findings of a recent poll by the Levada Center showing that 50 percent of Russians “dream of leaving the country,” including “two thirds [of those] under 35,” and that “63 percent of those questioned would like their children to study and work abroad” rather than in their homeland.

But those findings, which express interest and desire rather than action, have now been made even more a matter of concern by other data. Vladimir Gruzdyev, a Duma deputy of the ruling United Russia Party said that in 2010, “the number of individual entrepreneurs dropped from 4.61 to 4.11 million,” with most of the half million not only leaving business but Russia.

Igor Nikolayev, the head of strategic prognostications for FBK suggests that this statistic “should be increased by a factor of two if not three.” The reason? “Many people keep their citizenship and apartment in Russia, and although their entire family has been living in the West for a long time, they do not fall within the emigration statistics.”

And Vladislav Inozemtsev, the director of the Center for Research on Post-Industrial Society, says the situation may be even worse than those figures show. According to his research, “45 percent of [university] graduates do not exclude the possibility of leaving and almost half of them firmly intend to seek” work abroad.

According to Moscow experts, the two journalists say, there are now about four million Russians living in the European Union and the United States, distributing themselves according to ease of entry, cost of living and the existence of a Russian community with which they can find support at least at first.

No one knows for certain just how many more of Russia’s middle class are really waiting to join them, “sitting on their suitcases,” to use the Russian expression. But the number has certainly gone up in the last few years because, in the words of one expert, opportunities have declined while “administrative pressure has increased.”

According to Moscow political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin, “the main cause” pushing members of the Russian middle class to think about emigration is “the lack of a future,” the sense that for Russians now, unlike a decade ago, there is no light at the end of the tunnel but only more darkness.

Moreover, the members of this class increasingly feel the envy of those below them in the social pyramid and pressure from the political elite above. And they fear that the current situation may get even worse after the 2011 and 2012 elections which could set in train a new set of challenges they would rather avoid by moving out of Russia.

Most analysts fear the impact of these departures, especially since in many ways it is the best and the brightest who are leaving. Approximately 15 percent of all Russians have higher education, but among those leaving, “more than 40 percent do,” thus undermining the ability of the Russian economy to modernize or even keep up.

A few experts, like Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a specialist on elites at the Russian Academy of Sciences, suggest that no one should be upset by these trends because they show that Russia is becoming part of the global society and that Russians are “step by step becoming people of the world.”

But others take a gloomier view. Oreshkin says that “the sense of total corruption does not leave [these people].” Consequently, to improve matters and retain more of the Russian middle class, the country must “in the first instance destroy the power vertical, cleanse itself from corruption and conduct honest elections.”

However, he continues, even if Russia manages to do this, “a minimum of about five years will be required for people [now] abroad to believe that the situation for business in Russia has changed for the better” and decide that they should be working at home rather than living abroad.

Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Northern Peoples Use UN to Press Moscow on Ethnic Rights

2011-05-24T12:28:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 23 – Representatives of the numerically small and often widely dispersed peoples of Russia’s Arctic north have used a United Nations forum to press the Russian government to respect their collective rights, but President Dmitry Medvedev has indicated that he believes the regions in which they live rather than Moscow should bear the costs of doing so.

Last week, during the sessions in New York of the United Nations Forum on the Issues of Indigenous Peoples, representatives of the Russian Federation’s numerically small peoples of the North issued a series of demands to Moscow ranging from help in countering the effects of global warming to recognizing their right to self-determination.

Valentina Sovkina, the speaker of the Saami Parliament of the Kola Peninsula, issued the most sweeping demand. She called on Moscow to observe the right of all indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation to self-determination, something she pointed out the Russian government is committed to by treaty (finugor.ru/node/17742).

Vasily Nemechkin, a member of the governing board of the Youth Association of Finno-Ugric Peoples (MAFUN), made a more limited demand. He called on the Russian powers that be to establish a special ombudsman to ensure the rights of native peoples, including his own (mariuver.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/mafun-ombudsmen/).

And Tatyana Achirgina, the president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference of Chukotka, called on Rusdsia to reaffirm its treaty support for the rights of indigenous people by approving the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and living up to its provisions (www.raipon.info/component/content/article/1-novosti/1974-arkticheskij-kokus-deklaraciju-oon-.html).

UN officials and especially representatives of UNESCO expressed their support for the Northern peoples and indicated that they are ready to address their problems, especially those arising from global warming and increased economic activity in the Arctic region (www.raipon.info/component/content/article/1-novosti/1973-junesko-usilit-rabotu-s-korennymi-narodami.html).

Over the last several decades, Russia’s Northern peoples have sought to advance their cause in Moscow by building alliances with other indigenous peoples in the Arctic through such institutions as the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and they are now using such links to enlist the UN as well.

The strategy has worked at least up to a point: Russia’s Northern Peoples currently receive disproportionate subsidies from Moscow compared to the all-Russian per capita average. But leaders of these communities argue that environmental challenges, the activities of business groups, and their traditional cultures require greater support.

They received some encouragement last week from a comment by President Dmitry Medvedev at his press conference. He said that he now understands the problems of the Northern peoples, but he suggested that these problems should be addressed not by the central government but by regional officials (www.raipon.info/component/content/article/1-novosti/1971-prezident-rossii-znaet-o-problemah-severnyh-narodov.html).

From the point of view of the Northern peoples, Medvedev’s suggestion that regional officials rather than Moscow should focus on these issues and bear the cost of resolving them will not be welcome. And as a result, some of their leaders are likely to try to advance their interests in international forums like the UN, potentially adding to Moscow’s problems there.

Window on Eurasia: South Korea Continues to Hope to Host 2014 Winter Olympiad, Moscow Paper Says

2011-05-21T07:38:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 21 – South Korea, which lost out to Russia in the competition to hold the Winter Olympics in 2014, is continuing to build facilities for such a competition, apparently in hopes that the Sochi Games will be cancelled either because of construction problems or security concerns, according to Moscow’s “Izvestiya.”

“Izvestiya” correspondents Andrey Reut and Aleksey Severov report that “Korea is continuing to build Olympic sites despite having lost to Russia the right to hold the 2014 Olympiad.” More than half of the South Korean sites are ready, and “the remaining ones are being build at record rates” (www.izvestia.ru/investigation/article3155383/).

Having visited the sites, the Russian journalists say they want to answer the question: “What are [the South Koreans] counting on?” But in fact, the article may be designed to send a message to the international community: Any problems now in the run-up to the Sochi Games are the result of Georgian actions rather than Russian problems.

“Officially,” the Russian journalists say, officials and Olympic activists in Seoul are competing for the 2018 games, in which there are officially three candidates – Germany, France and South Korea. That would be the third attempt to bring the Olympics to South, given that “the previous two have failed.”

Despite that, “the Koreans are all the same actively engaged in construction,” the “Izvestiya” journalists say, “more actively than in Sochi,” and consequently regardless of the results of the voting in the International Olympic Committee, “practically all the Olympic venues” in South Korea are “already prepared.”

“The main intrigue” here, the journalists say, involves the question: “Why spend billions of dollars on games which Korea has not yet won the right to hold?” According to the article, “Olympic officials are not answering this question, but indirectly they confirm: they [still] have hopes for 2014.”

Speaking with what “Izvestiya” characterized as “ironic Eastern diplomacy,” Yang Chung Pak, the secretary general of the Korean Olympic Committee, refused to answer the direct question whether his group was preparing for 2014. “Let us hope,” he said, “that Sochi will hold one of the best Winter Olympics” in that year.

Could it in fact happen, the journalists ask, that the 2014 games could be taken away from Russia and handed over to Korea? There are only “two possible causes,” they say. The first would be a failure of Russia to build all the venues on time, and the second basis “for the hopes of the Koreans” would be “instability in the region.”

The two “Izvestiya” journalists say that “representatives of the Russian special services” tell them that “in Sochi have appeared groups of potential diversionists from Georgia who have tried to settle in as local residents” or to take the guise of “builders” of Olympic sites. And the services add that “it is possible there even exists a program” in Georgia to block the games.

“Georgian politicians have more than once spoken about this,” “Izvestiya” says, beginning in the fall of 2008, after the Russian-Georgian war, when Tbilisi proposed shifting the games to South Korea or to Austria. The motivations for this, the paper continues, were political rather than ecological, despite Georgian claims to the contrary.

Moreover, the Moscow paper continues, there even exists in Georgia “a special commission” which is preparing “a boycott plan,” as the head of that country’s parliamentary committee for diaspora affairs, Nugzar Tsiklauri, has said. “But all this is only words,” the Russian journalists say.

The Olympics have never been taken away from one city and given to another, Russian Olympic Committee officials say, and the Olympic Charter does not allow for it. But apparently, the South Koreans still have “hope for a miracle” in this regard. And because they have the money, they are more than ready to prepare for one.

Window on Eurasia: Recognition of Circassian Genocide Part of Broader Georgian Campaign in North Caucasus

2011-05-21T06:05:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 21 – The Georgian parliament’s adoption yesterday of a resolution declaring the mass killings of Circassians 150 years ago to have been a genocide is part of a broad Tbilisi campaign to extend its influence in the North Caucasus by undermining Russian control there.

That conclusion is suggested both by the debate preceding the adoption of the resolution and by two other recent developments, one in Georgia involving the expansion of broadcasts into the North Caucasus from Georgia and a second in that region itself where demonstrators invoked Georgian support to pressure local officials.

Yesterday, the Georgian parliament passed a government-backed resolution saying that the “pre-planned” mass killing of Circassians in the 1860s constituted “a genocide” and that those forced to leave their homeland and their descendents should be recognized as “refugees” (www.circassianworld.com/new/headlines/1571-georgia-recognizes-circassian-genocide.html).

Backers of the resolution said that this declaration is “not directed against the Russian people” because “the Russian people should not be permanently living under the burden imposed on them by their leaders in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.”

But many Russians and at least some Georgians are likely to view it otherwise, in part because another deputy from the ruling party, Givi Targamadze, said that the Georgian parliament should also take up “the situation surrounding other peoples” in the North Caucasus, a step he said would “lead us to a powerful and significant Caucasian unity.”

Deputies of the Christian Democratic Movement abstained from voting, arguing that the vote was taken too hastily, but only one parliamentarian spoke against the resolution. Jondi Bagaturia said that while “it is impossible not to show solidarity towards the Circassian people,” Georgians should consider whether that “will not look unfair” to the Armenians.

That is because Armenians have frequently asked Georgia to declare the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire a genocide, something Georgian officials and parliamentarians have refused to do, most recently a month ago.

Another deputy, Nuzgar Tsiklauri, chairman of the diaspora and Caucasian issues committee in the parliament, countered that it was “inappropriate” to link the two issues. Tbilisi could address these questions with “Georgia’s two friendly nations,” Armenia and Turkey, “with “a positive dialogue,’ and “meddling in this process would be ‘unjustified.’”

The second development indicating that this decision was very political and directed against Russian interests in the North Caucasus was the launch earlier this year of a Russian-language television channel in Georgia targeted at that region, PIK television, which can be viewed on the Internet ( pik.tv/ru).

Yesterday and today, that channel gave prominent coverage to yesterday’s decision of the Georgian parliament to declare the 1864 killings of the Circassians a genocide and headlined its story, “Georgia has become the first to recognize the genocide of the Circassian people” (pik.tv/ru/news/story/gruziia-stala-pervoy-kto-priznal-genocid-cherkesskogo-naroda).

But a third development this week, although it has attracted far less international attention, may prove to be equally consequential. In Daghestan, members of the Dido nationality on Tuesday organized a demonstration in Makhachkala demanding that their nationality be given official status and their own ethno-territorial unit (www.ndelo.ru/one_stat.php?id=4908).

The meeting, which attracted some 80 people and adopted a resolution sent to both the Daghestan and Russian Federation governments, took place under a banner declaring in Russian “Daghestan Refuses; Georgia Helps,” a message that, if taken up by other groups in that republic and beyond, could further complicate Moscow’s tasks in the region.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s Fight against Extremism Lacks Clear Definitions, SOVA Head Says

2011-05-21T05:18:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 21 – Russia’s struggle against extremism “does not have clearly defined tasks” because the government “cannot clearly formulate them,” and as a result, various officials, operating on the basis of “their own interests” rather than on the basis of law act in ways that contradict one another, according to the head of the SOVA analytic center.

Not only does that shortcoming undermine the rule of law and the protection of the rights of citizens, but it means that some genuinely extremist materials escape any ban at all while many entirely innocent publications are deemed extremist, thereby sending a chill through the entire society.

In an interview published this week in “Epoch Times,” Aleksandr Verkhovsky says that “in any country, there are legal limitations of rights” when they come into conflict with other rights or goals, but in Russia, such limitations go far beyond that because the state has failed to define the basis for such limitations (www.epochtimes.ru/content/view/47852/54/).

Verkhovsky says that in his work, he encounters what are clearly legally justified limitations on religious texts that are clearly “directed” at inspiring hatred toward others. “Here I understand why they are banning them,” he continues. But “often, I do not understand” because there is no apparent basis for taking this step.

According to the SOVA leader, this is at least partially explained by what he believes is the fact that officials “themselves do not know what they want to achieve” by their acitons. In order for there to be understanding, there is a need for one side to be able to explain its acitons to another.” But in the case of Russia’s struggle with extremism, that isn’t possible.

“The state cannot formulate [these tasks] clearly,” either because it lacks the ability to do so or because it wants to retain maximum flexibility. And consequently, “many various groups of bureaucrats” act independently and often in contradiction with one another because they are “guided by their own interests and ideas” rather than by the legal definitions.

Some officials engaged in these activities undoubtedly are sincere in their stated belief that this or that religious group is “socially dangerous and must be uprooted.” But others appear to be doing so to attract attention, justify budgets or out of personal vindictiveness,m all things that undermine the rule of law.

“The main repressive mechanism” in this struggle is the banning of the distribution of materials “recognized as extremist,” Verkhovsky says. And on the basis of judicial decisions, the justice ministry maintains a list of publications that have been declared extremist. “But one must not use this list” because of a whole range of problems.

There are many mistakes in this list, the result of multiple decisions which sometimes find a particular work extremist and at other times declare it not to be and of the failure of the justice ministry to update the list in an appropriate and timely fashion. And consequently “it is clear that this cannot work in principle.”

And there is another problem, Verkhovsky notes. “In the law it is written how this list is to be added to but nothing is said about the basis on which materials can be removed from the list … [Thus,] this situation is not legal because in this case there are no norms” as any legal arrangement requires.

In the opinion of the SOVA chief, there should be “either an amendment to the law or a directive of the Justice Ministry regulating this procedure or an explanation by the Supreme Court.” But none of these things has yet happened, although he adds that “a resolution of the plenum of the Supreme Court” is working on these issues.

That effort, he adds, allows “the weak hope that some kind of wise explanations will be adopted and that they will have obligatory force.”

Another serious problem in this area, Verkhovsky points out, is the use of the charge of extremism by officials without the sanction of a court. That isn’t supposed to happen under the law, but by drawing analogies with materials that have been banned, officials often broaden the scope of anti-extremist actions.

And still a third problem involves the use of expertise in deciding whether this or that item is extremist. Ten years ago, expertise was not widely employed; now, it is involved in almost every case, and Verkhovsky says, it is being misused, with experts expressing their view on whether something is extremist, a conclusion only judges are entitled to make.

The situation of experts on religious or other groups is like that of a specialist on ballistics, Verkhovsky says. The expert can be asked about how a bullet flew or from what gun it came, “but it is impermissible to ask him who killed Sidorov or whether he was killed because of hatred. If such a question is given to an expert, this is a crude procedural violation.”

Window on Eurasia: Abkhazia Again ‘Struggling for Independence’ -- But Now Perhaps ‘From Russia,’ Moscow Observer Says

2011-05-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 19 – In the nearly two years since Russia recognized Abkhazia as an independent country, relations between Moscow and Sukhum have deteriorated with many in the former unhappy that they have to pay such a high price for geopolitics and many in the latter suspicious that Russia is a threat to Abkhaz independence, according to a Moscow observer.

In yesterday’s “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” Vladimir Vorsobin, that paper’s political observer, explained why “after recognition, ever more problems are appearing” in the Russian-Abkhazian relationship on such questions as resorts, religious administrations, property ownership and even the border between the two (msk.kp.ru/daily/25687/891281/).

To the extent that and as long as Abkhazian leaders viewed Tbilisi and Washington as the main problems, relations between Abkhazia and Russia were “simplified,” with people in both of their capitals subordinating any disputes to the broader and more important geopolitical problems of relations with Georgia and the United States.

But “in recent months,” this dynamic has changed. Tbilisi and Washington are less often viewed as credible opponents, and people in both Sukhum and Moscow are focusing on their own differences, differences made all the more troubling, Vorsobin says, because of the amount of money Russia is spending and the natural suspiciousness of the Abkhazians about outsiders.

The Abkhazians have become outraged by Russian cutbacks in support for sanitaria, and the Russians in turn have been upset by what they see as shady practices and even illegal actions by the Abkhazians – and by the efforts of the Russian embassy in Sukhum to excuse the Abkhazians rather than defend Russian citizens.

Other issues have added to the tensions. The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has been reluctant to see the Orthodox in Abkhazia become an independent church lest that undermine Moscow’s claims in Ukraine and elsewhere but at the same time has acted in ways that seem intended to put the Abkhazian Orthodox under its domain.

Some Orthodox clergy in Abkhazia openly declare, the Moscow journalist says, that “the future of the Abkhazian church must be constructed not only on the basis of ties with the Russian church but also with other Orthodox churches, including the Greek and Serbian. There must be multi-polarity in the foreign policy of the Abkhazian church.”

Just last Sunday, the Abkhazian Orthodox split, with part agreeing to be subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church and part rejecting that approach, such splitting the Orthodox “front” and exacerbating tensions between Russians and Abkhazians. (For details on this, see www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=comment&id=1875).

Other areas where tensions are high concern property that the Russians claim but that the Abkhazians have seized, and what may surprise many even more over the border between Abkhazia and the Russian Federation. Vorsobin offers a map showing a portion of the northwest part of Abkhazia that Moscow wants transferred to it.

The Russian side makes two arguments. On the one hand, some of the villages in that region are overwhelmingly ethnic Russian. And on the other, this part of Abkhazia is very near the places where Moscow hopes to stage the 2014 Olympics. Having the territory under direct Russian control would make that task easier.

But from the Abkhazian perspective, Russia’s interest in part of Abkhazia’s territory is seen as the effort of another outside power to seize Abkhazian lands. Indeed, the Moscow observer says, “hot heads” in Sukhum now accuse Moscow of evil intentions and “suggest that Moscow repent for expelling a half million Abkhazians to Turkey in the 19th century.”

Out of geopolitical calculations, the Russian embassy in Sukhum has tried to keep all this out of the press, obviously without success, and Russian government officials have rejected Duma complaints about how much money Moscow is spending on the ungrateful Abkhazians. “The main thing,” Russian officials say, “is geopolitics,” not money.

That is “useful advice,” Vorsobin says, but it is clear from his article that he does not expect many on either side of this deepening divide to take it for much longer.

Window on Eurasia: Muscovites Want Their Children to Study in Schools without Migrants

2011-05-19T16:18:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 19 – Now that “up to 60 percent” of the pupils in the primary schools of the Russian capital are children of migrants who do not speak Russian well, an increasing number of Muscovite parents are doing whatever they can to ensure that their children go to those schools which have few or no migrant children, according to a Moscow newspaper.

Educational officials in Moscow prefer that parents send their children to the schools that are closest to their homes, but the parents of many believe that their children will have a less successful academic experience if they are surrounded by other pupils for whom Russian is not a native language (www.kp.ru/daily/25688.4/892109/).

As one father put it, an article in “Komsomolskaya Pravda” today reports, he would rather have his child be in a school nearby so that he and his family would not have to get up so early. But that school is “”full of these … How can the teacher teach if half of the pupils do not speak Russian!””

Such attitudes undoubtedly reflect both xenophobia of some parents and worries about the well-being their children, but the situation has already reached the point, the paper says, that Muscovites now speak about “’white’” and “’black’” classes because in many schools on the outskirts of Moscow half or more of the pupils are “children of migrant workers.”

The low Russian language competence of many of the migrant children puts a serious burden on classroom teachers, the paper continues. Those who complain about the difficulties of keeping the interest of native Russian speakers while developing Russian language skills among others are told by their directors: “’You’re a teacher; teach!’”

Such problems in the classroom are creating “a serious problem for many school directors” in the Russian capital, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” says. Some believe that the best thing is to segregate those with poor or non-existent Russian language schools while others are convinced that the best way for such pupils to learn is to be thrown in with Russian pupils.

And many of these directors are upset because, the paper notes, “in essence, the only social institution which adapts [migrants in Moscow] if not the adults then at least their children for life in the Russian capital is the school,” an institution that is already asked with ever fewer resources to carry out other tasks as well.

There is a network of special classes where Russia is taught as a foreign language. In Moscow at the present time, there are 211 such groups, but they cannot hope to serve the hundreds of thousands of migrant children. And there are only ten schools entirely devoted to this task in Moscow in which are enrolled all of 417 children.

There are many reasons for this shortage besides the obvious financial difficulties. Many parents “often don’t want their child to lose a year,” as they assume those in such schools do. Others don’t want to take the trouble involved in getting their children into such schools. And still a third group resists because its members are unsure of how long they’ll stay in Moscow.

Some Moscow teachers report that in springtime, they suddenly lose “half of their pupils” if these are from Central Asia because the children are sent home to work in the fields of their relatives. And others say that female Muslim pupils are often pulled out of class because their parents don’t believe they need much education at all.

Most teachers involved with such children, however, are committed to providing them with the instruction they have a right to as residents of the Russian Federation. But unfortunately, they sometimes face a problem: “There is no legal foundation” for insisting that a foreign child study Russian. Indeed, the paper says, “no one has the right to do that.”

Many observers are likely to view all this simply as evidence of nationalism among the pupils, but the reality is more complicated. According to the Moscow journalist, “teachers, directors, and the children themselves assured [him] that there is much less nationalism in the capital’s schools than there is outside their doors.”

Window on Eurasia: More than Half of Bashkortostan’s Imams above Pension Age, Survey Finds

2011-05-19T15:03:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 19 – More than half of the imams and muezzins of the mosques of Bashkortostan are beyond the normal age for pensioners, according to a recent survey, and 20 percent of all Muslim religious leaders in that republic lack any religious training, a situation common in Middle Volga and one that points to challenges for both Muslims and Moscow.

Not only do these numbers suggest the approach of a radical generational change in the leadership of the Muslim community there, but they open the way to the introduction of even more graduates of Islamic training centers abroad, a development that could unsettle the parishes there as well as increase tensions between the Middle Volga Muslims and Moscow.

These are among the many issues currently roiling the Islamic community in the Middle Volga that Ruslan khazrat Sayakhov, the deputy head of the Bashkortostan Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) responsible for educational issues and external relations, discusses in an interview posted on the Islamrf.ru portal today (www.islamrf.ru/news/umma/faces/16102/).

The problems of the umma in Bashkortostan and the need for new leading cadres, Sayakhov says, were shown by a re-attestation survey of the imams and muezzins of the republic’s MSD. “More than 50 percent of the spiritual workers are people who have long ago passed pension age,” with some imams being over 80 years of age.

Such people, of course, “are extremely respected and wise,” but often cannot keep up with “contemporary people,” he continues. Moreover, “on the order of 20 percent of all these workers do not have even a primary religious education.” Not surprisingly, parishes “ever more often are asking for the sending of young specialists” to take their places.

Unfortunately, there are two few such people who can be sent. Russia’s own Muslim educational system is still being built, Sayakhov says, and consequently, many people are looking at younger people who have received training in Muslim universities and medrassahs abroad.

Despite the fears of some, those who have received such training often benefit from it, the deputy MSD chief who himself studied for eight years in the Arab world adds. They of necessity learn Arabic far better than those who do not go abroad. They are exposed to different approaches and experiences. And they bring this back to others.

Clearly, he continues, it is important to work carefully with those who have studied abroad. They need to be screened and clear goals need to be set, and they must operate under the guidance of more senior Muslim leaders who have greater experience with traditional Islam in the Middle Volga.

Those who say that the Muslim universities in Egypt and elsewhere are “preparing radicals” and that “their graduates fight with arms in their hands against federal forces in the North Caucasus” are making assertions that are “not completely based” in reality, the Bashkortostan MSD deputy head says.

Each student whether in the Russian Federation or abroad “chooses for himself” what he wants. “No one can impose on [him] an alien ideology,” Sayakhov says. On the basis of his own experience with and knowledge of Islamic educational institutions “in Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabai,” he adds, “an individual can find in each of them” that which corresponds to his search.

When one talks about “the contemporary problems of Islamic education,” he goes on, the question needs to be ask “whom do we want to see ‘at the other end’? What knowledge and personal qualities must an individual have who has decided to devote himself to work in the religious sphere?”

There is much to be learned from the jaded traditions of a century ago, Sayakhov says, and he expresses the hope that “in the next few years, that colossal work which is being conducted in this area will allow the discovery” of the best possible combination of a knowledge of Islam, the Arab world, and the Tatar-Bashkir past.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Nationalists, Leftists and Chechens Debate Future of North Caucasus

2011-05-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 18 – Yesterday, at a roundtable organized by the Moscow Institute of Innovative Development, Russian nationalists, members of leftist groups, and representatives of the Chechen Republic joined in a lively debate about what each group sees as the future relationship of the North Caucasus and the Russian Federation.

The participants were unusually blunt. Dmitry Bakharev, the head of the Slavic Force Movement, opened the debate by arguing that “over the course of centuries, [his] ancestors had assembled these lands with their blood, worked and defended them,” pointedly asking “and what contribution to the general development of Russia has been made by the Chechen people?”

Arguing that the Russians, not the Soviets had defeated Hitler, Bakharev enquired “how can [we] build relations if we know about the disappearance of several dozen Russians in Grozny, about the bestial murders of Russian soldiers in Chechnya? [and] ifin Moscow, there is a street named for a man who called for killing as many Russians as possible.

Zelimkhan Musayev, the Chechen minister for foreign ties, nationality policy, press and information, disputed Bakharev’s argument. He argued that the Soviet Union won in World War II “only thanks to the trust among peoples.” Moreover, he pointed out, “the Caucasus war did not last a century; it lasted only 25 years” (www.nr2.ru/moskow/331976.html).

Moreover, the Chechen minister continued, “Russian General Yermolov “who pacified the Caucasus destroyed Chechen settlements completely” because that struggle “was not a war of Russians and Chechens; it was a war of two civilizations. But most strikingly, Musayev defended Chechen actions since 1991.

The Chechens Have “nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Akhmad Kadyrov with arms in his hands defended his people, and the war itself was a ‘bestial provocation’ of the Yeltsin-Dudayev corrupt regime.” Moreover, it often happened that “Chechen women covered Russian soldiers with their bodies, thus saving the soldiers from shooting.”

What his opponent is doing, Musayev suggested, is seeking to “justify his own excesses by searching for the bad in his opponent. We are prepared for positive dialogue. The problem is that unfortunately, the Russian Federation does not have a national ideology.” Instead, what is on offer is extreme nationalism and chauvinism.

Another Chechen, Professor Yavus Akhmadov turned on the nationalists and said that “You as people who did not pass through the war certainly do not understand one thing. You think that it can’t get worse than it is and that it is necessary to take power and so on. We also thought that way when we supported the first revolt against Dudayev’s regime.”

“I assure you,” Akhmadov said, if you act in the same way, “it will get worse.”

According to Akhmadov, most Chechens “identify themselves as citizens of Russia. But they are supporters of a state of a ‘feudal-imperial type,’ a strong power, a strong president, and a strong Russia.”

Vladimir Lakeyev, the first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the KPRF and a representative of leftist groups, Novy region reported, “tried” to bridge the gap by arguing that what matters is not nationality but the structure of the state. “To a complete degree, friendship of the peoples will work only under socialism,” he added.

Aleksandr Batov, the coordinator of leftist ROT-Front, argued that “in Chechnya there is only the appearance of peace” and that “in other national regions there is the basis for the renewal of a war,” with new outbreaks of “separatism and nationalism because conflicts like Chechnya were “profitable for [leaders on] both sides” although deadly for the people.

“Nationalism, the establishment of an [ethnic] Russian state, and the separation of the Caucasus are a path to nowhere,” Batov argued. That is because there are in reality only two nationalities: “the nationality of honest people who toil honestly and the nationality of thieves,k bandits and the like who now rule in our country.”

Another nationalist speaker, however, took a different view. Aleksandr Belov who had led the now-banned Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) said that he “personally did not feel any antipathy toward Chechens” and that “none of the Russian nationalists consider the Chechens as anything but fully valued people.”

But Belov said, “objective reality is such that Russian society experiences a definite fear of the Chechens and the majority of Russians do not associate Chechenya with Russia.” Given that and the absence of assimilation, ‘how should the Russian and Chechen peoples exist together?” The answer is that the divide between them is too great to bridge.

Rustam Tapayev, the president of the Union of Chechen Youth, called on the Russian nationalists to provide evidence that they were seeking a resolution. “Otherwise, in his words, all will conceive them as an organization which ‘exists while there is a conflict … Bothers can argue but they need to find common aspects and not disagreements.

Vladimir Tor, the representative of the Russian Social Movement (ROD), dissented from the idea that one could call “brothers” all those at the table But he suggested that did not mean that there could not be a discussion. However, he insisted that the Chechens must explain why they deserve many times the subsidies from Moscow that Russians get.

He said that was the most important question that had to be answered, although he suggested that two others – the bad behavior of Chechens in Russian cities and “the genocide of ethnic Russian in the Caucasus” – require resolution as well. And he reminded the group that “genocide is a crime which does not have a statute of limitations.”

That prompted a response from Akhmadov. He suggested that “not a single kopeck or ruble has Chechnya received at the expense of the Russian or Khanty-Mansiisk land. Everyone knows the expression of our president [Ramzan Kadyrov]: “Give us the possibility to pumpt oil and we won’t need money from the federal budget.”

After a sharp exchange on these and other issues, Viktor Militaryev, the coordinator of ROD, said there were two additional problems which had to be discussed: “the monopolization of small and mid-sized business by the peoples of the Caucaus” and “the protection of ‘their own’ by national diasporas.”

But Denis Zommer, a leader of the Union of Communist Youth, summed up the meeting with what may be a common view: “It is wrong to dance the lezginka at the tomb of the unknown soldier, but it is also wrong to drink beer there.” With that, the groups appear to have agreed to meet again, next time in Grozny.

Window on Eurasia: Caucasus Muslim Leader Denounces Georgia’s Creation of an Independent Muslim Body

2011-05-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 18 – Allashukyur Pashazade, sheikh ul-Islam and head of the Baku-based Administration of Muslims of the Caucasus (AMC), has sharply criticized the creation of an independent Administration of Muslims of Georgia (AMG), as the latest example of the nationalist course set by President Mikhail Saakashvili.

The sheikh said that the decision of “official Tbilisi” was “incorrect,” adding that in his view, “behind the establishment of this organization stands the idea of ‘Greater Armenia” and saying that he deeply regretted that “part of the ethnic Azerbaijani officials” in Georgia support the new body (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1405007.html).

However that may be, the efforts of Georgians to have their own Muslim organization are but the latest example of numerous problems involved in squaring religious and national borders in the post-Soviet states, ones that bedevil the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine and Abkhazia but that is nowhere more complicated than in the south Caucasus.

The AMC was established in Soviet times as one of four Muslims Spiritual Directorates (MSDs), but unlike the other three, the Baku institution had a double task. On the one hand, it was responsible for Shiite communities throughout the USSR. And on the other, it had administrative responsibility for Muslim parishes in the Caucasus as a whole.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Pashazade, who has been in office since 1980, has sought to continue to exercise the powers involved in each of these responsibilities, although he has been under pressure to yield on both counts and has in fact given way to other newer Muslim bodies.

The sheikh ul-Islam has insisted that he, the only Shiite leader of a supra-national MSD, is still responsible for all Shiite communities across the former Soviet space, although his position has been challenged by others, including most recently Ravil Gainutdin, the head of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR).

And while he has de facto yielded to the new MSDs in the post-Soviet North Caucasus, Pashazade has sought to maintain the powers implied in the name of the institution he heads, especially with regard to neighboring Georgia, where the majority of Muslims are ethnic Azerbaijanis, although many of them are Sunni rather than Shiia.

The Baku sheikh noted on Monday that he has exercised his authority in Georgia through a special division of the AMC, which was “created in 1996 at the request of [former Georgian] President Shevardnadze” and which continues to function under the direction of Ali Aliyev, a citizens of Georgia.

That makes the creation of the Georgian body a particular threat to his dignity and influence. Details about the AMG are still sketchy, particularly with regard to how many of the Muslim parishes in Georgia, ethnic Azerbaijani or otherwise, recognize its authority. But some details are offered in the just released issue of “NG-Religii.”

In an essay entitled, “The Shiites and Sunnis Divide Georgia,” Lidiya Orlova reports that the AMG was created last week, with Sunni Mufti Dzhamal Bagshadze becoming its leader with the avowed purposes of “achieving independence from the AMC” and “uniting under its control the Muslim communities of Georgia” (religion.ng.ru/events/2011-05-18/3_gruzia.html).

Ali Aliyev, the AMC representative in Georgia, insisted that the announcement of the new group would have little effect and that in his words, “the mosques in Georgia will continue their activity and continue to be subordinate to the AMC.” That is especially true because there is no legal basis for the new national AMG.

According to Aliyev, “the creators of such a structure must be representatives of the religion and spiritual persons. [But in this case] there is not one spiritual person; they are civil people, and certain [of those involved in fact] work in government structures.” And he added that in the AMG leadership as of now, “there is not a single [ethnic] Azerbaijani.”

“At the same time,” Orlova continues, “Aliyev is not inclined to see a political subtext to the appearance of the new spiritual administration” because Tbilisi in general and President Saakashvili in particular “constantly declare their friendship with Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani people.”

But if Aliyev does not view this action as political, Araz Alizade, the vice president of the Social Democratic Party of Azerbaijan is sure that it is. He told Regnum that “behind the creation of the AMG stands the Georgian government” which is trying in every possible way “to separate Azerbaijanis living in Georgia from Azerbaijan.”

Window on Eurasia: Regime Opponents, Under Pressure in Russia’s Regions, Flee to Capitals

2011-05-17T19:46:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 17 – Less constrained than their counterparts in Moscow, police officials in Russia’s regions are currently putting so much pressure on those they identify as “extremists” that many of these people in many cases feel compelled to move to Moscow and St. Petersburg where they hope there is “still a chance to be heard.”

On the one hand, this situation means that the state of repression in the Russian Federation is much worse than it may appear to those who judge it on the basis of the situation in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And on the other, it suggests that the amount of opposition to the regime in the capitals may overstate the level of such opposition in the country as a whole.

Those are just some of the disturbing conclusions suggested by commentator Aleksander Litoy in an article the current issue of Moscow’s “New Times” weekly, an article that compares how interior ministry officers treat people in Moscow and the provinces and examines how opposition figures have adapted to this difference (www.newtimes.ru/articles/detail/38797).

Litoy notes that the E Centers have existed in the interior ministry since the end of 2008, when they replaced the subdivisions for the struggle with organized crime and when the majority of the staff of the latter passed into the former. But already then, after anti-extremist legislation was passed, “rights activists expressed concern” that these units would be used against dissent.

That is exactly what has happened. Litoy says. And as a result, “the “clients” of the centers” had only one option left to defend themselves if they were operating in the regions: “they could flee to the capitals where there are still media prepared to speak out on behalf of the repressed and where organizations defending rights are still active.”

Those who were in the regions had no such defense, and the operatives of the E section of the local interior ministry offices acted against them without much ceremony. Anna Polikova, the editor of the extremizma.net site, says that this reflects the anti-organized crime background of the officers involved.

Most of these officers, she suggests, view their new “charges” as no different than the organized criminal groups they had earlier been deployed against. Consequently, they “are not able to work any differently” toward political dissidents than they did toward real criminal groups.

Indeed, Polikova points out, “the regional ‘E-men’ consider the ideal situation to be when on their territory there are in general no political organizations or initiatives other than the official ones.” And consequently, given their past, they seek to suppress any independent action, viewing it through the prism of official definitions of “extremism.”

As a result, outside of the capitals, Litoy says, “the possibilities of those who struggle with extremism have only increased despite the continuing criticism by the media and human rights activists.” And that has led many political activists there either to cease their activities or, quite often, to flee to Moscow or St. Petersburg where their chances are greater.

Appended to Litovoy’s article are quotations from the late Galina Kozhevnikova or SOVA, Mikhail Maglov of Solidarity, who himself came to Moscow from Omsk, and Olga Ivanova of the Left Front who moved from Krasnodar to Moscow, all of whom support Litoy’s basic conclusions.

Window on Eurasia: For the Price of the Sochi Games, Russia Could Provide Kindergartens for All Preschoolers, Activists Say

2011-05-17T16:28:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 17 – For what Moscow plans to spend on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, activists say, the central government could open and support the operations of kindergartens for all preschoolers in Russia, the latest indication of the way in which in straightened economic times, Russians are registering their objections to government policies.

And because all Russians are paying the price for these games just as they are paying for the continuing war in the North Caucasus, such objections are likely to increase the number of opponents to these policies, even if as seems likely the powers that be in Moscow will do everything they can to ignore or downplay them.

But even if Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev are able to continue to pursue such policies, anger about spending on one set of projects, especially if it is shown to be taking money out of the mouths of children and others who need it, will have an impact on the rhetoric of Russian politics especially during the upcoming parliamentary campaign.

The Accessible Pre-School Education for Russian Children Movement has pointed out that Russia is spending 1.5 trillion rubles (50 billion US dollars) to prepare for the Sochi Games, an amount that the group say would provide kindergartens for three million Russian children, many of whom must now do without (globalsib.com/10501/).

The movement adds that Moscow plans to spend “not less” than that on the World Soccer Championship in 2018, yet another high profile publicity event that will do little or nothing to help ordinary Russians. And it offers other examples where money Moscow is currently spending could be put to better use.

To attract attention to this cause, the movement is organizing a three-day hunger strike for next weekend, the seventh such effort over the past several years but the one that already has attracted more support from more regions and cities than any of the earlier ones which Moscow studiously ignored (rdddo.ru/golodovka).

A major reason why the movement appears to be gaining support is that tough economic times and Moscow’s decision to solve its budgetary problems largely by cutting services to the poorer elements of the society is infuriating an increasing number of people and leading them to question the gigantist Soviet-style projects Vladimir Putin in particular appears to favor.

Last week, Anton Razmakhnin of “Svobodnaya pressa” reported that because of budgetary problems, “in this year, the majority of rural hospitals are closing,” a forced measure he points out that Moscow had not taken “since the times of the German occupation” during World War II (svpressa.ru/society/article/42957/).

Cutbacks in schools and hospitals, of course, will do more than anger many Russians. They will worsen the country’s demographic situation because many will decide not to have children if they cannot be sure there will be pre-school facilities to take them and because many others will suffer and die because they cannot gain access to medical treatment.

Window on Eurasia: Russians Worried Siberians Could Follow the Path of Ukrainians

2011-05-17T15:58:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 17 – Siberians may follow the path of the Ukrainians and seek independent statehood, some Moscow commentators believe, but whether they do is still an open question, the answer to which depends as much as on the Russians themselves as on those who are now identifying themselves as “Sibiryaki.”

In the latest broadcast of the “Nationality Question” program of “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” the two hosts, Elena Khanga and Dmitry Steshin note that according to some in Siberia, as many as a third of the residents of that region now identify as Siberians and see their future as separate from or even independent of Russia’s (www.kp.ru/daily/25686/890769/).

The two then discuss with their guest, Egor Kholmogorov, the editor of the “Russky obozrevatel” internet journal, whether the growth in Siberian identity represents a threat to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation and who is to blame for the apparent increase in such an identity over the last few years.

As Khanga points out, “a segment of the Siberians assert that they are distinctive people and, by distinguishing themselves from other nations, can resolve many social, ecological and other problems. And they themselves can define the future of their region and over time cease to be [only] a source of raw materials for Russia.”

Steshin adds that “Siberia always was set apart from the rest of Russia,” at least at the level of “social consciousness.” Because of the way the region was settled, a unique “Siberian mentality” has emerged -- to which Khanga adds that almost 14 percent of the population of the country could identify as Siberians, “an enormous figure.”

Kholmogorov concedes that there is such a possibility, but he says that he “hope that the greater part of them will never write down this nationality or even find out about such an idea,” lest having taken this first step in nation building they take others much as some of the nations of the former Soviet Union did.

To Khanga’s objection that “nationality is not citizenship” and that if people identify in one way rather than another, there is no harm in that, the “Russky obozrevatel” editor replies that everyone must understand that “in today’s world, there is no other territory” which outsiders view with such greedy aspirations.

He then recalls the statement of one former US secretary of state that “Siberia is too large a country to belong to a single state,” a clear indication in his mind of what the West intends and of the West’s role in promoting this particular national “identity” as a first step to taking Siberia away from Russia.

Steshin then suggests another approach to the problem of Siberian identity. In his view, Russians themselves are to blame both by forcing Siberians to pay excessive prices for tickets to travel to European Russia and by depriving them of the assistance they need both in normal times and during natural disasters like the forest fires of last year.

He adds that the appearance of a Siberian language is “a very serious provocation which touches the depths of the sub-consciousness,” although appended to the article is a comment by the language’s developer that he came up with the idea of such a language as a lark and has been surprised by the interest in it.

According to Kholmogorov, Ukrainian was once invented in much the same way by Mihailo Hurushevsky, and consequently, the Russian commentator argues, the appearance of such a language, however artificial, has the potential to create real problems for the state down the road.

That is especially likely in the Siberian case, Kholmogorov suggests, because Russian identity is no longer highly values and the asymmetric nature of Russian Federalism means that non-Russians have many benefits and powers that ethnic Russians do not, even in places where they are the overwhelming majority.

Consequently, he concludes, what some may now dismiss as a bad joke may prove to be something more and more disturbing if Russians do not wake up to the danger that such an identity represents for their country and for their nation, one that could cost their country even more than did the departure of Ukraine.

Window on Eurasia: Virtually All Daghestani Media Outlets Now Have Online Versions

2011-05-10T05:08:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 10 – People throughout Russia and around the world can now follow developments in Daghestan as reported in traditional print and broadcast media online in that North Caucasus republic since virtually all media outlets there maintain frequently updated web sites, according to the Internet columnist for the republic’s “Nastoyashcheye vremya.”

In an article featuring a photograph of four older Daghestani women looking at a laptop computer, Bagdat Tumalayev who writes frequently on Internet issues in the North Caucasus provides a comprehensive listing of the traditional media outlets that have their own websites (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/6002/109/).

As is the case elsewhere, such sites may be the salvation of some traditional media outlets by attracting more readers, listeners or viewers, of they may represent the death knell for others by causing people to stop reading, listening or viewing them. But the extent of such online media in the regions means Moscow will likely find it ever more difficult to control the flow of news.

Below the list of the sites Tumalayev offers.

Daghestani newspapers online:

Gazeta-nv.ru “Nastoyashcheye vremya” weekly

Ndelo.ru “Novoye delo” weekly

Dagpravda.ru “Dagestanskaya Pravda” daily

respublic.net “Respublika” weekly

chernovik.net “Chernovik” weekly

mi-dag.ru “Makhachkalionskiye izvestiya” daily

assalam.ru Newspaper of Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Daghestan

dagstadion.narod.ru “Stadium” sports newspaper

dagorlenok.ru “Orlenok Dagstana” youth newspaper

tryjenik.3dn.ru “Selsky truzhennik,” a regional paper

proji.ru “Prodzhi” features journal

dmdag.ru “Delovoy mir Dagestana”

Башня05.рф “Bashnya,” a youth newspaper with its own Facebook page

garage05.ru “Garage,” an automobile magazine

stpartner05.ru “Stroipartner,” a construction industry paper with a guide to firms in Daghestan

Television Sites:

gtrkdagestan.ru Daghestan state television

rutvstar.ru RuTV channel

tvchirkey.ru Daghestani Islamic television channel

tvdrk.ru Makhachkala advertising channel

mtv-stolica.ru MTV youth channel

Radio Sites:

radio-stolica.ru Stolitsa Radio site– сайт модного дагестанского радио «Столица».

mediaholding-stolica.ru Radio aggregator site

dagfm.ru Volna media group site

99fm.ru Kristall radio site

News Service Sites:

Riadagestan.ru RIA Dagestan news service

dagnews.com Independent analytic service

Window on Eurasia: ‘No Confirmed Evidence’ of Al Qaeda Role in Caucasus Resistance Exists, Daghestani Journalist Says

2011-05-10T05:07:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 10 – There is “no confirmed evidence” that Al Qaeda has played a role in the militant movement in the North Caucasus, and Moscow’s claims to the contrary are yet another effort by the Russian government to avoid facing the real basis for the anti-Moscow movement in the region, a Makhachkala journalist says.

In an article the current issue of “Nastoyashcheye vremya,” Ruslan Gereyev says that “representatives of Al Qaeda of course were in the North Caucasus” at various times “but they did not play a major role,” and “the general movement” there did “not depend on them, a sharp contrast to the situation in Bosnia or Somalia (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5988/109/).

Gereyev acknowledges that Al Qaeda operatives have visited the North Caucasus and that the organization has provided some funding for militants there, but “the Arabs have never achieved control of the administration of the resistance movement in the North Caucasus.” Instead, Gereyev says, “local Islamists have used” the Arabs rather than the other way around.

“Many who act in the North Caucasus,” he continues, “do not have direct ties to Al Qaeda,” and it is even more the case that “Al Qaeda itself has never had great influence in the North Caucasus,” despite all the claims that have been made by the Russian special forces to the contrary.

The Russian security services have tried to link the North Caucasus militants ot the Arabs by ascribing membership in Al Qaeda to Khattab and all Arabs who have appeared in the region, but the numbers of such people have been relatively small. And they do not snow that bin Laden ever realized control over what is taking place” in the region.

Under contemporary conditions, “there is no need” for Arabs to turn to Al Qaeda as the only possible source for support. “People coming from North Africa, the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have for a long time already their own channels of financing. They do not need Al Qaeda in order to carry out a jihad, including in the North Caucasus.”

As Gereyev notes, “experts have more than once declared that the information of the [Russian] sp[ecial services about the activities of Al Qaeda in the North Caucasus is not shown, although according to the data of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, the terrorist network of Al Qaeda continuously finances the leaders of the armed Caucasus Emirate.”

But as the Daghestani journalist points out, “up to now, the causes which are giving birth to terrorism, including social, political, economic, and inter-ethnic conflicts,” especially in the North Caucasus, have not been eliminated by Russian government policies. Instead, Moscow hopes to win the sympathy of the West by suggesting Al Qaeda is behind Russia’s problems.

As a result, despite “the liquidation of bin Laden,” the level of terrorism throughout the world, including in the North Caucasus, will not change. Instead, his death at the hand of the Americans is likely to open “a Pandora’s box” of problems. Indeed, the Taliban of Afghanistan have already declared that they will take revenge.

Window on Eurasia: Russians Caught Between Post-Imperial and Russian Identities, Orthodox Editor Says

2011-05-10T05:06:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 10 – Russians today find themselves between a very real post-imperial identity and an ethnic Russian one, a situation in which they find it difficult if not impossible to define themselves or to consider their country or their nation in a positive way, according to the editor of the leading Russian Orthodox journal.

In an article posted on polit.ru based on a presentation he made to the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in April, Sergey Chapnin, the editor of the “Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate,” argues that these difficulties show that Russians routinely use the wrong terms to describe the reality surrounding them (www.polit.ru/country/2011/05/05/culture.html).

On the one hand, the editor says, Russians very much want to describe the world in which they live as Russian. But on the other, they continue to live in a post-Soviet one, a world that is “not a ‘frozen’ post-Soviet one, but rather an actively developing one,” even 20 years after the collapse of the USSR.

The values of post-Soviet culture, he continues, are “extremely contradictory and do not form a single picture.” Instead, they are so contradictory that “we have lost the ability to speak about ourselves, our ancestors and one another in a positive fashion and to create convincing and attractive models.”

As a result, “neither in high culture, nor in its mass variant is there any positive model of contemporary Russia. We do not like ourselves and we do not respect one another. An integral model of the present is lacking. The image of the past is mythologized … [and] there is no clear model of our future.”

As a result, “at the center of the new national mythology is only one event – the Great Victory in the Great Fatherland War,” a victory “conceived as the single ‘holy’ event of our history of the 20th century” and one whose celebration is “constructed as a religious action in which participate or at least sympathize the majority of Russians.”

And from this, Chapnin says, a kind of “civic religion with its own rules and rituals. The theme of victory is so ‘holy’ that to speak about it is possible only in the framework” established by “mass post-Soviet consciousness,” a situation that distorts both history and the consciousness of it.

“At the basis of this civic religion lie pagan values, meanings and symbols which were only partially modernized by communist propaganda,” including the eternal flame before which all bow but whose meaning within the traditions of Christianity is contradictory or even profoundly negative.

The cult of the Great Fatherland War entails a number of “extremely dangerous aspects,” the Orthodox editor says, including “the preservation and cultivation of ‘the image of the enemy,’” “the total heroization of war,” a sense of loss since victory, and “a primitive (pagan) understanding of patriotism.”

But perhaps the most serious of these is “the justification by virtue of the victory of all that happened in Russia in the10th century and above all with the totalitarian regime and Stalin personally.” And not surprisingly, in recent years, this “post-Soviet civic religion” has come into conflict with Russian culture as “inspired by the evangelical ideal.”

Because the Russian Orthodox Church is “a big Church,” it does not, indeed cannot provide “a common position” on all issues which are not directly part of Church doctrine. Instead, there have emerged what Chapnin calls three “church subcultures,” each with its own views on the Soviet past.

The first of these is “prepared to incorporate elements of Soviet culture” on the basis of a claim that “Soviet culture was more Christian by its content than is contemporary mass culture.” This is the largest of the three and includes almost all those who joined the priesthood in the last decade or so.

This group strives toward “social and cultural self-isolation,” shows “extreme lack of faith to any forms of ‘Western’ values,” and thus opposes ecumenism, changes in the Church itself, and any steps by the state which appear to threaten the Church including electronic numbering systems.

In reality, Chapnin argues, one can say that “this is Orthodoxy without tradition,” and “its representatives continue to struggle with the church problems of the past Soviet epoch – ecumenism and agents of the KGB within the Church,” even though “today these are already not real problems but phantoms.”

The second Church subculture is the successor to the Church underground of Soviet period, when the Church was persecuted. “This group,” Chapnin says, “consciously and consistently accepts nothing that is Soviet,” but it does so “peacefully and non-aggressively” because it recognizes that overcoming the past will take a long time.

Representatives of the second group also “well understand the universal character of Eastern-Slavic culture, but they know, love and value those forms of the cultural tradition” which exist within Russian Orthodoxy. A small group, it is will become smaller because its supporters are those who became priests in Soviet times or who were part of the Orthodox Church Abroad.
Finally, the third subculture combines a claim of links to the catacomb church but “on the other hand completely accepts the Soviet cultural matrix. In essence, this group has preserved the stylistics of Soviet propaganda and only replaced a number of terms and definitions, dropping ‘Soviet Union’ in favor of ‘Holy Rus,’ and ‘communist’ for ‘Orthodox.’”

Each of these groups supports a different version of Russian nationalism and Russian national culture and is in turn supported by them. And consequently, because the Church does not speak as one on these questions, it is not in a position to lead Russians along a single path to overcome the divisions in society which now exist.

Window on Eurasia: Russian First Lady Seen Actively Promoting Orthodox Church

2011-05-09T06:35:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 9 – Svetlana Medvedeva, Russia’s first lady, currently plays an active role in promoting the spread of the values of the Russian Orthodox Church not only in Russian society at large but in the Russian elite in particular, according to members of the Orthodox clergy who have known her for nearly 20 years.

In the current issue of “Sovershenno sekretno,” Aleksey Chelnokov surveys their opinions about what he calls “the phenomenon of the First Lady,” a woman whose role in the life of the Russian Federation is far larger than any of her immediate predecessors and far more important than most suspect (www.sovsekretno.ru/magazines/article/2786).

While much of his article is devoted to the Russian first lady’s childhood, first encounters with her husband, and his role in “glamorous” events like fashion shows and the promotion of particular Russian artists, Chelnokov devotes particular attention to her role in the Church not only in the 1990s but more recently.

It is said, Chelnokov notes, that Svetlana Medvedeva entered the church thanks to her “religious older sister already in the 1990s” when “fate, more precisely God, put her in touch with the pastor” of a church across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, Father Vladimir Volgin, a remarkable figure in his own right.

Not only is he the pastor of four different congregations but he is the son of the actress Yekaterina Vasilyeva and has been responsible for bringing into the church “Irina Abramovich, the mother of five children of the oligarch Roman Abramovich” and for making a pilgrimage with Svetlana Medvedeva.

The First Lady, he told “Sovershenno-Seketrno,” is “an individual of high morality and strong, I would even say, strategic mind,” adding that he was sure that her “experience of contact with holy things” has had an impact on her work in the program for the spiritual and moral training of young people.

Father Volgin said that he accompanied Russian First Family to Mount Athos in Greece and that “sometimes” he is invited to visit the couple “at the government dacha of the Administration of the Affairs of the President.” When that first happened, officials often looked at him askance, but now that has changed.

And he added that some of the senior officials he had met there now visit Mount Athos or other Orthodox pilgrimage sits “several times a year,” another indication of a change of attitude at the top. Father Volgin added that the Medvedevs are not shy about expressing their faith to those whom they know.

Another Orthodox priest with whom Chelnokov spoke was Father Kiprian who heads the Church’s Institute for Expertise on Educational Programs and Governmetn-Confession Relations. Born in 1953 into a family of atheists, he nonetheless became a monk in 1994 and since 1997, a member of the Academic Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church.

He has worked closely with Svetlana Medvedeva since 2007 when she was given the Church’s Olga Order and became a member of the advisory committee of the Spiritual-Moral culture Program for the Rising Generation of Russia, that was created at the behest of then-Patriarch Aleksii II.

At present, Kiprian, who serves as the secretary of this Church project said, “Svetlana vladimirovna is involved in the formation of a new membership” for that council and in the development of a program for its activities over the next decade. “The conception has not changed, but the extent of its activity has been significantly increased,” he added.

Under her influence, the group is promoting the Orthodox holiday of Sts. Peter and Fevronia as a counter to “the challenges of the Catholic Saint Valentine.” And the First Lady is involved in various projects including supporting religious communities and a home for mentally handicapped children.

And in a final comment, Father Kiprian made a remark about Vladimir Putin that may say even more about relations between the Medvedev’s and the prime minister than he intended. He called that Putin had suggested after the Manezh clashes that “Orthodoxy in many ways is even closer to Islam than let us say to the Catholics.”

“Perhaps,” Father Kiprian said laughing, “it is closer to Vladimir Vladimirovich personally. Islam is an Old Testament branch, a single religion which aspires to exclusiveness, by calling all others unbelievers.” Insisting on its similarities with Orthodoxy, the Orthodox churchman said, “is conditioned by some personal preferences” of Putin himself.”

Window on Eurasia: Central Asia on Brink of ‘Inter-Ethnic Explosion,’ Moscow Scholar Says

2011-05-09T05:35:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 9 – An” inter-ethnic explosion” in Central Asia and Kazakhstan is increasingly likely given both the impact of gastarbeiters flowing from the southern part of that region to the north and the increasingly widespread idea of a ‘Greater Uzbekistan,” according to a Moscow ethnographer.

Georgy Sitnyansky, a researcher on Central Asia at the Center of Asian and Pacific Research at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, argues in addition that Russia is interested in particular in stability in Kazakhstan and Northern Kyrgyzstan, the only “potential subjects of Eurasian integration” (www.regnum.ru/news/1402208.html).

The author of a new monograph, “Ethnic Conflicts in Central Asia and the National Interests of Russia,” told Regnum in an interview posted online on Friday that while Kazakhstan stands somewhat apart from the problems of the other Central Asian countries because of the ethnic composition of its population, that may change.

At present, Sityansky noted, only about 40 percent of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnically Kazakh, something that makes the slogan “Kazakhstan for the Kazakhs” relatively unimportant. But 20 years from now, that could change, both because of the outflow of European nationalities and because of the influx of migrants from the south.

For the time being, he continued, Kazakhstan has been able to “block the influx of Uzbeks by inviting Kazakhs from Mongolia, the Oralmans.” But the question arises, “for how long will this work? For how long will Kazakhstan be able to avoid the problems that gastarbeiters from the south have already caused in the Russian Federation and Kyrgyzstan?

But the region may not have to wait that long for inter-ethnic explosions in other places, Sityansky argued. Kyrgyzstan was “the first bell” in that regard. But “as far as the activity of Uzbekistan is concerned,” the notion of a “Greater Uzbekistan” could trigger conflicts in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan as well.

Events like those which shook Osh last year could push Uzbekistan to take more dramatic action. That is all the more likely because it would have the effect of allowing Tashkent to displace Astana as the regional leader. But at the same time, “in Uzbekistan itself, the situation for economic regions is not as stable as it appears.”

Thus, these domestic Uzbek problems might drive Tashkent to behave aggressively toward its neighbors, but such actions in turn could “end badly for itself.” It is of course possible that “namely the dislike of Uzbeks living in Kyrgyzstan for the Karimov regime [in Uzbekistan] may restrain this process.”

“But,” Sityansky continued, “that regime can be changed – the last events in the Arab countries show that any dictatorship may be overthrown, and then a different attitude of the Osh Uzbeks toward Tashkent would be possible.”

Moscow has an interest in stability in Central Asia in general and “in the first instance on the territories of Kazakhstan and Northern Kyrgyzstan,” two places which have potential for “Eurasian integration.” But a change in Tashkent could bring to power an Islamist regime and that would threaten Russian interests immediately.

Asked whether NATO’s military campaign in Libya is a precedent for a possible Russian response in Central Asia, the Moscow scholar says that such a precedent could be invokved only in the most extreme cases. “For the time being, [Moscow will use] all possible levers of pressure on Karimov” to prompt him to liberalize.

Sityansky concluded his article by saying that “if ‘the flow [of gastarbeiters] from south to north] is not stopped, then in the mid to long term, one cannot exclude even the fall of Kazakhstan into the orbit of radical Islamization.” That seemed improbable to many in Kyrgyzstan a decade ago, but now, the ethnologist says, it is happening.

Window on Eurasia: Soviet People Fought Against Hitler Rather than For Stalin, St. Petersburg Scholar Argues

2011-05-09T05:05:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 9 – The viciousness of the Nazis against both Jews and Russians explains why the Soviet population shifted from indifference or even hostility to the Stalinist regime at the start of the war to the kind of passionate commitment its defense that led to the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and the salvation of the Soviet Union, according to a St. Petersburg scholar.

Many Western historians and some Russians ones have made this argument before,but its appearance now is worth noting because it challenges the image of the Soviet regime and especially its Stalinist variant now being presented by Vladimir Putin and many Russian nationalist writers.

In an article in the current issue of “Znamya,” Sergey Tsirel, a professor of the St. Petersburg branch of the Higher School of Economics, argues that Russians today need to more clearly understand what their ancestors were thinking when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and why they changed their minds a year later (magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2011/5/ci8.html).

Tsirel outlines the “strong sides” of the pre-war Soviet Union before discussing what he sees as the potentially fatal weaknesses of that regime. Among the former were industrialization, a “logical ideology,” well-organized propaganda, the lack of alternative leaders, fanatic devotion to Stalin by the Communist Party and urban youth, and “a powerful repressive apparatus.”

But despite these strengths, he points out, the Soviet Union had an extraordinarily difficult time in defeating Finland, a much smaller and less well-armed opponent. And it almost completely failed to defend itself during the first year of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.

“Military theoreticians and defenders of the Stalinist regime have been able to explain the causes of this shameful defeat,” Tsirel points out, by talking about the importance of the blitzkrieg. But their explanations fail to explain why after these losses, “the army nevertheless not only stood up to the onslaught of the occupiers but achieved significant victories.

The real reason first for the defeats and then for the victories, however, is seldom mentioned: “If soldiers do not want to fight and commanders cannot or are afraid to command, then automatic weapons and machineguns will not save” an army or a people from defeat from a much less well-armed opponent.

There are many examples of this, Tsirel continues. “Pacifist, internally divided France [for example,] could not show a worthy resistance to Hitler [in 1940] when the forces of the two sides were approximately equal.” And the Soviet Union in an even better position in terms of arms could not do so either in the first months of the war.

Again, apologists for Stalin provide numerous explanations for this, but Tsirel argues that these miss the fundamental point: “the widespread hunger in the collective farms just five to seven years after the terrible famine of 1933” caused by the pursuit of military strength “made a significant farm of the population indifferent to the defense of the country.

To be sure, Tsirel continues, “there was not real mass hunger, but the short period of easing in 1936-38 in that regard, which was used by Stalin for reprisals against the elite had ended, and mass hunger in the countryside began again,” as did broader repression “against simple people … which thus touched broad strata of the population.”

He cites statistics to show that “by the winter of 1939 the majority of Soviet people were encountering difficulties with getting enough food.” There was hunger in some areas, rationing in most, and “tens of thousands of peasants who were trying to save themselves from hunder fled into the cities.”

All this led to increased disease and morality, “especially among the young,” and a reduction in the birthrate. Indeed, “the general social-economic crisis” brought on by Stalin’s armament programs and industrialization had led to the near collapse of “the demographic subsystem of Soviet society.”

Such problems, which defenders of the system are accustomed to dismissing as “temporary difficulties,” nonetheless left the population indifferent at best to the fate of the regime and in many cases hostile to its survival, and those attitudes rather than the supremacy of the German war machine explain the near collapse of Soviet power in 1941.

But instead of exploiting these attitudes, Tsirel continues, the Germans transformed them into the attitudes of an enemy they could not defeat. At first, the German forces attacked primarily Jews and Roma, but soon by their attacks on Russians and other Slavs, they made it obvious that they had come not as liberators but as new and even worse masters.

Indeed, Tsirel argues, “the fear of people concerning what would happen to them ‘under the Germans’” not only became a theme of Soviet propaganda but also played a fundamental role in changing people from indifferent defenders of the USSR into passionate opponents of the German invaders.

As a result, “the rotting colossus began to develop real legs.” Consequently, one must conclude that it was not the cruelty of Stalin which won out but rather – “thank God!” – the racist policies of Hitler which turned those who could have become his allies into his most committed opponents and ultimately the people who defeated him and his system.

Moreover, the enormous losses that the Soviet people suffered in their fight helped most but not all of the world forget the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Finnish war and the Katyn executions. But what really saved Stalin’s regime was Hitler’s decision not to allow the USSR to join the Nazi-led Tripartite Alliance.

Had Hitler acted differently at that time, had he not been struck by the weakness the Soviet Union displayed in the Finnish war, “only a change of regime, for example, the killing of Stalin and Molotov like the killing of Mussolini could have allowed the USSR to count itself among the anti-fascist block of victors.”

In short, Tsirel says, “the surprising ability of Russia to lose small and unjust wars and to win in great and just ones in combination with the bloody anti-Semitism of Hitler and his hatred fo rhte Slavs saved Russia from dishonor and destruction, and converted the terrible dictatorship of Stalin and the tyrant himself into ‘saviors of humanity.’”

Window on Eurasia: Russians ‘Categorically Against’ De-Stalinization and De-Sovietization, Poll Shows

2011-05-06T15:37:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 6 – The population of the Russian Federation is “categorically against” the de-Stalinization and de-Sovietization that the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights says are preconditions for the modernization of the country, according to the results of a massive poll.

On the Rosbalt.ru portal today, sociologist Yuliya Krizhanskaya syas that the poll makes clear that “despite all ‘the dark places’ of the Soviet past, [residents of the Russian Federation] do not want to disown it” at least in part because “everyone understands that the Soviet past is what unites us” now (www.rosbalt.ru/main/2011/05/06/846408.html).

Krizhanskaya says the poll was taken because the Presidential Council’s call for “de-Stalinization” and “de-Sovietization” includes numerous controversial ideas such as equating the USSR with Hitler’s Germany, accusing the Soviet government of genocide against Russians, and declaring “the entire Soviet period” a criminal one.

The Council, she continues, declared that such steps are needed because it is view, “the modernization of the country” would be “impossible without ‘the modernization of the consciousness of its citizens’ in a ‘de-Sovietized direction and also because of the necessity of uniting society” in the process.

Such an assertion, Krizhanskaya says, means that “they want to modernize the consciousness of the citizens of Russia, that is, all of us, supposedly in our own interests but without asking us” if that is something Russians in fact want.

The Essence of Time Public Movement, she says, decided “to find out” what the public thinks about this idea. Some 1500 of its activists during April queried more than 36,000 adults, in some 1700 population centers in 77 “oblasts, krays, and republics.” The “main” finding, she says is that “Russia said a decisive ‘No’ to the program of ‘de-sovietization.”

Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed said they would vote against any referendum on the conducting of a program “which would presuppose the recognition of the Soviet Union as a criminal state, which conducted genocide against its own people, and was guilty of unleashing World War II.

As far as backing for a program of de-Stalinization, “only ten percent” backed that as “correct and useful,” while 20 percent said they were “indifferent,” and “70 percent” were completely opposed. “But even among those who reacted ‘positively,’ 40 percent ‘voted’ against its realization in the country.”

This pattern held for all social, regional, ethnic and age groups, Krizhanskaya continues, and that permits only one conclusion: “Everyone understands that the Soviet past is what unifies us. And correspondingly, everything that is directed against it divides us” and won’t be supported, if people in fact have a choice, as Krizhanskaya says, they should.

Window on Eurasia: Daghestanis Seek to Overcome Muslim Divisions to Oppose Militants

2011-05-06T13:53:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 6 – Daghestan banned Wahhabism more than a decade ago both to defend traditional Islam and counter militant groups, but officials and Muslim leaders in that North Caucasus republic have now concluded that this step was counterproductive and have opened a process to bridge the divide between these two trends – and for exactly the same reasons.

The Daghestani law banning extremism, the traditional Muslim leaders of Daghestan have concluded, has had the effect of dividing the umma, not only creating a situation in which entireliy innocent people are attacked for their faith but also allowing the militants to pose as the defenders of what is a widely respected trend in Islam and thus gain support from that alone.

As Islamnews.ru pointed out yesterday, “one o fht emost discusses themes of recent times in Daghestan has been the issue connected with the start of dialogue between representative es of the two conflicting religious tendencies of Islam,” between “so-called official Islam” which is based on Sufism and Salafites, including Wahhabis (www.islamnews.ru/news-53521.html).

The news service points out that “all negative events in the republic are being connected with the presence of a certain destructive force by the name of ‘Wahhabism,” thus automatically equating all the followers of this trend to the militants who in turn cover their illegal activity with islam or more precisely with one of its trends.”

Government officials, both Daghestani and federal, have made the situation worse, the portal suggests, by their insistence of the need to “struggle ideologically with the radicalization of young people” even as they acknowledge without doing anything that the reasons most young people are going into the forests is because of “social problems and corruption.”

Neither the officials nor the Muslim establishment were inclined to make any change, however, until Daghestani society “began to raise the alarm” about the growing departure of young people “‘into the forest’” and to insist that “by force alone, problems will not be solved: force will give rise only to force.”

The first effort to have the leaders of the various trends of Islam within Daghestan’s umma to talk with one another was a Makhachkala roundtable organized at the end of April Sulayman Uladiyev, the vice president of the public organization, “A Land of Peace and Accord” (www.chernovik.net/news/438/MONOTHEOS/2011/04/29/11917).

The primary goal of the roundtable was “to put a stop” to the charges and countercharges that the two trends have been exchanging for more than a deacde. Among those taking part were representatives of the traditional jamaat, the imam of the Makhachkala central mosque, the head of the Daghestani institute of theology, and all the deputies of the republic’s mufti.

During the discussion, “it was noted,” Islamnews.ru reports, “that representatives of the force or ‘the third provocative side’ about whose presence experts and observers have spoken are seeking to use religious principles in order to justify and even more to support the carrying out of criminal actions.”

One representative of traditional Sufi Islam, Kayakent Imam Kamil Sultanakhmedov suggested that “if today we are not prepared to be united then we ought to at least stop that which divides us,” a step that if taken should allow for others to follow. His position was supported by several other speakers.

Another participant, Mukhammadrasul Saaduyev, the imam of Makhchakala’s central mosque, argued that officials must allow more Islamic activities in civil structures in order to counter the arguments of those who say that the regimes in the republic and the Federation are not just secular but hostile to Islam.

One participant, the poet Adalo Aliyev, went further. He suggested that “certain bureaucrats” are promoting the conflict within the umma and urged that the Daghestani law banning Wahhabism be repealed, not ony because it isn’t working but because it “does not any any analogues” elsewhere in the world.

The rountable declared that “the single possible form for the restoration on Daghestani land of a peaceful life and the well-being of the population is the strengthening of the unity of the Daghestani peoples, the development of dialogue among constructive forces of civil society, an end to inter-religious arguments, the strick observation of law and the defense of rights and interests of citizens, independent of their nationality and faith.”

Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians to Lose Majority in RF Population by Mid-Century, Scholar Says

2011-05-05T18:41:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 5 – Russia’s demographic decline means not only that the total population of the counry will decline but that ethnic Russians who now form about three-quarters of that country’s population will lose their majority within the population sometime in the middle of this century, according to a Russian scholar.

Not only are fertility rates lower and mortality rates higher among ethnic Russians than among most non-Russian groups, researchers at the Russian Academy of Economic Sciences say, but the influx of non-Russian immigrants is accelerating this Russian decline (www.za-nauku.ru//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4137&Itemid=29 ).

And while many may be inclined to dismiss this essay because it is so obviously informed by animosity toward those involved with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the rule of the Russian Federation since 1991, its arguments deserve attention both on their own terms and because of what they suggest about the thinking of some scholars in Moscow.

In a 5,000-word article posted online this week, B.I. Iskakov, a professor and member of both that academy and the International Slavic Academy, provides one of the most detailed descriptions of this process, one he describes as the result of the policies of the post-Soviet Russian government and “the demo-genocide of the [ethnic] Russian nation in Russia.”

According to “optimistic predictions,” Iskakov says, Russians are at risk of losing their majority status in the Russian Federation “in the 2060s [or] 2070s.” But “unfortunately,” he continues, because Russian statistics are so problematic even now, that loss of majority status is in fact likely to occur even sooner unless Moscow changes its policies.

Indeed, given migration and ethnic Russian fertility and mortality rates, “the Russian people could loseits predominant position in the structure of the population of the Russian Federation “much earlier, already in the first half of the 21st century,” which Iskakov says will lead to the division and demise of Russia.

Window on Eurasia: Some Russians Don’t Want North Caucasians in the Army -- But North Caucasians Want to Serve

2011-05-05T18:24:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 5 – Some Russians have suggested that dedovshchina and other problems in the Russian armed forces could be eliminated by an end to drafting soldiers from the non-Russian nationalities of the North Caucasus, but officials there say that people from the Caucasus very much want to serve, thus potentially setting the stage for new and broader conflicts.

The argument of those like Nikolay Zakharov, the military commissar of Chelyabinsk oblast, that the army should not draft “residents of the Caucasus or people from the Caucasian republics who live in other regions of Russia” is gaining support even though Moscow has disowned it (folksland.net/m/articles/view/Rossijskaya-armiya-prevrashaetsya-v-dzhamaat).

Some writers are simply supporting the idea of not drafting any Caucasians. Others are suggesting that there should be a return to tsarist practice in which Muslims were allowed to serve only on an exceptional basis or to the Soviet one in which they were largely confined to construction battalions.

And till others want to increase the powers of officers to send anyone from the Caucasus who violates the rules to special disciplinary battalions from which they will not be released until they demonstrate not only that they have learned what is appropriate behavior but also that they want to fit in to military units.

The most immediately serious result of this comment by the Chelyabinsk official has been to give new prominence to incidents of inter-ethnic conflict in military units over the last two decades and to promote more generally anti-Caucasian attitudes, with the Folksland.net article cited above entitled “The Russian Army is Being Transformed into a Jamaat.”

Now, the North Caucasians are responding. Vladimir Telnov, the military commissar of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, for example, says that “those born in the Caucasus are also citizens of Russia, just like all others and therefore must fulfill their holy obligation before the motherland” (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184668/).

“Residents of the Caucasus have always served, and in the tsarist, Soviet and Russian army, they have served well. Among them have been many gifted military men,” and as far as men from his republic are concerned, Telnov reports, “there have not been any problems in this regard.”

“For example, in the past year from Karachayevo-Cherkessia,” he continues, representatives of 27 nationalities were called into the army, and there was not a singl negative report about any of them,” a reflection of good preparation and not of any ethnic specificity or diversity.

Arsen Dzhashakkuyev, a resident of Cherkessk, added that in his view, “the declaration that residents of the Caucasus will not be drafted is the latest example of the enflaming of inter-ethnic relations. They have served in all times and distinguished themselves by the qualities needed for this.”

What possible sense, he asks rhetorically, is there any reason to discuss this in ethnic terms?

Another Cherkessk resident, Oleg Gordienko, points out that “dedovshchina and disorders will flourish wherever there is inappropriate ctions by the officers. If the officers fulfill their responsibilities as they should, then as a reul there will not be a basis for violations of the military code of behavior,” including ethnically based dedovshchina.

In short, the statement by the Chelyabinsk officer, even though it almost certainly was a trial balloon or based on a misunderstanding of a Moscow order, has had the effect of worsening rather than improving inter-ethnic relations within the military and indeed within Russian society as a whole.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Nationalist Attitudes Product of Corruption, Absence of Democracy and Stagnation, Ethnographer Says

2011-05-05T17:52:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 5 – Widespread corruption, the lack of democracy, and a decline in social mobility are behind the rise of Russian nationalist attitudes rather than any hostility to immigrants on ethnic grounds, according to a Russian ethnographer, who adds Russians are especially angry because they feel non-Russians currently have more resources than they do.

In an interview to the Fergananews.com portal, Igor Savin, an ethnographer at the Center fo rhte Study of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Ural-Volga Region of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies, lays out his arguments in detail on each of these points (www.fergananews.com/article.php?id=6952).

Challenged to explain survey findings that suggest younger Russians are sympathetic to the anti-immigrant attitudes of the participants at the Manezh Square protest in December, Savin argues that “these statistics do not speak aobut a growth of xenophobia” among Russians toward all groups but rather “only about the growth of dissatisfaction with ‘Caucasians.’”

On the one hand, he argues, the survey involved not just ethnic Russians but “representatives of other nationalities as well,” including the Tatars. And on the other, it found that people were not put off by the Caucasians because of the way they look or their culture, the two most usual causes of xenophobia.

Instead, the ethnographer said, “it turned out that [residents of the Russian Federation] did not like precisely the behavior of ‘the Caucasians,’ the way in which they conducted themselves during the time they spend earning money and during their off hours,” a response that he suggested was “a natural reaction which arises given the lack of a serious integration policy.”

“This is [thus] not a question of dislike, which has suddenly arisen among the Caucasians, ethnic Russians, Tatars and whomever else. This is an issue of the lack of agreement on a straqtegy of social survival,” where the indigenous people choose one and the arrivals choose another.

In the recent past, Savin points out, “those who traditionally lived in the central part of Russia, the national majority had their own ‘working’ models of social success based either on personal entrepreneurialism or on the obtaining of good educaziton or on the inclusion in various structures.”

Ethnic Russians therefore “did not play ‘the national card’” because “this was considered a marginal measures which was used [only] by representatives of national minorities,” who it was assumed “would use such means because they did not have equal access to others. But now the situation has changed.

“As before the national minorities use these mechanisms, but the government institutions which earlier secured the socialization of the majority (the Russians) have ceased to work. Nothing depends on the level of your education, competence or on your individualisty today. Today the mechanisms that matter are ‘personal ties,’ clientalism, and tribalism.”

Because those are the only reliable resources at the present time, Savin says, ethnic Russians simply want to use them as well, and it is that desire which explains the growth in support for the idea of “’Russia for the Russians’” rather than hostility to other ethnic or religious groups.

“For representatives of national minorities, the use of [such] ethnic resources is an every day affair. But for ethnic Russians, it is a manifesto. Rephrasing the well-known expression, it is possible to say that ‘the nation is like health; if one is talking about it, then that means that it doesn’t exist.’”

Many people assumed that “the market would put everyone in his place,” Savin continues, “but this is a simplification.” More is needed, and “everything that is taking place now – the growth of hatred to migrants, degradation, and the destruction of social institutions – is the result of corruption and the exclusion of civic organizations from decision making.”

Some people say, the ethnographer insists, that Russia needs migrants, “but illegal migrants do not pay social taxes – or more precisely their employers do not pay them.” How useful are migrants to ordinary Russians, who also suffer because migrants push down wages even as they benefit from social services they aren’t paying for.

Corruption explains all this because the problem is not with the migrants but with the people who employ them, Savin says, and with the failure of the powers that be to integrate people and “force their integration” by coming up with “adaptation mechanisms” and trying to make “from the migrants ‘people just like us.’”

Russians need to understand this, to recognize with whom the problems lie, the oligarchs and the powers rather than with the immigrants, and to understand that “corruption, the absence of social escalators, and the inequality of citizens before the law in Russia” is holding everyone back, pointing toward a disaster unless more Russians understand and act on this reality.

Window on Eurasia: ‘Wild 1990s’ Simply a ‘Thaw’ in a Long ‘Russian Winter,’ Analyst Says

2011-05-04T12:16:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 4 – To the usual charge that “enemies of Russia” are responsible for all the country’s problems, the current powers that be in Moscow routinely blame “the wild 1990s” with their “incorrect foreign and domestic policies” for temporary difficulties, even though they themselves emerged from precisely that period, according to a Russian analyst.

In an essay entitled “Why is the Lie about the 1990s Necessary?” Andrey Gusev surveys the direct relationship between the current tandem and that decade and important parallel between that latest “thaw” in Russian history and the cold “winters” which seem to invariably return there after any such warming (news.babr.ru/?IDE=93298).

Russia’s current leaders entered “big politics” in the 1990s and were shaped as political figures “in the second half” of that decade, a time when the country “having understood Gorbachev’s perestroika and Yeltsin’s revolution without much debate moved along the path of oligarchic capitalism.”

Moreover, those years were “the time when the first Chechen war ended, when society wanted stability after the default of 1998, but there still existed political competition,” and few Russians thought that being ruled by a single party of corrupted officials would be their lot anytime soon.

Today, Gusev continues, “the Russian political space has been cleansed down to the bottom,” with the media controlled by the state. But, the analyst says, “this does not eliminate the need to explain to the population the reasons for the largely unsuccessful rule of the St. Petersburg chekists.”

The current powers that be routinely invoke the traditional explanation for problems: “the enemies of Russia are guilty of everything.” But they have now added a second explanation: “our provisional failures are the result of the incorrect foreign and domestic policy” of those who ruled the country in the last decade of the 20th century.

That is why the 1990s are now called “wild.” Under Yeltsin, Gusev writes, “Chubais was guilty on all points. [Now] under the Petersburg tandem, the wild 90s are to blame.” Those who think and reflect can see this is an absurdity, but for the ordinary Russian who gets his information from state television and the politically ambitious, it all makes sense.

And now the tandem and its supporters are not afraid to declare openly in a Stalinist fashion that “life has become better; life has become more joyous” as long as everyone recognizes that “no one has the right to move forward without the United Russia party,” which has overcome “the wild 90s.”

Since 1991 enough time has passed, Gusev continues, to dispassionately assess the situation. “On the greater part of the post-Soviet space authoritarian regimes or even quasi-dictatorships have solidified their hold. The exceptions have become [only] the Baltic countries, Georgia, and in part Ukraine.”

It is also true that in the 1990s, Gusev says, there were “a mass of mistakes and crimes,” something no one should “close his eyes to.” The default happened, capital flight happened, the dishonest presidential elections of 1996 happened, and “the biggest mistake of the state” occurred – the Chechen war began which has drawn through its fires “a million Russian men.” All this “could not fail to leave a mark on the entire country.”

“Today’s authoritarian Russian regime is at a crossroads,” Gusev concludes. “Its bearers would like nothing to change but they understand that this is impossible for any lengthy period of time.” Moreover, they know that they have to modernize the economy, that that requires “modernization of political life,” and that that in turn leads to the competition they fear.

“The alternative is a dictatorship,” Gusev points out, but he suggests that the tandem “has still not decided” to go that route. But if they do or even if they continue their current way forward for some interval of time, it will be increasingly obvious that the 1990s were not “wild” but “only a law in the middle of a long Russian winter.”

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Hopes to Make the Next 100 Years ‘Century of the North’

2011-05-04T11:42:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 4 – Moscow officials want to make the next 100 years “the century of the North,” a time when Russians and others will move north and east rather than south and west. But a Siberian commentator argues that a genuine “rebranding” of the region will have some profound consequences for Russian politics and society.

At the second Eurasian Economic Youth Forum in Yekaterinburg last week, Valery Yazev, the vice speaker of the Russian Duma, said that young people from Russian and around the world will be involved in the coming century in the development of the Arctic and the Far North (www.oilru.com/news/252471/).

That is especially true of and important for Russians, he continued, “Russia historically was established as a powerful state in the great civilizational advance for the mastery of the endless spaces of the Russian north, Siberia and the Far East.” This process, he said, “forged the Russian national character” and “showed the entire world our possibilities.”

As President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have stressed, Yazev continued, “the path to the north is possible only under conditions of fruitful international dialogue” because “the continental shelf must be ‘a zone of peace and cooperation’” rather than a place of conflict among nations.

That in turn means, the Duma leader said, that young people will have “not only to participate in the economic mastery of the North but also to develop a philosophy of a new movement to the North,” to draw on the successes of the past and use them to innovate in the future.

The conference reflected not only Yazev’s perspectives but also those of Aleksandr Dugin, a leading neo-Eurasianist. The meeting declared that “our Eurasianism is looking for models and concepts which promote a New Northern Oecumene, the cradle of the civilization which nurtured the Russian empire and its allies, the USSR, and the CIS” (www.barentsobserver.com/eurasian-youth-looks-towards-russian-north.4914333-116321.html).

In a related but perhaps even more indicative move, President Medvedev signed new legislation this week that makes it easier for foreign workers in the North and elsewhere to get visas and secure them for their families, an issue that had sometimes been a problem earlier (www.barentsobserver.com/russia-improves-conditions-for-foreign-specialists.4915952-116321.html).

If Yazev and Dugin viewed the past of Russia’s conquest of the North in a positive way and argued that Russia in the future should draw on what was done then to reinforce Russian national culture and identity in the future, another writer argues that the Northern “brand” needs to be modified, a change that will affect the Russian nation itself profoundly,.

In an essay on “Brand Arctic” published this week in Karelia, Siberian theorist and activist Dmitry Verkhoturov suggests that the Soviet-era “meta-brand” on the Arctic carried within it several dangerous and destructive messages, messages that must be changed if the future is to be better than the past (rk.karelia.ru/2011/05/daesh-novyiy-brend-arktiki/).

On the one hand, he says, the Soviet “Arctic brand” treated the region as “an empty land where no one lived until polar expeditions appeared which discovered everything and entered them on the map. And on the other, “this brand was the root of a sense that everything is permitted,” that Soviet people working there “can do what they liked.”

A simplification like all brands, “brand Arctic” ignored or papered over such things as “the bloody wars with local peoples which lasted for decades,” the spread of alcoholism, the deportation of peoples like the Nentsy, and the environmental contamination ranging from oil spills to the wholesale scrapping of nuclear fuel.

“For definite circles now,” Verkhoturov continues, “the most valuable thing in the Arctic brand is not the geographic discoveries and the polar researchers who have long ago gone to their graves.” Rather, it is “the ideological justification of the idea that everything is permitted and that there are no limits” on what those running the area can do.

In Siberia, such Soviet-era brands have had to interact with those from other sources, thus creating “an entire mosaic of meanings and signs,” with regard to the Arctic, “this is not the case.” Instead, it appears, Moscow hopes that it will be able to “replace one meta-brand with another” of the same type.

In Verkhoturov’s view, Russians “need a new Artic brand, a new understanding of this region, its history, its present and its future. Without a change in the brand it will hardly be possible to make any essential moves forward in the existing situation.” And he suggests that new brand should have four elements.

First of all, people must understand that “the Arctic unifies,” tying people from around the Arctic Ocean. Second, “the Arctic has its own laws and rules of behavior” learned by local people over thousands of years. Third, in the Arctic, the individual “is closer to the cosmos than anywhere else on earth” and stands “face to face with the forces of nature. And fourth, the people who live in the high north have a cultural knowledge which others must take into consideration.

Coming up with such a new “meta-brand” for the Arctic should not be all that difficult, Verkhoturov says. “What one needs is only to love and value it in all its multiplicity and manifestations and above all to respect it.” Simply exploiting it will not serve either the high North or Russia as a whole.

Window on Eurasia: Are the EU’s Roma about to Move to Russia?

2011-05-04T10:03:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 4 – Rising tensions between the Roma and the titular nationalities of the European Union have sparked reports in Moscow that some of this often-despised community are about to be moved to the Russian Federation, either on their own or from a deal between the EU and Russian officials who believe that that country needs all the migrants it can get.

Yesterday, “Komsomolskaya Pravda” reported about this possibility (www.km.ru/v-rossii/2011/05/03/migratsionnaya-politika-v-rossii/evropa-zaselit-rossiyu-tsyganami-nashi-vlasti-v), picking up on a story that had run the day before on the Tolkovatel.ru portal (ttolk.ru/?p=3665).

According to Tolkovatel.ru, the possibility of an agreement by which Europe’s Roma will be dispatched to the Russian Federation and possibly Ukraine is to be the subject of upcoming discussions between the EU and the Russian Federation, a step France and several East European countries support but the Germany reportedly opposes.

The first public mention of this, Tolkovatel.ru said, was a “Komsomolskaya Pravda” radio program on April 12 when Roman Grokholsky, a leader of the Roma community in the Russian Federation, said that in his view, “Russia for economic reasons could accept [Europe’s Roma]. It is an enormous land” (kp.ru.daily/25667/828997/).

As Yuri Filatov put in yesterday’s “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” “Europe it seems has found a radical solution for the problems of its Roma [who number between nine and twelve million] – simply to take them and resettle them in Russia.”

European countries do not have a good record in their dealings with the Roma. Last year, for example, French President Nicolas Sarkozy expelled “several thousand” of them to Bulgaria and Romania, an action that was denounced by international human rights groups but generally supported by the French people and by residents of many other EU countries.

But despite this support, European governments have concluded, Filatov continues, that is “neither technically nor economically” feasible “to deport all the Roma to Romania or Bulgaria as was done in the past: the sizes of these countries do not allow that and local nationalists are protesting ever more loudly against” that idea.

As a result, Europeans have come up with the notion “why not resettle all the Roma in Russia (and also in Ukraine),” which have the space and the jobs to accommodate them and which, in the view of the Europeans, have a tradition of tolerance for the Roma, as reflected in Russian novels and music.

It is anticipated, the paper says, that “each Roma family would receive from the European Union money for travel and resettlement.” The exact amount hasn’t been determined but it would likely be in the range of 500 euros per person, the amount Roma deported from France received earlier.

“In this way,” Filatov says, “by counting on our accommodating spirit and hospitality, ‘tolerant’ Europe wants on our account to resolve the problem of its own intolerance. And it is worth noting that in the circles in and around the powers that be in Russia, there is actively being prepared the basis for such decisions.”

Indeed, the “Komsomolskaya Pravda” journalist says, the Russian elite is thinking about far more than just Europe’s Roma. Specifically, it is thinking about the Chinese and even Africans as a means of addressing the Russian Federation’s increasingly severe demographic decline.

Filatov cites the comments of Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, the head of the migration laboratory of the Institute of Economic Prognostication at the Russian Academy of Sciences, at a meeting last week devoted to the demographic dimensions of Moscow’s strategy paper for 2020 (slon.ru/articles/587652/).

Given Russia’s declines in its overall population and especially among working age cohorts, Zayonchkovskaya said, Russia will have to attract at least 20 million additional migrants over the next 15 years. Central Asian countries can supply no more than six million of these, and so most will have to come from China.

Chinese workers are already coming into Russia and they will only increase in number over the coming years, Zayonchkovskaya said, noting that “the longer we put our heads in the sand, the more unexpected this will be for us.” And there is going to be a big change: by mid-century, she said, there will be more ethnic Chinese in Russia than Tatars.

Such migration flows will only feed more xenophobic attitudes among Russians, such as those that the recently banned (the case is now on appeal) Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) reflect and seek to channel. And it is no surprise that the DPNI portal features these stories about Europe’s Roma.

But Zayonchkovskaya’s comments reflect the dilemma in which the Russian government finds itself: If it allows more immigration, increasingly from non-Slavic peoples, it will face an ever more antagonistic population. But if it doesn’t, the Russian economy will suffer, and the regime will face class rather than ethnic anger.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Nationalism is a Middle Class Phenomenon, Khomolgorov Says

2011-05-03T06:51:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 3 – Most analysts have suggested that Russian nationalism is “a reaction of the poor to social problems” and even is “the path of failures,” but one Russian nationalist commentator argues that Russian nationalism is the ideology of “the middle stratum which wants to become a middle class” but is blocked in its efforts by “ethnic problems.”

Last Friday, at a roundtable at St. Petersburg State University’s political science faculty on “Youth and Nationalism in Russia,” speaker after speaker stressed that Russian nationalism is “the reaction of the poor to social problems, a primitive ideology, and the path of failures (www.rus-obr.ru/lj/10723).

But one of those in attendance, Igor Kholmogorov, a nationalist commentator, advanced an alternative thesis. He argued that “the path of failures in contemporary Russia is alcoholism not nationalism” and that the Russian “middle stratum” has adopted nationalism because ethnic problems stand on its path of self-realization as a class.

“The middle stratum,” he continues, consists of educated, employed and independent people who “would like to become a middle class, that is to achieve a table self-reproduction of themselves as a social stratum. But in contemporary Russia, this is impossible for it,” Kholmogorov argues.

The main reason for this, he says, is that “the representative of the middle stratum cannot put his child in a normal school because the school is filled up with children who do not know the Russian language and hold back the educational process, he cannot go on the street normally and drink beer with friends without encountering everywhere a criminal danger.”

The ability of the middle stratum to become a middle class, therefore, Kholmogorov says, argues depends on the development of “all-national social infrastructure which will appear at the same time with a national state.” The absence of this infrastructure, he says, has led the members of this stratum to turn to Russian nationalism.

But that is not the only reason they are doing so, Kholmogorov says. The members of this stratum are also doing so because of the impact they feel from “the de-industrialization of contemporary Russia and the degeneration of production both in central Russia and in the national borderlands.”

And they are upset, as are the young, by the imposition of special programs to promote tolerance, programs that Kholmogorov says are having exactly the opposite effect. That is because such programs have the effect of heightening attention to differences that many individuals do not even suspect.

“The ordinary Russian youth hardly distinguishes himself from a Mari or suspects the existence of the Yukagirs,” the Russian nationalist commentator says, “and even the Chukhi for him is a hero from anecdotes” rather than someone he doesn’t like. For most Russians, there are only two categories of ethnic groups, Russians and those who look different from the south.

“After having informed Russian young people about the existence of 150 peoples and nationalities and about their principle distinctions from the Russian,” Kholmogorov says, “wqe will obtain only one thing – a 150 times increase in negative reactions to other ethnic groups and the growth of the syndrome of a fortress under siege.”

“Therefore,” the Russian nationalist commentator argues, “if we really want to calm young people then we need to tell Russians not about the particular features of the Vaynakh lezginka but about what the distinction features of the Russians themselves are.” Then it will become obvious that we can tell others how to live and that “to argue with Russians is useless.”

Those who are confident of the power of their own nation will be peaceful in their relationships with others; those who are not won’t be, Kholmogorov argues. And if Moscow continues to promote the idea that Russians are surrounded on all sides by enemies, then there will be “a powerful response” in the form of aggression.

Window on Eurasia: Shapsugs, a Circassian Sub-Group, Seek Autonomy in Krasnodar Kray

2011-05-03T05:42:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 3 – Representatives of the 12,000 Shapsugs, a subdivision of the Circassian nation, last week called for the formation of an autonomous district within Krasnodar kray, an event that takes on importance because the Shapsugs are the Circassians who had been living where the 2014 Sochi Olympics are scheduled to take place.

Indeed, speeches at this meeting suggest that Circassian groups, many of whom are outraged that Moscow would organize the Olympics on the site of the genocide of their people in 1864, are beginning to use their objections and the attention these have garnered to make demands on the Russian government to improve their situation.

On Saturday, a congress of the Circassian organization Adyge Khase took place in the village of Lazarevskoye in Sochi to discuss the provisions of the law protecting numerically small peoples like the Shapsugs and the possible impact of the conduct of the Olympics there on them (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184658/).

Some 230 delegates from Adygeya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Krasnodar and Armavit as well as guests from the International Circassian Association heard speakers call for the establishment of a Shapsug Autonomous District within Krasnodar Kray as a means of protecting that small community.

Most speakers stressed that the Russian law “on guarantees of the rights of numerically small peoples” is not being implemented and consequently the problems it was intended to address are only growing worse. Murdin Teshev, honorary president of Adyge Khase, said that officials in Krasnodar “are deaf to our requests and hopes.”

Several speakers said that because of this, the only hope for the Shapsugs, now living in the Tuaps and Lazarev districts of Sochi is the establishment of an autonomy within Krasnodar kray, an idea that was first put forward in the 1990s but has acquired new importance given the Sochi Olympics.

Adam Bogus, the deputy president of Adyge Khase in Adygeya said that “there is only one approach to the resolution of the problems – the restoration of this district, the restoration of corresponding structures and a budget on a state basis.” If this step is not taken, many of the auls where the Shapsugs now live will soon disappear as “there is no work.”

Another speaker said that things had reached the point that individuals have to ask for land to build a house or operate a farm. And still a third said that “in the auls, drunkenness rules, and narcotics have appeared. Many 30 to 40 year old men and women do not have families and children,” a pattern unprecedented in Shapsug history and a demographic disaster.

According to the delegates, “young people are fleeing from the auls, and pupils are deprived of the chance to study their native language. ‘For the past years, the number of school hours has been reduced several times, and today on the Black Sea coast, only about 20 percent of the Shapsug children are studying their native language,’” one said.

In addition, the Shapsugs asked for assistance in overcoming the problems of housing and infrastructure in their auls, the construction of roads and water mains. Some cultural facilities are operating but generally only on the basis of private contributions such as those which support the local newspaper, “Shapsugia.”

In a related development, the congress discussed the prospect of the 2014 Olympiad in Sochi. According to Kavkaz-Uzel, opinions were divided. Kanshobi Azhakhov, the president of the International Circassian Association, said that “for one people [the expulsion of the Circassians in 1864] was a tragic event; for all others, [the Olympiad is] a holiday.”

“The majority of Shapsugs, whom I represent,” he said, “support the Olympic games. “But this majority can shift to the side of the minority if existing problems are not resolved.” Among the steps Moscow must take to avoid that, he said, is to ensure that the law on numerically small peoples is observed and May 21 is declared a day of mourning.”

Window on Eurasia: Bin Laden’s Death Won’t Affect North Caucasus Militants, Russian Analysts Say

2011-05-03T05:12:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, May 3 – Although Russian analysts divide on whether the death of Osama bin Laden will lead to a new spike in terrorist acts around the world, those who have expressed an opinion so far are nearly unanimous that the passing of the Al Qaeda leader will have little or no impact on the fighting in the North Caucasus.

That conclusion, almost certainly correct because of the relatively small involvement of Al Qaeda in that region, will nonetheless have an impact on Moscow’s ability to continue to present its actions there as part of a worldwide anti-terrorist campaign and thus raise more questions about the nature of the militants the Russian government is confronting.

Yesterday, the Regnum news agency, an outlet that has been among the most vocal in seeking to link the North Caucasus militants to Al Qaeda, featured an article entitled “Will the End of bin Laden be Noticed in the Caucasus?” which surveyed what it described as bin Laden’s involvement there (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1400597.html).

“Judging from everything,” Regnum begins its story, “bin Laden tried to demonstrate his active role in the Caucasus.” It gives the example of the statement by an Arab “military instructor,” Abu Daud, in 2000 during the second post-Soviet Chechen war that bin Laden “had sent 400” of his people to fight Russian forces.

After the conclusion of that war, the news agency continues, there have been scattered reports of Arab militants killed or captured in the North Caucasus. In March 2010, for instance, Abu Khaled, “who was considered close to the leader of the terrorist ‘Caucasus Emirate’ Doku Umarov was killed after having spent 13 years in Chechnya, Russian officials said.

And Chechen leaders have routinely talked about the existence of two “Arab instructors” named Mohannad [sic] and Yasir who supposedly help prepare suicide bombers. Meanwhile in Daghestan, in November 2006, “an Arab militant” named Abu Khavs, who the Russian interior ministry said was an Al Qaeda emissary, was liquidated.

But Regnum concedes, “at the same time, to speak about any dependence of the North Caucasus band formation underground on international terrorist structures including Al Qaeda today is not appropriate. Experts evfer more frequently conclude that the militants in the North Caucasus operate on a ‘self-financing’ basis, collecting ‘tribute’ from local business.”

Moreover, at a Makhachkala roundtable on this subject last week, Zaid Abdulagatov, a sociologist at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Daghestani Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Science, said that a poll showed that “the majority of young people” join the militants in search of employment.

According to Regnum, however, another link between Al Qaeda and the North Caucasus involves people from the North Caucasus who “fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban.” The exact number of such people, the news agency says, is “unknown,” but at least two of them were at one time in the US prison in Guantanamo.

And implying that there may be more, Regnum concludes with the observation that “information about leaders of North Caucasus extremists directly making contact with the leaders of the terrorist community of Afghanistan and Pakistan have not been published” in the open media.

A decade ago, such contacts may have been probable, but “in recent years, such subjects have ever less actively been discussed by experts and journalists,” a likely indication that the numbers of those involved, if any, have fallen off or completely disappeared.

The lack of such ties gives even more credibility to those who point to the domestic sources of violence in the Caucasus. In an interview published in the current issue of the Daghestani weekly “Nastoyasheye vrema,” Federation Council member and former general Aslambek Aslakhanov provides a list of these (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5973/109/).

Among the causes the general points to are “the extremist statements of Vladimir Zhirinovsky relative to the Caucasus, the Nazi pogrom on Manezh Square, the corrupt nature of Caucasus and Moscow bureaucrats, and the throwing of youth [in the region] to the arbitrariness of fate.”

Window on Eurasia: Different Parts of Russia Will Modernize Differently, Emil Pain Says

2011-04-29T08:07:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 29 – Russia’s regions and republics are so different in terms of their current social and political development that their modernization is certain to be different as well, possibly in ways that will mean that the development of some will interfere with the development of others, according to a leading Russian specialist on ethnicity.

At a roundtable in the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Emil Pain argues that if Russia does modernize, there will be “different modernizations for different parts of [Russia],” a point he makes by comparing the situation between Chechnya and the ethnic Russian regions of the country (www.nr2.ru/moskow/329988.html).

Chechen society, Pain says, retains many elements of both blood feud and communal organization. Thus, wearing knives is not just “a ritual” matter. Rather they “fulfill a real function in life,” potentially saving the life of the wearer or his family in cases of “force majeure.”

Russian society, in contrast, he suggests, long ago saw such “traditional-patriarchal institutions” disappear or be destroyed. As a result, “Russian society is the most de-traditionalized and the most split.” That opens the way for progress but only if traditional institutions are replaced by modern ones. Otherwise, degradation sets in.

Unfortunately, “in all post-communist countries” and “in Russia least of all,” the appearance of the kind of informal organizations on which modernity depends “is several times lower than on average in Europe,” an apparent reaction to the enforced collectivism of the past from which people are fleeing.

It is often held, Pain says, that “a low level of traditionalism in society is compensated by a high willingness to pursue innovations.” But for that to be true, there have to be people who want such innovations and who can work together to pursue them. In Russia, however, there are few such people.

Instead, “Russian initiative is anarchic and often immoral,” Pain continues, a pattern that is reflected by the fact that while the number of people going to church has increased over the past 20 years, the number of those who “in fact observe the commandments, respect the laws of God and so on has not changed” over that period.

And it is also reflected in polls that show that “in Russia, there is the lowest level of horizontal trust among 27 countries” in which that has been sampled. “This is practically a catastrophe,” Pain says. Without trust, people will not work together for the future, and pursuing any long-term goals is “utopian.”

In Chechnya, on the other hand, “modernization has the classical problems” with traditional norms “blocking the formation of new ones.” But “both varieties of society, both patriarchal and de-traditionalized create their own obstacles for modernization,” albeit different ones and thus modernization will be of a plural nature.

That in itself creates problems, Pain the ethno-sociologist says, because there is a very great probability that these various modernizations will interfere and contradict one another,” possibly putting all of them and the country itself at risk.

In other comments, Pain notes that “the mythology about the great power nature of the Russian people is very widely disseminated.” But he notes, “there also exists another form of this, imitation. Supreme power imitates democracy. Regioonal power imitates that it takes orders from the center but in fact does what it wants.”

“The population imitates love for the powers, but in fact it seeks to avoid being controlled by any power.” This leads to “complete alienation,” Pain says, and that means that “the problem of national consolidation is the central problem for all, not only for modernization but [indeed] for survival.”

“Certain parts of the Russian Federation, such as Chechnya,” Pain goes on to say, “have created a regime of the Saudi type,” and have for a long time not been part of the common Russian legal space. But they follow this imitation principle, according to the principle “’We did not voluntarily become part of Russia and voluntarily we will not leave it.”

What that means, Pain concluded, is that “there is a problem of the country and there is the problem of community. The community has already fallen apart. The country is still holding on.”

Other speakers at the roundtable expressed similar if even more dire concerns. Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center said that “one of the main problems of Russia is that its central institutions of power … have remained practically unchanged” from the distant past and that the main issue for Russia is overcoming the “deficit of legitimacy” of the powers that be.

But instead, the powers announce “plans and projects for the future which … they will never realize. The modern is something which has nothing in common with the present, and there is no real modernization here.” If Medvedev wanted “changes,” Gudkov said, “he would begin modernization with the independence of the courts, the separation of powers,” and so on.

As far as the Caucasus is concerned, the pollster continued, it “de facto has its own courts, its own legal system, and its own system of social relations.’ And while 90 percent of Russians won’t yield the Kuriles to Japan, “60 percent [of Russians are ready to separate [the North Caucasus] from the Russian Federation one way or another.”

And finally a third speaker, economist Sergey Magaril gave an even bleaker picture of the future. Russia, he said, is like the Titanic moving toward the iceberg, a situation in which he suggested he was not certain “we have the time to maneuver” to avoid a complete and total disaster.

For Russians he said, modernization is simply “an effort to escape from stagnation.” But there are “few chances” for that. “In front of our eyes, in Russia is being reproduced the same police state on an illegal basis as it was in the USSR and before that in tsarist Russia,” a kind of regime “incapable of guaranteeing national development and inevitably leading to oblivion.”

Indeed, Magaril said, “this is only a question of time.” But Russia is not using what time it has. Instead, the economist concluded, it is reproducing “the Gogolian type of Akaky Akakiyevich … a social isolate who can give rise only to an atomized society. Are there any mechanisms for the modernization of such consciousness?”

Window on Eurasia: Little Possibility of Social Explosions in Russia, Sociologist Says

2011-04-29T07:08:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 29 – At the present time, Lev Gudkov, the head of the independent Levada Center polling agency says, there is “neither the possibility nor the potential” in the Russian Federation for the kind of social and political explosions which continue to occur throughout the Arab world.

In an article on the “Osobaya bukhva” portal yesterday, Gudkov says that “the Russian middle class, despite concerns about losing everything is loyal to the regime” and generally lacks any capacity for solidarity and action,, preferring “as before” to place its hopes in the state (www.specletter.com/obcshestvo/2011-04-28/print/osnovnaja-massa-naselenija-rossii-ochen-konservativna-depressivna-i-bedna.html).

And “the main mass of the population,” the sociologist continues, is not likely to rise in protest either because its members are “very conservative” and “depressed” -- even if they are also “poor” because like the middle class they fear losing what they have more than they hope to achieve something more.

According to the pollster, “about 80 percent of [the Russian] population considers that one should not trust people around them and that one must be very careful [even] in talking” about problems. Consequently, “they believe and are concerned only about those closest to them” rather than identifying with a larger group or class.

All this makes the situation in Russia very different from that in the Arab world, Gudkov argues. “There, the breakthrough has been achieved on the basis of the appearance, at least in Egypt, of educated people, [whom one could] conditionally call the middle class [and who] did not find a place for themselves or see a future for themselves under the ruling dictatorship.”

As a result, and precisely because of “modernization processes,” groups were formed which felt themselves without prospects and who thus decided to act to advance their own collective interests against those of the state. But the situation in Russia is “different,” and thus, Gudkov says, he “does not see” many chances for “mass uprisings and social explosions.”

And this is the case, he continues, even though there is “chronic dissatisfaction” among many groups. That is because while they are unhappy about this or that situation, most Russians are far more willing to put their trust in the state to solve their problems than they are to trust others in society and work together to improve conditions on their own.

Many in fact, “do not even imagine how a better life might be possible,” Gudkov says. “They understand Soviet life and Soviet forms of organization.” The ongoing degradation of social infrastructure angers them but what they want is for the state to solve their problems. As a result, their dissatisfaction “is not destructive for the regime.” Rather the reverse.

In principle, the pollster continues, what is called the middle class could be a source of change, “if it really understood the growing threat to its existence” – “instability, the absencxe of new institutions, independent courts, media freedom .. and access to political activity,” “all that Russians “today are deprived of.”

“But the risks [involved in seeking those things] are too great in the consciousness of this narrow stratum, [and] therefore opportunism arises,” an opportunism limited both by fear of losing one’s position and the possibility of leaving rather than changing the situation inside Russia itself.

Gudkov then focuses on what he calls “one really interesting problem” – the passivity of university students. On the one hand, he says, many of these people are getting many of the things they want; and on the other, many are opportunists, something that “paralyzes political solidarity and the political activity of this group.”

Were a protest to arise among them, the Levada Center leader says, it would “however strange this might seem take the form of conservative-nationalis[m].” Many students, “especially those from the provinces,” are filled with “nationalistic resentments” and envy” for “rich America and the Russian oligarchs.”

Moreover, he says, many of them suffer from “a complex of incompleteness caused by the collapse of the USSR, a sense of national incompleteness,” most strongly expressed outside of the capitals because people there have fewer prospects, their instructors are from soviet times, “and there are very few new people and new ideas.”

The Russian state is inclined to “support and provoke such attitudes through a system of propaganda and instruction,” offering “an eclectic mix of old prejudices, Orthodoxy, imitation fundamentalism, and ideological boilerplate of Soviet times” rather than promoting new ideas and new directions.

An instructive finding of polls in this regard, Gudkov says, is that 78 percent of the population of the Russian Federation considers themselves to be Orthodox, but only two to five percent go to church regularly and only about 27 percent believe in God, in salvation, and in eternal life.

Window on Eurasia: Russians No Longer View Orthodox Church as Separate from the State, Lunkin Says

2011-04-28T15:36:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 28 – Most Russians do not consider the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as separate and distinct from the Russian state, a perception that reinforces indifference to matters of faith and that has led many to ignore or disparage the first signs of a genuine religious revival, according to a leading specialist on religious life in Russia.

Roman Lunkin, the director of the Institute of Religion and Law and a leading scholar at the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says this is part of a larger problem: “Religion and chiefly Orthodoxy are conceived in the mass consciousness of Russian society in an irrational and contradictory way” (www.politjournal.ru/index.php?action=News&tek=9555).

“For the majority of [Russians], it is customary to view Orthodox leaders and the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution as a constituent part of the official chronicles on federal television channels and in the press,” Lunkinn says, but when the Church uses these ties to push its agenda, many Russians become angry.

That is because, Lunkin says, Russians are “accustomed to consider themselves as Orthodox and with satisfaction listen to speeches by the Patriarch and the bishops that ‘we are all baptized into Orthodoxy,” but they do not want the Church to try to extend its influence, viewing that as a form of “dangerous clericalization.’”

For most of the post-Soviet period, Orthodox leaders have supported this contradictory view, but “independently from the declared basis of the consteitutional system and the declarations of Orthodox hierarchs that the Church does not want to again become a government church, Orthodoxy has always ceased to be viewed as separate from the state.”

Since 1991, Russian officials and commentators have routinely declared that Orthodoxy is “the preserver of the richness and values of Russian culture and spirituality,” thus replacing the term “people” in the oft-repeated Soviet slogan that “’art belongs to the people’” and thus putting the Church in a complicated position.

Evidence of this is provided in the way in which the media oppose state-supported Orthodoxy and unacceptable “sects,” and the willingness of the Russian people to accept that division, a willingness that shows that “neither in society nor in the media is there an understanding of what faith is, how one can believe and what is religious practice.”

Even more important, all this is evidence of a lack of interest in the faith itself and in the fundamental aspects of the Orthodox religion and a willingness of many Russians to view Orthodoxy iin conjunction with “a semi-pagan culture’ with “astrological-occult” aspects including “superstitions, fortunetelling, diets, and in general about how religion must help.”

This “folklorization of Orthodoxy” is not the result of any “ill intention” or popular inattention. Rather, “under conditions of the existence of the polar opposites” of Official Orthodoxy and sects, “genuine faith does not interest anyone;” and consequently, “what develops is precisely folklore.”

The situation has somewhat improved in recent years, Lunkin says, and he points to the influence of Patriarch Kirill as being a positive one in this regard, an especially interesting comment given that Lunkin has often been criticized by Orthodox hierarchs for his critical attitude toward the Patriarchate.

Evidence of this improvement, of a greater concern with faith rather than form, Lunkin suggests, is to be found in a place many Orthodox hierarchs may not like: in the dissent of the Izhevsk “free thinkers, three priests who declared about their refusal to recall Patriarch Kirill in their prayers and who accused the Church leadership of tight connections with the powers.”

Nonetheless, it is still true, Lunkin says, that “the number of practicing believers as before remains extraordinarily few, and besides this, religious life consists not of Orthodoxy and ‘the sects” but of the most various movements and confessions,” often far beyond Orthodoxy or even Christianity.

“The number of believers who are becoming part of the Russian Orthodox Church in a genuine way is slowly growing, especially to the extent that the Church is becoming more open, more willing to talk about its problems and involved in social projects and the development of parishes.”

Window on Eurasia: Central Asian Countries May Leave CIS in the Coming Decade, Moscow Analysts Say

2011-04-28T15:35:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 28 – The Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States will survive this decade at least, but it will likely have fewer members, with the countries of Central Asia the most likely to exit because they “will make a different geopolitical choice,” according to a leading Moscow specialist on the post-Soviet region.

During a video conference between scholars and officials in Moscow, Tbilisi, Almaaty, Bishkek, and Chisinau, Aleksey Vlasov, director of the Center for Post-Soviet Research at Moscow State University, said that “the nucleus” of the CIS will survive but some of its outlying members will likely leave (www.ia-centr.ru/expert/10364/).

Vlasov mentioned three “factors” which he said would prevent the complete unraveling of the CIS: “the absence of visas, Russian as a common language of communication, and the still existing trade and economic preferences in relations among the [Commonwealth member] states.”

“If the three components disappear,” he continued, “the CIS as such will not exist. In this case, the CIS will be transformed into a club of interests, the presidents will meet twice a year, some questions will be discussed, but not more than that. While these exist, it is necessary to add to them certain motives so that the system will not weaken but be strengthened.”

Another participant in the video conference, Sergey Mikheyev, the director general of the Moscow Center of Political Conjuncture, agreed. He said that in his view, the CIS “in one form or another will be preserved over the course of the next decade because there exist definite preconditions for this.”

There are actually many reasons for “integration within the framework of the CIS,” Mikheyev said. “The question is in how deep this integration can be. As far as the membership is concerned, then it certainly can be changed, but this to a significant degree depends on external factors because around the perimeter of the CIS, destructive processes are taking place.”

As far as the countries of Central Asia are concerned, the Moscow analyst said, “the question could be put in a still worse form.” That is because those countries are “not simply reorienting themselves” but because outside forces are promoting this “in a quite dangerous key.”

The remarks of Vlasov and Mikheyev represent a remarkably open acknowledgement by those close to the powers that be in Moscow that the CIS is hardly the vibrant organization Russian leaders often seek to present it as. But more than that, their words point back to the way in which the CIS itself was in fact organized.

The CIS was not created at Belovezhe as many now think. Instead, the actions of the presidents of the three Slavic republics prompted the leaders of the Central Asian Muslim states to meet and consider forming their own organization. Fearful of what that might mean, Russian leaders then organized a meeting in Kazakhstan to link the two groups into the CIS.

The comments of Vlasov and Mikheyev this week suggest that 20 years on, the organization has not been able to overcome that original division effectively and that it, rather than the withdrawal of Georgia or the assumption of associate status by Turkmenistan, is likely to be the defining vector in that organization’s future existence.

Window on Eurasia: Regional Paper Considers Impact of Russia’s Possible Disintegration on Samara Oblast

2011-04-28T15:34:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 28 – Many analysts in Moscow and the West have talked in general terms about what they see as the probable disintegration of the Russian Federation into a number of independent states, but a Samara paper this week has taken the next step and discussed what independence would mean for that oblast.

And while this article’s prognostications are no more certain of coming true than those who discuss this possibility in more general terms, they are interesting and important for what they say about how ordinary people are thinking about such outcomes and what their views say about their current expectations and fears.

In an essay in the Tol’yatti paper “Ponedel’nik,” Aleksandr Gremin says that he is not calling for the disintegration of Russia – that is a criminal offense – but only seeking “to analyze what awaits Samara oblast if in the country for one reason or another begins a parade of sovereignties” (rus.ruvr.ru/2011/04/26/49421674.html).

As he points out, “predictions of Russia’s disintegration into regional principalities, khalifates, republics and confederations” are nothing new. They have been a staple of articles from “serious institutes” in the Russian capital and abroad, with most disturbing prognoses eing “the separation of Siberia from European Russia and a split along the Volga-Urals line.”

If the UN is correct, Gremin continues, by 2030, the population of Russia will “fall to 118 million” and “this means that in Siberia and in the Far East the population will be less than would be needed to keep their territories within Russia.” The North Caucasus will likely have already left, “in a Kosovo scenario,” as soon as “the river of money from Moscow runs out.”

Indeed, given the international community’s interest in the natural resources of the Russian lands, the Kosovo “scenario” is the most probable way the disintegration of Russia will be arranged, with “local referend[a], unilateral declaration[s] of independence, [and] recognition of sovereignty by the key powers, the US, China and the European Union.”

“Kaliningrad is already prepared to run to Europe,” Gremin says, and “the rich national regions like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are already anticipating the fruits of [such future] independence” from Moscow.

While this process could be violent, it might be peaceful as was the disintegration of the Soviet Union 20 years ago. “The heads of the subjects of the federation could meeting somewhere in Gorki, sign something like the Belovezhe accords, and return to their gubernias already with the status of presidents, general secretaries, beloved leaders, and emperors.”

“You don’t believe this?” Gremin addresses his readers. “But this is precisely what happened in 1991!”

In such a scenario, Samara oblast, he continues, would occupy a “special” position. Samara is a wealthy region, “and up to 70 percent of the taxes collected there go to Moscow.” As a result, “many suppose that with such resources, we [Samarans] having acquired independence would live as the rich, full and happy.”

But Gremin argues, those who think so are mistaken. “Independence would not work in Samara oblast’s favor,” and “here is why.” On the one hand, Moscow would not want to give us up, and on the other, very quickly, “other strong young states” would “immediately become interested in us.”

“Look at a map,” the journalist suggests. Samara would find itself in that event wedged between “one Islamic world – Kazakhstan, Turkey and Iran – and another Islamic world Kazan and Ufa.” Neighboring Orenburg, “also a Russian area rich with oil and gas,” would find itself “in a similar situation.”

As a result, “Samara oblast will never be a self-standing independent state.” Instead it will be fought over by Moscow and “a Tatar-Kazakh alliance.” Indeed that has happened before and “more than once.” And “all our cities – Samara, Saratov, Orenburg and Stavropol – were founded as fortresses, as fortified regions and bases for the conduct of military operations.”

“In the medium term historical perspective,” Gremin suggests, “Samara oblast would automatically fall into the sphere of interests of the Islamic world and territorially would be included apparently within Tatarstan and not Moscow – in part because we the local population already today do not like the Moscow occupation regime and often spend weekends in Kazan.”

Can such a scenario be avoided? Gremin asks rhetorically, and then he observes that “the majority of researches are convinced that it already cannot be. In the ‘blessed’ [first decade of this century] powere was occupied already by others than those that were needed” for an alternative future.

The journalist’s concluding advice to his Russian readers is “Learn Tatar.”

Window on Eurasia: Plan to Build All-Russian Muslim Body around New Tatarstan Mufti Runs into Trouble

2011-04-27T06:58:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 27 – The plans of some in Moscow that the center could build an all-Russian Muslim organization around the new mufti of Tatarstan and thus weaken both the two other Muslim bodies with such pretentions, the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) and the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD), have run into trouble before they could take off.

On the one hand, boosting the position of the Muslim leader in Tatarstan has led the authorities in Kazan to adopt an even more Islamic, not to say Islamist, position in their public appeals. And on the other, the election of a new mufti has led to a split in the ranks of the Tatarstan MSD’s congregations with some breaking off to form a new MSD of their own.

Following the election of Ildus Fayzov as the mufti of Tatarstan two weeks ago, Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to the Moscow Patriarchate and notorious for his attacks on SMR head Ravil Gainutdin, played up the idea that Fayzov could become a paramount leader of Islam in Russia (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=dujour&div=374).

Silantyev’s idea was based on Fayzov’s declaration that the Tatarstan MSD of which he had become the leader would not be part of the SMR even though Fayzov’s predecessor Gusman Iskakov had been vice president of this organization “on his own initiative and as a private person,” the Russian Islamic expert said.

Moreover, because the Tatarstan MSD has numerous parishes beyond the borders of that Middle Volga republic and not just in adjoining areas, Silantyev continued, Fayzov is in a position to present himself as “the leader of an all-Russian Muslim structure,” one which already controls, according to Silantyev, a fifth of all the Muslim congregations in Russia.

As Silantyev points out, the Russian government has its problems not only with the SMR and Central MSD in Ufa – the North Caucasus Muslim organization does not play an all-Russian role – and because Moscow is disappointed in the results of its recent effort to create an all-Russian Muftiate up to now. Consequently, the Kremlin “can begin” to look at Fayzov.

The Russian expert outlines some of the reasons for what he calls “a cooling of relations” between the SMR and Kazan, including issue of Wahhabism, ties with the Central MSD and Talgat Tajuddin, and the fact that an SMR leader took the lead in opposing Fayzov in the run up to the mufti election in Kazan.

Silantyev’s suggestion, which almost certainly reflects the ideas of many in Moscow and especially those close to the Russian Orthodox Church, has run into difficulties for reasons that he and others should have anticipated, reasons that reflect both the nature of Russian political life and the nature of Islam.

If Moscow would like to see another center of Islamic administration in the Russian Federation, establishing it in Kazan has the potential to create a serious problem for the center because it gives the leadership of the Republic of Tatarstan yet another lever to advance itself as spokesman or at least bellwether for all the non-Russians of the Russian Federation.

That is because Kazan can now, as it is doing, present itself as a spokesman for Islam too. On Monday, for example, Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov noted in a message to the World Congress of Tatars that “religion plays a big role in the preservation of national identity” and that Kazan is “concerned” about the situation of Islam in other parts of Russia.

Islam, the Tatarstan leader continued, is “the foundation of Tatar culture” and consequently, when today “mosques in regions of Russia are passing over into alien hands which do not very much strive to preserve our Tatar traditions, the traditions of our ancestors, it is necessary to focus attention on this (www.islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusnews/15835/).

But perhaps a more immediate if ultimately less serious problem for the Russian authorities is that the Tatarstan MSD is now at risk of disintegrating into two or more smaller MSDs, with Muslims in Almetyevsk declaring today that they do not want to subordinate to the Tatarstan MSD of Fayzov (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=40530).

Because the MSD system has no canonical basis in Islam – such institutions are a political-administrative convenience for Russian officials who would like Islam to be a church like Orthodoxy – any parish can decide to opt out of an MSD whenever it likes, at least from the point of view of Islamic law.

And in this case, it appears that local Muslim leaders, at least some of whom opposed Fayzov’s election and his increasingly active program, have decided that the most effective way to register their objections is to withdraw. If they do and if others follow, Fayzov may not have the base that Silantyev and others hope for.

Window on Eurasia: North Caucasian Reminds Russians Moscow is Subsidizing More than the North Caucasus

2011-04-27T06:22:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 27 – Russian nationalists are angry that Moscow is subsidizing the Muslim North Caucasus, but a North Caucasus analyst has reminded them and everyone else that Moscow is also subsidizing other and predominantly Russian regions as well, something he suggests the nationalists should be thinking about as well.

On Saturday, the Russian Civic Union and the Front of National Salvation organized a demonstration in Moscow to call for an end to Russian government subsidies to the North Caucasus. About 400 people listened to speakers denounce Russian spending in that restive region (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184396/).

One of the participants in that demonstration, Viktor Sobolyev of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), said that his party was the only one in the Duma which has constantly raised the issue of Russian money flowing into non-Russian portions of the country and wants to see it go to Russian regions instead.

But the meeting was about more than just Russian money supposedly going to waste in the North Caucasus. It also was about corruption, and one participant told Kavkaz-uzel.ru that he fully agreed with speakers there that “’a fish rots from the head’ and that corruption begins here [in Moscow] in the highest echelons of power.?

One North Caucasian commentator, political scientist Ruslan Martagov said it was completely understandable that Russians were concerned about the flow of money to the North Caucasus and to corruption there. “How can one explain such large transfers … to simple people” when there are many worthy projects elsewhere in Russia that remain without funding?

And such ordinary Russians, he continued, are outraged by the corruption in the North Caucasus, although most of them recognize that “the corrupted Kremlin has given birth to a corrupted elite in the North Caucasus It has given it birth and it is feeding it as well.” Over time, this will lead to more inter-ethnic tensions.

That is because Moscow has the opportunity to start up a new conflict in the North Caucasus if its own position becomes shaky, and when it does so, the political scientist suggested, “in the eyes of society, this will be completely justified,” an attitude that makes questions about funding the North Caucasus potentially serious.

But another North Caucasian expert, Aslambek Paskachev, an academic who heads the Russian Congress of Peoples of the Caucasus, said Russian nationalists “should turn their attention to the Far East and the Volga region which are getting more subsidies than the republics of the Caucasus” because of the way in which the Russian system is now arranged.

And as far as corruption is concerned, “then in the North Caucasus, it is just the same as it is everywhere else.” Because that is the case, the holding of the Saturday’s meeting, he suggested, prompts the question as to who may be trying to play “the Caucasus card for their own political purposes.”

On the other hand, Paskachev continued, “let’s consider who is feeding whom and who has fed whom at various periods of modern history.” He noted that he had worked in the Chechen-Ingush Gosplan in Soviet times and that at that time, the republic had sent 21 million tons of oil to the rest of Russia every year” – including rocket fuel for Yuri Gagarin’s flight!

That alone shows how wrong speakers at Saturday’s meeting where when they asserted that “the North Caucasus has never given the country a single scholar, artist or writer … All the income from oil went in those years into a common union pot. And our republic, using the meeting’s language, during the so-called stagnation ‘fed’ more than one region of Russia.”

“Why then is it necessary to hate all those who live in the South of Russia,” Paskachev asked. Advancing “Slogans like ‘the Caucasus for the Caucasians’ and ‘Russia for the Russians,’ the North Caucasian specialist said, “will only lead to the collapse” of the Russian Federation as a whole.

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Window on Eurasia: Despite Rising Oil Prices, Russians’ Standard of Living is Falling

2011-04-27T05:50:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 27 – Many observers had assumed that recent increases in the price of oil and gas would boost living standards in the Russian Federation, a major exporter, but in fact, according to Moscow’s statistical agency, living standards there are again beginning to fall as is public confidence in the future.

In an article in today’s “Svobodnaya pressa,” Lev Ivanov and Dmitry Ivanov use Rosstat data to show that “despite the growing prices for oil and gas, the standard of living of Russians fell in March compared to a year earlier by 3.4 percent and that popular expectations about the future declined as well (svpressa.ru/economy/article/42654/).

Moreover, the two journalists point out, “if one looks at the graph of monetary incomes of the population offered by Rosstat, then it is obvious that this spring, the statistically average Russian lives approximately at the level of the height of the crisis, the winter of 2008/2009” and has not benefitted from the rise in the price of oil and gas.

Last month, compared to a year earlier and with inflation taken into account, the two “Svobodnaya pressa” writers say, average pay for Russians fell by 0.4 percent. They note that “the main reason” for this trend is not a decline in pay but rather “the continuing growth of the cost of living.”

And that trend in turn has sent consumer confidence tumbling. According to Rosstat, that index fell three percent in the first quarter of 2011, with only 13 percent of the population now expecting an improvement in their material position over the next 12 months, 23 percent expecting a decline, and 53 percent anticipating little change.

These figures, Ivanov and Ivanov say, put Russia in the range of the crisis countries of the European Union, Greece and Portugal, rather than with those EU states which are coming out of the recent economic crisis. And what is worse, they suggest, is that this decline in standard of living “correlates with the worsening situation of the Russian economy as a whole.”

GDP is falling as is investment, and the growth in incomes from the sale of oil and gas is not having an impact on the standard of living of ordinary Russians. Using Rosstat figures, they show that those at the top of the income pyramid are benefitting from these sales but those in the middle and bottom are not – or at least are not at a rate higher than inflation.

Given these figures, the two asked three specialists whether these figures suggested that there is “renewal of recession in Russia.” Aleksey Mikhailov, an expert at the Moscow Center of Economic and Political Research, replied that “all contemporary statistics are practically useless” because “they reflect the desires of the leaders and not real processes in the economy.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has declared that GDP grew 4.4 percent in the first quar4ter and so “we will soon with surprise find out that there was no fall in the real incomes of the population and no fall in investment in the first quarter .. Just wait for Rosstat’s corrections! All will be well.”
But if one considers the real situation and not that as presented by the country’s leadership, Mikhailov continues, one sees that investment has fallen well below plans and that ruble has strengthened and will continue to do so at ever higher costs to consumers, a situation that the government is doing nothing to correct.
“Russia is a prisoner of liberal fundamentalism,” the economist says, just as it was before the crisis of 1998. And undoubtedly, this will lead to a new crisis” once the price of oil falls or when the regime commits the next “stupidity” and thus sends Russia into a tailspin.
Yevgeny Yasin, the director of studies of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, was more measured in his language but equally damning in his conclusions. He pointed out that “citizens do not eat oil” and that as a result, income differentiation is increasing with “the majority becoming poorer.”
What is especially worrisome, he continued, is that “when there was a crisis, demand fell and prices should have fallen,” but Russia “did not make use of this situation” and introduce reforms in the economy. Inflation remains high, “and this will lead to a further decline in real incomes.”
“Growing prices for oil will not save the situation,” Yasin said, because “if the temporary extra incomes will be wasted on everyday expenses,” that will only give the illusion that things are well for a time. And “when after this the crisis comes,” the money that could have been put to good use for investment in change won’t be available.
And finally, Mikhail Khazin, the head of the NEOKON consulting company, said that the situation reflects serious distortions in the Russian economy. The price of oil has doubled but domestic production has declined, with all the oil earnings going to the rich rather than being used for social purposes.
“As a result,” Khazin says, “the incomes of the population are falling, [and] real inflation is much higher than what our government says.” Together these trends are promoting “degradation in our economy” at a rapid rate. And that can be seen in particular in the case of inflation.
If one ignores the export sector, one sees that the real disposable incomes of the population are falling and thus the sales of such goods as well. That means, Khazin says, that “the possibility of earning profits” there has declined as well. “Who then will invest in an economy in which profits are falling?”

Window on Eurasia: Libya’s Circassians Say Qaddafi is Killing Them Too

2011-04-26T18:20:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 26 – A report last week that a group of Circassians from the North Caucasus had written to Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi and offered to come to fight on his side in the civil war there attracted a fair amount of media attention in the Russian Federation, Turkey and the West.

But the next stage in this story has attracted far less and yet it is in many ways more instructive of what is going on in the Circassian movement. After hearing from Circassians in Libya that Qaddafi is in fact a murder of Circassians and after being urged by Circassian leaders in the North Caucasus and elsewhere not to interfere, the original group has changed its mind.

The original offer to serve as volunteers in Qaddafi’s forcdes came from a group in Kabardino-Balkaria. It was published on the Internet and also sent formally to the Libyan embassy in Moscow. The letter spoke about “the full and unqualified support” of this group of Circassians of Qaddafi’s position (kabardino-balkaria.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184203/ ).

“We ask You,” the letter continued, “to allow us to come to Your country in order with arms in our hands to stand in defense of the independence of Libya. Many years ago, Libya became a refugee for our fellow Circassians, the descendents of whom live there up to now. And we would like in a small play to pay back Your country for its good relations to the Circassians.”

But a few days after this letter became public, a letter came from Libya asking the group to reconsider. Written by Musbakh Shirksi, a Circassian living in the city of Misurat, it said that “Qaddafi is a murder … [who is] killing innocent Libyan Muslims, including Circassians” and suggesting that “if you really want to come to Libya, come to help” Qaddafi’s opponents.

A second letter came from Kazbek Soobzokov, a Circassian now living in California. He urged the group to think again as well. “Qaddafi,” he wrote, “is someone like Stalin who is well known to you. Your good intentions toward Qaddafi are based on a false feeling.” And those letters had their effect.

The original group announced that it had reconsidered its plans and would decide what to do next on the basis of information from the Circassians of Libya. Among the ideas being discussed is “the question of their return to their historical motherland, based on the precedent of the return of the Circassians of Kosovo during the war in Yugoslavia.”

Other Circassian leaders have weighed in as well. Ruslan Kesh, the leader of the Circassian Congress, said that Circassians “respect democratic values and the opinion of the international community and consider that the conflict msut be resolved above all by the Libyans themselves.”

“Circassian interference in the Libyan conflict,” Kesh suggested, “could complicate the international direction of the policy of the national Circassian movement.” At the same time, however, he expressed understanding for the authors of the original appeal: They are “people who do not accept the policy of double standards.”

Moreover, “the traditional readiness of the Circassians to come to the help of those in need shows that the people is alive and that it is capable of reacting to the challenges of the times. As for the Circassian diaspora living in Libya, it is necessary to develop the question about its repatriation to its historical Motherland.”

Unlike many Circassians in the Middle East who trace their origins to the expulsion and partial genocide of their people by the Russian authorities in the 1860s, the Circassians of Libya came to that area with the Mamluks in the 14th century. They do not speak Circassian, but they “remember that they are descendents of the Circassians and call themselves al-Jerkesi.”

In 1998, one Circassian from Libya came to the congress of the International Circassian Association in Krasnodar. He spoke Arabic and had a translator, but he “expressed the desire of the Libyan Circassians to restore their historical ties” with other Circassians.” In this roundabout way, that is now happening.

Window on Eurasia: Demographic Realities Forcing Moscow to Boost Draft Intake from North Caucasus

2011-04-26T17:44:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 26 – Even as some Moscow officials suggest the Russian army would be better off with fewer North Caucasian soldiers or even none at all, the demographic decline among the ethnic Russians at a time of continued growth in many Muslim nationalities has forced the military to dramatically boost draft calls in the North Caucasus.

The current issue of the Daghestani weekly “Nastoyashcheye vremya” reported that Moscow had increased the draft quota from an initial 420 people to 5980 and, adding insult to injury, noted that draft officials in that North Caucasus republic say that they could easily send “up to 20,000” if that were required (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5919/109/).

Three weeks ago, the Daghestani weekly noted, “in a number of Russia media outlets appeared the declaration of the military commissary of Chelyabink oblast Nikolay Zakharov to the effect that residents of the Caucasus would not be called into the army because as the media put it, ‘the growth of ethnic tensions’” caused by their appearance in military units.

In the North Caucasus, such assertions “have generated anger both among draftees and also among the higher military command.” In the Daghestan military commissariat, the weekly said, officers said that they “consider such assessments to be an attempt at exacerbating inter-ethnic hostility” and that the courts should take up the matter.

And they noted that the draft quota for Daghestan had been increased from an initial 420 to the final 5980 after Makhachkala asked Moscow to increase it because so many young people from that republic want to serve. But even that number, Yavnus Dzhambalayev, who oversees the draft in Daghestan, said “is not the limit” for his republic.

Today, he continued, there are 27,000 people in the prime draft cohort in Daghestan, “and in fact we could send 20,000 draftees” to the armed forces. “We have many who want to serve and those 7,000 which wer called in by the commission have already passed through the process without any excesses.”

As to where the Daghestani draftees will serve, he said, they will be in units in the Central, Southern, Eastern and Western districts. They won’t serve in their home republic, however; there “only professional soldiers” are used, at least according to the existing rules of the Russian defense ministry.

What makes this Makhachkala report so striking is that in many predominantly ethnic Russian regions around the country, military commissariats are facing a difficult time in meeting much lower draft quotas because the current prime draft cohort, men born 18 to 20 year ago, is so small.

As a result, commissariats there are being forced to go after students in university and to round up people whose health or criminal backgrounds make them poor candidates for military service, a pattern that is likely to intensify if the current demographic trends continue as scholars now predict.

Many military officers would prefer to have fewer people from the Caucasus in their units believing that such people either cause or trigger ethnic conflicts with soldiers of other ethnic groups and thus reduce unit cohesion and military effectiveness. But they face serious opposition in taking the steps necessary to make that happen.

On the one hand, many Russian parents actively resent the idea that their children should be at greater risk of being called to military service than the parents of Muslim nationality youth. And on the other, the Russian government cannot easily avoid draft Muslim youth unless it is willing to have a smaller army or to accept serious consequences for the economy,

Moreover, and this may be the most powerful argument against reducing draft quotas in Muslim areas in general and in the North Caucasus in particular. If the Russian military does not take Muslim draftees in ever greater numbers, unemployment and discontent in the North Caucasus will only increase, with some of those not drafted likely choosing to fight another way.

Window on Eurasia: Kadyrov has ‘Terrorized’ Chechens into Silence, Alekseyeva Says

2011-04-26T16:40:00.001-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 26 – The human rights situation in Chechnya has not gotten dramatically worse under Ramzan Kadyrov because it was already bad when he came to office, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, says, but it has changed in a dramatic way, she notes, with the population so terrorized that people are afraid to say anything Kadyrov might not like.

If a Chechen dares to do so, Lyudmila Alekseyeva told Kavkaz-Uzel.ru in an interview posted online today, the powers that be will come down hard “not only on that individual but also on all his relatives and friends,” a “Stalnistpractice which is totally illegal and unique above all to Chechnya (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184361/).

As a result, there is very little information coming out about what is actually going on, a situation that allows Kadyrov to claim that things are fine and improving in Chechnya in much the same way that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin managed to conceal from most outsiders the crimes he was committing against the people of the Soviet Union.

Alekseyeva says that there are no independent human rights organizations remaining in Chechnya. “They cannot work normally to the extent that they are under the full control of the Plenipotentiary for human rights in Chechnya Nurdi Nukhazhiyev,” who summons those he is displeased with and “demands that they disown their own words.”

Nukhazhiyev, Kavkaz-Uzel.ru notes, “has not infrequently criticized the activity of Russian human rights activits in Chechnya and especially the work of the Memorial Human Rights Center. He says that this group, “which is financed from abroad is pursuing political goals” by disseminating “negative information” about Chechnya.

According to Alekseyeva, the situation that Kadyrov and Nukhazhiyev have created means that “the only organization which is in a position to operate in Chechnya is the combined group of human rights activists from other regions.” But even they suffer restrictions because Nukhazhiyev says they are “absolutely not needed” in that republic.

Chechen political scientist Ruslan Martagov expands on Alekseyeva’s point. He told Kavkaz-Uzel.ru that those who know the region only from the media have the wrong impression on what is taking place in Chechnya and why. The Russian media suggests Kadyrov is winning the war against the Islamists, but Martagov says the facts are otherwise.

The militants have not left Chechnya for other North Caucasian republics because Kadyrov has frightened them. Instead, they have done so because he is doing what they would like to see the powers do: promote the imposition of Islam on all aspects of political and social life in the North Caucasus.

“In Chechnya,” Martagov points out, “is taking place the clericalization of the republic; the muftiates are becoming an inalienable structure of production, and an official dress code has been introduced. “We are called to give up many of the achievements of a free society” and return to the society of the past, the political scientist continues.

Although hidden from the public media, Kadyrov and his regime are making an attempt at “legalized feudalism and the construction of a theocratic state. This is equivalent to what the Wahhabis want to do.” But there is one difference: Kadyrov’s system would collapse in one day if the money stopped flowing, and he would be swept away by those more radical than he or by those who want a freer future.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Must Develop Siberia In Order Not to Lose It, Chernyakhovsky Says

2011-04-25T06:09:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 14 – Moscow must come up with a development strategy for Siberia and the Russian Far East that links these regions with European Russia or face the prospect that over time, the residents of these enormous territories will decide that their fate depends not on the Russian center but on China and other Asian countries, according to a Moscow analyst.

In a commentary in the current “Novaya politika,” Sergey Chernyakhovsky says that simply promoting the development of Siberia and the Far East is not enough because some kinds of development could make these areas less connected to Moscow and make them more closely tied with foreign powers (novopol.ru/-trete-osvoenie-sibiri-text100298.html).

Given “the economic and transportation degradation of the last quarter century,” he writes, people in Siberia and the Far East “feel ever less their ties” with Moscow. As a result, “separatist tendencies are growing although they are now yet openly declared politically” because people there are “ever more integrated with Japan and China.”

And the rise of such attitudes beyond the Urals, Chernyakhovsky continues, has led to discussions typically in private but sometimes in public that Moscow will have to give up “the entire territory beyond the Urals to someone or other.” But preventing that outcome is “not only a question of ‘modernization’ of the country.”

What is required, Chernyakhovsky says, is “a new assimilation of Siberia,” involving not only the exploitation of its wealth but also the integration of the region into Russia as a whole. “If the country as a state-political subject cannot secure the development of Siberia, it will not have the strength or even the moral basis to hold it.”

This third assimilation of Siberia – the first two were in tsarist and Soviet times – will require increasing the region’s population to all-Russian densities and the design of investment programs that will work to the benefit of Russia not only immediately but in the long term rather than only to foreign states.

In designing this program, the Moscow analyst continues, Russians need to ask themselves two questions: “Where will investments go in this region?” and “how will the pattern of such investments affect the vector of integration of Siberia and the Far East?”

According to Chernyakhovsky, investments in this region can go into three distinct spheres. The first involves the extraction and processing of raw materials; the second, “the construction of communications and the development of infrastructure;” and the third, “the development of industrial potential and its technological reconstruction.”

Moscow has been able to attract foreign capital for the first but has given little thought to the long-term consequences of doing so, but the center has had and will continue to have far more difficulties in getting foreign investment in the second and third because those are long-term and will benefit Russia more than anyone else.

In coming up with a strategy for Russia beyond the Urals, Moscow needs to reflect on the differences between an East-West axis of development which will strengthen the country and a North-South one which will weaken it, regardless of how much “modernization” there is otherwise.

Such a focus on these risks, Chernyakhovsky says, is needed because “given the incompetence which the federal center and the Russian powers that be frequently show,” only such a focus will lead them to act in the correct way, “simply out of a feeling of self-preservation.”

In sum, he says, “Russia needs not only to find a means of attracting capital for the development of Siberia and the Far East but of attracting it in a necessary and profitable configuration for itself and for these regions as well.” So far, this strategy is not on offer, but Moscow needs to come up with it soon.

Window on Eurasia: Soviet-Era Russian Translation of Koran Basis for New Sect in Islam

2011-04-25T05:22:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 25 – A 1963 Russian translation of the Koran has become the basis for a new sect in Islam across the former Soviet space, a sect whose members reject both the view that the Koran exists only in its original Arabic form and the notion that the sunna and hadith are necessary for understanding the text of the Koran itself.

Known as the Krachkovtsy, in reference to Ignaty Krachkovsky, the Soviet orientalist who prepared the translation, its followers believe that “a literal understanding of the translation of the Koran is sufficient,” according to an analysis of this group in the current issue of the Daghestani journal “Nastoyashcheye vremya” (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5909/109/).

In this, the Krachkovtsy resemble the early Protestant denominations in the West who relied on a literal reading of the new translations of the Bible into German and English. But the Krachkovtsy resemble these sects in another way as well: they have been subject to intense persecution by other Muslim groups, both Sunni and Salafi.

The sect emerged “little more than 12 years ago” in Western Kazakhstan, the Daghestani journal notes, but as a result of active missionary work, “it has quickly found numerous followers … across the entire space of the CIS,” most often in the outskirts of cities “of this onetime enormous country.”

A Krachkovsky congregation has now appeared in Daghestan. Initially, it included “about 20 people, largely residents of the Makhachkala districts of Novy Taryky and Pyaty poselok.” And while few members of the community are prepared to talk to the media, one agreed, on the basis of a promise of anonymity, to discuss the Krachkovtsy there.

He told the Daghestani weekly that the followers of this trend in Islam “do not consider it necessary to study Arabic, believing that if that language is not one’s native tongu, “there is no sense in studying it since this will not give the possibility for as deep an understanding as making use of the text in one’s language of everyday conversation.”

“I don’t want to offend you,’ “Ibragim” said. “Simply look around soberly and without prejudice, drop the chains of Sunnism and the hadith and look at the Koran with clear eyes. Here we are called Koranites, are subject to persecution, and my bothers and ssisters in the faith are insulted at eat step. Can this be what Islam is about?”

The Krachkovets continued, “Honestly speaking, I am glad I am a Koranite and not a Sunni,” considering what has happened in Daghestan. “Calling yourselves Sunnis,” he added, “you stress that you follow only the Sunna and not the Koran.”

Challenged by his interviewer that there are passages in the Koran that can be understood only with the assistance of the hadith and sunna, “Ibragim” responded that Allah has made out religion sufficiently easy so that only someone full of pride or mentally ill cannot understand it. Allah the Most High said: ‘The writing is for all who believe in it.’”

According to “Ibragim,” the Krachkovtsy attend regular mosques, say the prayers required by the Koran, “but read [the Koran] in Russian … and refuse to follow practices” required by the sunna but not found in the Koran itself.

The Makhachkala parish of Krachkovtsy now numbers “more than 175 people,” but in addition, representatives of this group are found “in all the cities of Daghestan.” And the followers of this trend believe that “the expansion of their ranks is only a matter of time” even though they are often subject to attack by other Muslims, both traditional and radical.

One of the conflicts “Ibragim” described involved a funeral when Krachkovtsy opposed reading a prayer over a dead man in Arabic, as both Sunni and Salafi Islam require. “What is important is the language in which you think,” “Ibragim” said. “What good is reproducing a set of words which you do not understand?”

In the view of many Muslims, using Russian or any other language besides Arabic in Islam is prohibited as an innovation. But that is simply wrong, “Ibragim” said. Using a language people understand “must not be considered an innovation in Islam.” And it is time to stop struggling over which language to use.

Window on Eurasia: Middle East Unrest Prompts Moscow to Ban DPNI, Moscow Analyst Says

2011-04-24T09:04:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 24 – Frightened by the implications of the events in the Middle East, Moscow has finally banned the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), a group that over the last decade has played a major role in shifting Russian nationalism away from the margins of Russian politics to their center, according to one Moscow analyst.

In an article on the APN.ru portal at the end of last week, Aleksei Abanin argues that the decision of the powers that be to take that step will do little to restrict the rise of Russian nationalism and may in fact trigger its spread to even broader groups in the population, thus further weakening the regime (www.apn.ru/publications/article24072.htm).

And while Abanin’s article is certainly excessive in its praise for an organization that has taken openly racist stands toward members of many ethnic and religious minorities and through its website and actions whipped up hostility toward them, its content is a reflection of the thinking of many Russian nationalities at the present time.

According to Abanin, “over the course of the ten years of its existence, the DPNI raised the propaganda of nationalism to a qualitatively new level, by reorienting it from narrow subculture circles to a mass audience” and thus providing the seedbeds for the growth of “an enormous quantity of talented cadres for the Right Movement.”

These people, he says, include, “civic activists, ideologues, human rights defenders, public social figures, publicists and so on.” And together they “carried out many large-scale (and not very) street measures, put out and distributed an enormous quantity of agitation and analytic materials, [and] provided help and support to an enormous number of Russian people.”

In addition, Abanin insists, DPNI “took an active information (and not only) part in the treatment and resolution of all the most serious conflicts and incidents in which Russians were subject to pressure, discrimination or terror by outsiders [and] made an enormous contribution to raising the importance of national discourse to a high political level.”

Thus, in sum, he says, the Movement “made possible the demarginalization of the image of Russian nationalism in the consciousness of society” and thereby contributed in this way to its transformation into “a real and THE ONLY political force which really has the mass support of the people” and is capable in the midterm of replacing the rotting RF regime.”

Because DPNI from the outset constituted a serious “headache” for that regime, Abanin says, the regime began to subject it to repressions already in 2005 when the first Russian March took place and when the DPNI “having understood the senselessness of attempts” to cooperate with the powers “went over into open opposition” even as it remained within the law.

By staying within the law, the DPNI made it difficult for the powers that be to move against it unless they were prepared to violate Russian law on their own and thus show their true nature to the Russian people even more clearly and definitively, the Moscow nationalist commentator continues.

Consequently, and short of that, the regime began to use its “beloved methods” against DPNI, including the dissemination of “yellow compromise” materials and the sponsoring of “the escalation of internal conflicts [within DPNI} with the goal of splitting the organization.” But neither proved effective, Abanin insists.

And their failure prompted the authorities to make use of “police repressions against particular activists and regional sections. But even this did not help the system destroy the spirit of the comrades in arms of the Movement and force them to begin to leave its ranks in massive numbers.”

Instead, DPNI’s street demonstrations “became ever larger and began to generate within the Russian elite not angry responses but real concern. And when throughout almost the entire Middle East suddenly broke out a wave of popular revolutions, the concern of the elite was transformed into fear.”

“For if a revolutionary could unexpectedly take place in Tunisia where no organized opposition existed,” the powers that be in Moscow reflected, “then what might happen in Russia where the national opposition, even given its serious internal contradictions and pressure from the powers, is able to assemble thousands of people in meetings?!”

According to Abanin, “the probability of the realization in the Russian Federation of ‘an Egyptian scenario’ after the prohibition of the largest legal nationalist organization will not fall but only increase.” That is something Moscow does not understand because it does not recognize that “in the first instance, it is not an organization that brings people to meetings.”

Instead, he continues, “Ideas” are what cause people to protest, and “however many movements and parties are banned, good and brave people cannot be. And it is impossible to ban people FROM THINKING WITH THEIR OWN HEADS,” at least for any prolonged period of time.

Abanin thus concludes that while “there is no longer a DPNI, its task will live! In the minds, hearts and actions of thousands of Russian people whom this organization helped to throw off the chains of slavery and gave direction as to how much be constructed a better world than the one in which we now live.”

Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Muslims Sure Census Results Will Allow Them to Get More Haj Slots

2011-04-23T16:11:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 23 – Even though the 2010 Russian Federation census has not released nationality data and did not ask questions about religious affiliation, Russia’s Muslims are confident that the latest enumeration will show that their numbers have increased significantly and that this in turn will allow them to secure a larger quota for the haj.

Yesterday, Ilyas Umakhanov, the vice speaker of the Federation Council and head of Russia’s haj mission, told Kavkaz-uzel.ru that the results of the 2010 census show a growth in the population of the Muslim regions of Russia and this will become the basis for Moscow to seek a larger haj quota (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/184169/).

The Saudis as the keepers of Islam’s Holy Places of Mecca and Medina set annual quotas of one haji for every 1,000 Muslims in each country of the world. For the past decade, Russia’s quota has been 20,500, a number based on Saudi estimates that there are 20,500,000 of the faithful in the Russian Federation.

Moscow, at the urging of the Muslims of Russia, has sought a higher quota, occasionally successfully as when two years ago Vladimir Putin secured an additional 5,000 haj slots by using the argument that there was pent up demand from Soviet times when few could make the required pilgrimage.

But the Saudis have been reluctant to grant Moscow extra slots not only because any such concession would anger others or encourage them to demand more slots but also because it would appear to legitimize what is an increasing problem: thousands of Russia’s Muslims simply go to Saudi Arabia outside the limit and “crash” the haj lines.

The results of the 2010 census may give Russia new arguments for boosting the country’s haj quota. “In areas of the compact settlement of Muslims,” Umakhanov said, “the growth of the population all the same shows a very positive dynamic,” one that suggests Russia has more than 20.5 million Muslims and hence should be allotted more than 20,500 haj slots.

According to Umakhanov, during the period from 1945 to 1990, only 900 people made the haj from the entire Soviet Union. But today, “Russia is in the top dozen countries which has the largest quota for the haj, and even as that is the case, the number of those who want to make the pilgrimage is growing.”

Umakhanov said that the Saudis appear likely to want to see the official results of the census before making any adjustment, but he suggested that it is already obvious that the Muslim population of the Russian Federation is growing rapidly, especially among the peoples of the North Caucasus.

“If we consider Daghestan, the Chechen Republic, Tatarstan and Ingushetia alone,” the republics which generate more than 85 percent of all hajis from Russia, the haj commission chief said, then population growth alone in these regions should lead the Saudis to increase the haj quota for the Russian Federation “already in this year.”

Window on Eurasia: Young Russians Hate Bureaucrats More than They Hate North Caucasians, Poll Finds

2011-04-22T13:08:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 22 – A poll of 1600 young Russians in six major cities found that as much as they dislike migrants from the North Caucasus and support nationalist groups like those who took part in the Manezh Square protests last December, they dislike bureaucrats “even more,” a pattern that may portend even larger and more violent clashes.

Yesterday, the Moscow newspaper “Kommersant” reported about a poll conducted for the Social Chamber which showed that “young [Russians] hate bureaucrats more than they hate people from the Caucasus and give preference to nationalist organizations such as the Nashi movement and Molodaya gvardiya” (www.kommersant.ru/doc/1625661?isSearch=True).

The telephone poll, conducted by the Politex Social Technologies Agency with the support of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, involved 1600 respondents aged 15 to 30 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-na-Donu, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, and Chelyabinsk.

Three out of four of those answering – 76 percent – said they sympathized with those who took part in the Manezh action. Only one in five – 20 percent – condemned it. Moreover, 78 percent insisted that the December protest was not a nationalistic action, with 58 percent saying that it was a protest against corruption and “so-called” ethnic crime.

The polltakers argued that the view that the Manezh protest was not nationalistic was confirmed by “the fact that ‘the relationship to it of ethnic Russian respondents and representatives of other nationalities was practically identical.

But the situation may be more complicated than that: Sixty-nine percent of the sample said the causes of the conflict were to be found in the fact that corruption, “especially in the law enforcement organs,” is flourishing and when “militiamen release criminals for money or on orders from above.”

Two out of three of those polled are “certain that migrants, especially ‘Caucasians,’ ‘live better,’ as a result of their rapid ability to adapt to the corruption of the authorities.” As a result, while 39 percent of the sample acknowledged they had a negative attitude toward people from the Caucasus, 51 percent had a negative one toward officials, and only 27 percent like the police.

Hostility toward young Caucasians, the poll found, is widespread: 69 percent said they “do not like them because of their ‘aggressive behavior’ and their unwillingness to “live according to our rules.’” As a result, 26 percent said they would “welcome the splitting off of the North Caucasus from Russia,” but a larger number – 40 percent – doubted that would help.

“Kommersant” noted that “it is interesting that only 17 percent of the participants in the poll positively assessed the activity of the Nashi movement,” while 32 percent expressed approval of the actions of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), which a Moscow court has just banned.

The poll found that 37 percent of young urban Russians said that they have “acquaintances” who “would take part in actions” like the Manezh Square clashes. And “almost none of them doubted” there would be more such events. “Where and when,” one individual polled said, “I do not know. But they will take place.”

Everything that points to that conclusion, the young Russian said, “is now taking place.”

Window on Eurasia: Karimov’s Repression Strengthening Jihadism in Uzbekistan, Memorial Report Concludes

2011-04-22T11:03:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 22 – Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov’s “suppression of religious and political disagreements, together with extreme authoritarianism, total corruption, ineffective economics and the absence of social justice is contributing to the spread of the conviction there that positive changes in society can be achieved only by force.”

And that growing conviction, according to a 143-page study of conditions in that most populous Central Asian country, its author Vladimir Ponomarev of Memorial says, is creating the basis for the strengthening of the positions of jihadist groups” rather than weakening them as Karimov and his backers claim (www.agentura.ru/experts/vponomarev/).

Ponomarev’s report, entitled “Political Repressions in Uzbekistan in 2009-2010, was financed by the Open Society Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy and provides a wealth of detail about conditions in Karimov’s Uzbekistan. But each of his 11 conclusions deserves particular attention.

First of all, the Memorial expert says, “Uzbekistan, which has been ruled for 22 years by the former Communist leader Islam Karimov remains one of the most repressive states of the world,” a country in which there is no legal opposition or an independent media and in which “political repression is an indivisible part of state policy.”

Second, “the use of mass repression,” which Karimov began in the 1990s, “continues to this day.” There are now “several thousand political prisoners” and more than 1200 others who are being sought on the basis of such charges. Moreover, over the last two years, “the extent of repressions rose significantly and now appear to exceed even the high level of 2004-2006.”

Third, to this day, Uzbekistan’s criminal code contains various provisions that limit fundamental freedoms, including those which “criminalize any religious activity not sanctioned by the state” and others which define “terrorism” so broadly that almost anyone can be charged with that crime by Uzbek officials.
Fourth, Ponomarev writes, “a large number of [Uzbekistan’s] Muslims, whose actions do not represent a threat to public order and security as before are being condemned on the basis of fabricated accusations of terrorism and extremism.” And most of their convictions are based on confessions obtained by torture.
Fifth, according to the Memorial study, “the main enemy of the state in 2009-2010 were declared to be the Jihadists,” a term which Uzbek official employ to describe “not only the memb ers of the few terrorist groups but also members of various informal Islamic communities which supposedly express ‘radical views.’”

Sixth, despite Tashkent’s claims of a massive upsurge in terrorist activity as justification for the crackdowns, “there is no data” about any terrorist act except for three incidents in May 2009, and “there is no information [at all] about links between the local ‘Jihadists’ with such organizations as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or the Union of ‘Islamic Jihad.’”
Seventh, because Tashkent’s repressive actions touch “not only marginal groups but have become part of the daily life of Uzbekistan,” they have become themselves “an important source of social-political tension” because they appear to justify the arguments of those who say that “positive changes in society can be achieved only by means of force.”
Eighth, just as was the case after the Andijan events of 2005, the Tashkent authorities appear to be using repression against independent human rights activists and journalists because they fear that such people will be the source of “alternative” and independent information and that that in turn “can stimulate protest attitudes in society.
Ninth, given the tight lid that Karimov’s regime has put on any information about the use of force by militants in 2009, it appears, Memorial’s Ponomarev says, that “the powers are afraid also that in the case of even limited success by Jihadist actions, the latter may serve as a model for emulation by others and give an impulse to the rise of new anti-government groups.”
Tenth, Ponomarev argues, “the West (like the partners of Uzbekistan inside the CIS as well) are underestimating the seriousness and extent of the problems connected with political repressions in Uzbekistan and their possible dramatic influence on regional stability” across Central Asia.
In contrast to the situation in 2002-2003, he continues, Western representatives have focused only “about 30” cases involving civil society activists and the democratic opposition, the freeingof which is assessed by some of them as evidence of ‘positive changes’” by the Tashkent leadership.
But in fact and just like in Soviet times, Tashkent is using these people “as hostages for political trade with the West” and is arresting new groups for every one individual it may choose to free. Indeed, the Memorial expert writes, “many are convinced” that the West is “not taking sufficient steps to change the situation.”
And finally, eleventh, Ponomarev aregues, “the current Realpolitik of the US and the European Union toward Uzbekistan needs to be reviewed, especially in the context of the latest events in the Middle East which can be repeated in Central Asia as well,” with Uzbekistan being a candidate for a Libyan rather than Egyptian scenario.
“It should be remembered,” the Memorial expert writes, “that during the period of active cooperation with the United States in 2001-2003, Uzbekistan annually freed up to 1000 political prisoners which not only did not create any problems regarding the stability of the domestic political situation but on the contrary made possible a reduction in the level of tensions” there.
And it is also necessary to remember, Ponomarev says, that Karimov’s “’war with Islam’ under the cover of the struggle with terrorism … can have catastrophic consequences for Central Asia. The use of mass repressions not only represents a clear violation of Uzbekistan’s international obligations but represents a threat to the security and stability of the region.”

Window on Eurasia: Crimean Tatars Press to Go Back to Latin Script by End of 2011

2011-04-22T10:11:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 22 – The Crimean Tatars are stepping up the campaign they launched in 1991 to return to the Latin-based script in which their language was written between 1928 and 1938 and thus end the use of the Cyrillic-based script Stalin imposed on them, a step that will further set them apart from Slavic groups and bring them closer to Turkey.

On Monday, Eduard Dudakov, the chairman of the Republic Committee of Crimea for Inter-National Relations and the Affairs of Deported Citizens, told journalists that “the process of shifting the Crimean Tatar language from a Cyrillic-based alphabet to the Latin script is to be completed before the end of the year.

Discussion of this measure has gone on long enough, he continued, and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine needs to adopt modifications in the country’s law on language that can “become the basis for the introduction of changes in the corresponding legal act, regulating the use of various writing systems.”

Dudakov’s comments follow proposals by Mustafa Cemilev, the president of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people who has long sought “a single alphabet for all Crimean Tatars in the world” and the publication last month of “Nenkecan,” a Crimean journal in the Latin script (e-crimea.info/2011/04/18/49428/Kryimskotatarskiy_yazyik_pereydet_na_latinitsu_do_kontsa_goda_.shtml).

Following an overwhelming vote in favor, the Verkhovna Rada of Crimea on Wednesday called on the country’s parliament to adopt “in as short a time as possible” draft legislation that would regulate the languages of all minority nationalities in Ukraine, including not just Crimean Tatar but also Russian and other groups (www.interfax.com.ua/rus/pol/66910/).

Because such legislation touches on the sensitive issue of Russian-Ukrainian relations and on the policies of the incumbent Ukrainian president who earlier promised to boost the status of Russian, that aspect of debates about a new language law is likely to attract the most attention in the coming weeks.

But in fact, the effort of the Crimean Tatars to go back to the Latin script may prove more important, not only because it will set them even more apart from the others on the peninsula but also because it will serve as a model for other Turkic groups in the post-Soviet world, in the first instance the Kazan Tatars, and tighten relations between these communities and Turkey.

The impact on the Kazan Tatars is likely to be especially great given Moscow’s increasing efforts to Russianize Tatarstan and especially the Russian government’s use of an appeal by a group of Kazan parents to reduce the amount of Tatar used in the schools of that Middle Volga republic.

Those Russian efforts have prompted some Tatar and Muslim commentators to ask, in this Year of Gabdulla Tukay, a leader of the Tatar renaissance of a century ago, “whether the language of Tukay [Tatar] will survive until the end of the 21st century?” -- or whether it is fated to be overwhelmed by Russian (www.islam.ru/content/kultura/1240).

Given the historic ties between the Kazan Tatars and the Crimean Tatars, a successful move to return to Latin script among the latter will likely spark calls for a similar step among the former, the largest ethnic minority in the Russian Federation and often a bellwether for the actions of other nations inside that country.

There are three reasons this Crimean Tatar effort is important in addition of course to its impact on the future of that nation. First, it highlights the way in which over the last year the Crimean Tatars and other nations of Eurasia have reasserted their efforts in the early 1990s to recover their own histories and set themselves apart from the hitherto dominant Russians.

Second, it underscores the ways in which Turkey is gaining influence among these peoples, positioning itself as a regional leader in direct competition with Moscow, Kyiv and other capitals and giving new content to the idea of Turkic world led intellectually at least from Ankara and Istanbul.

And third, it could trigger demands among other nations in Eurasia to shift away from the Soviet-imposed Cyrillic alphabets, including for at least some of the Finno-Ugric and North Caucasian languages and thus increase still further the centrifugal forces on the territory of the former Soviet space.

Window on Eurasia: Chechen Internet ‘Developing Not Badly,’ Insider Says

2011-04-18T06:44:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 17 – Given the role of the Internet and social media in the spread of popular revolts in many countries, there has been a great deal of speculation about how these new media are developing in places like Chechnya, but most of the commentary on such issues has come from outsiders rather than direct participants.

The current issue of the Daghestani online newspaper, “Nastoyashcheye vremya,” provides a welcome exception with its publication of information supplied anonymously by a Chechen blogger about how the Internet with its blogs and social media is developing in his republic (gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5875/109/).

The paper’s Bagdat Tumalayev who writes frequently about new media in the Caucasus but relatively seldom about developments in that sector in Chechnya reports that “a Chechen blogger who wishes to remain anonymous has decided to talk about the state of affairs with regard to the Internet in his native region.”

The Chechen blogger’s desire for anonymity, Tumalayev says, “is understandable even though today this region has become stable” because “it isn’t especially comfortable for anyone living in Chechnya itself to write about this openly.” But the Daghestani journalist continues, “judging [from his text], the Internet in Chechnya is developing in a not bad way!”

Moreover, he continues, conditions are being created for its future growth. Vaynakh-Telecon, the leading Internet provide in Grozny, has recently “significantly lowered [its] prices.” Now, Chechens who want to go online can do so at a speed of 1mb/second for only 1200 rubles (40 US dollars) a month.

Among the most popular sites in Chechnya are Chechen-republic.com, Checheninfor.ru, and Chechnyafree.ru, a project of the Golos Rossii radio station. A social network for Vaynakhs, waynahi.ru, has arisen and offers itself as “a national social network for Chechnya and Ingushetia,” although the paper says “it is difficult to speak about how well known it is.”

But social networks are growing. There are already 211,000 Chechen residents registerd on the Russian social network, Odnoklassniki.ru, and there are 26,000 Grozny residents who use the Vkontakte.ru service. Also important in this regard, the Chechen blogger relates, is the Internet forum, vchechne.ru, where there are discussions about all kinds of issues.

The Grozni.org site carries photographs of the Chechen capital today, while Grozny.vrcal.com has photos from before the first Chechen campaign. Current news about the city is available on grozny-inform.ru, the Chechen blogger says, without indicating what he thinks of the content of that outlet.

Other interesting cites the blogger refers to include moct.org, the site of the graduates of the Grozny Oil Institute, fc-terek.ru, terek-grozny.ru,and Chechen sport.com which follow sports clubs. Also important are chechenasso.ru, which features news on Chechen communities outside of Chechnya, garikish.com and gakish.livejournal.com, which discuss social issues.

Ratings of these and other Chechen sites is available at chechentop.ru. There are also “several dozen” Chechen bloggers. The most widely read of these sites are the blog of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, ya_kadyrov.livejournal.com and that of Chechen journalist Timur Aliyev, timur_aliyev.livejournal.com.

Other blogs of note include the diary of Murat Mamirgov, the editor of Islamtv.ru, at mamirgov.livejournal.com, the blog of Arslan Khasavov, a Chechen writer of Daghestani origin, ubl.livejournal.com, and the blog of Leko Gudayev, the webmaster of the Checheninfor site, leko007.livejournal.com.

According to the anonymous Chechen blogger, the Chechen government is actively supporting these bloggers by giving them gifts and prizes as part of what it calls “The Golden Site of CHENET.” He does not say whether such arrangements are intended to ensure that the government knows what is going on, but that possibility cannot be excluded.

Window on Eurasia: Russian Campaign against Muslim Moderates Strengthens Islamist Extremists, Commentators Say

2011-04-18T06:12:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 18 – Those Russians who oppose the modernization and integration of Russia’s Muslims into the political and social life of their country are unwittingly providing support to the Islamist radicals who argue that “there is no chance for normal legal work for the development of Islam” in Russia, two Muslim commentators say.

Indeed, Ruslan Kurbanov and Rinat Mukhametov argue in a lengthy article on the “Russky zhurnal” portal, this ongoing campaign against those within the Russian umma who want to modernize Islam represents “a serious threat to the common state interests of security and development” (www.russ.ru/pole/Islamskaya-modernizaciya-i-ee-vragi).

The occasion for their article, Kurbanov and Mukhametov say, is “the unceasing media-administrative campaign against the Union of Muftis of Russia [SMR]and its leader [Ravil Gainutdin]” and the fact that this campaign is “a clear testimony to the sharpening of the situation in the social-religious life of the country.”

They say that there are now “serious concerns that influential forces would like to exclude even the potential possibility of the enlivening and even more productive activity of domestic Muslims not to speak about some sort of more serious steps such as attempts at the unification” of the Russian umma.

“No one is obligated to love Islam and Muslims,” they continue, but such efforts, “which are trying to tie down the Russian umma hand and foot represent a serious threat” to Russia, and it is not surprising, they point out that “all this is being carefully observed by the imamate ‘forest,’” a reference to the militants in the North Caucasus and elsewhere.

Unlike Talgat Tajuddin of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD), Ismail Berdiyevof the Coordinating Center of Muslims of the North Caucasus, and Mukhammad Rakhimov of the Russian Association of Islamic Accord (RAIS), Gainutdin and his SMR have attracted negative comment precisely because of their support for Muslim modernization.

The SMR, in contrast to the three other umbrella MSDs, “has been attempting to lead young people along the path of what is called ‘constructive Jihad,’ of legal Islamic social, cultural, media, intellectual and other types of activity,” Kurbanov and Mukkhametov say, “and this for various reasons does not please a large number of people.”

Much of Gainutdin’s program remains “the level of declaration,” they note, “but this positive example of the possibility of the normal peaceful development of Islam, the modernization and integration of the Muslim intelligentsia and young people” is attracting the interest “of all Muslim Russia.”

That is because Gainutdin and his SMR represent the possibility that Muslims in Russia will be able to “establish real and effective mechanisms and models of adaptation of Islam within the framework of contemporary Russian statehood,” something “without which, the solution of the problem of extremism is impossible.”

“Islamophobes” – and these are “completely definite forces with political and financial interests,” the two writers continue, “do not see a future for Islam in Russia.” Some of them believe that Islam should not be part of a Russian nation state, and others argue that Islam should be reduced in influence so that Russian can become “part of the Western world.”

But both the one and the other, Kurbanov and Mukhametov say, “however suprising this may appear, are in agreement with the so-called ‘forest brothers’ in the Caucasus and with all those who sympathize with them [because] they too do not see Islam and Muslims as an inalienable part of Russia and Russian identity.”

The attacks on Gainutdin and the SMR, the two Muslim writers say, reflects a faulty logic, one that if applied to the Russian Orthodox Church would require everyone to blame Patriarch Kirill for the actions of the skinheads and serial murders of non-Russians. “We do not think that a discussion at this level is useful for the Russian state.”

Kurbanov and Mukhametov devote most of their article to a discussion of the history of Russian attitudes toward Islam and Muslim organizations, and they demonstrate that both in the pre-1917 period and now, Islamophobes opposed any modernization of Islam and promoted both the spread of Orthodox Christianity and Russification.

But in contrast to the sophistication of the pre-revolutionary leaders of this approach, the current Islamophobes are destroying their own case by promoting discredited leaders within Islam, leader who, Kurbanov and Mukhametov says, are “not cable of influencing Muslims the muftis of which they consider themselves to be,” in the hopes of destroying the umma.

The government-assisted rise of such leaders, they say, represents “a big gift to ‘the forest,’” one that the Caucasus Emirate “could not have imagined on its own.” The propagandists of that group treat what the Islamophobes are doing in Russia as evidence of the rightness of the struggle against Moscow.

“In ‘kafir’ Russia,” the Emirate’s propagandists say, “Leaders are imposed on Muslims who have lost any authority as a result of their declarations and activity; consequently, the development of Islam is blocked; and that in turn means that ‘our task is right’ and that ‘we will win.’”
In this way, and despite the failure of many to understand what is going on, Kurbanov and Mukhametov say, “the attack on the modernization of Muslim institutions is an attack on the security” of the country as a whole, all the more so because “without modernization [of the country],” Russia will not be able to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.
Those who oppose modernization generally and in the Muslim umma “are only playing into the hands of those who want that Russian Muslims do not feel themselves masters in their own land and of those … would like to remove the ‘Muslim’ bricks from the building of the single state and thus make possible the destruction of our entire common home.”
Russia’s Islamophobes oppose the consolidation of the umma on a platform of modernization, the two writers argue, and believe that the difficulties within the Islamic community there are not “problems of growth” but systemic and that “Islam always will be a factor of destabilization and a headache” for Russia.
These opponents of Muslims “advise the bureaucrats that it is necessary to continue the course on the step by step elimination of Islam – not ‘Islamism’ and ‘Wahhabism’ but Islam as such.” And to that end, they urge that “the official Islamic institutions in Russia remain at the level of Soviet times.”
But such an approach entails some really tragic consequences, Kurbanov and Mukhametov argue. It means that those really interested in Islam will be forced to go into “semi-legal or even illegal” places, that the official leaders will remain “illiterate and reactionary,” and that Islam n Russia will again be reduced to “rituals” rather than “faith.”
“In fact,” they say, what Islamophobes like Roman Silantyev are calling for would represent “a return to the pre-Catherine policy toward Islam, the core idea of which was Christianization by any means, including the use of force,” an approach that will in the present circumstances lead to an explosion.
That is because “the formation of the umma and the Islamic awakening in Russia are an irreversible process,” the two Muslim writers say. “The point of no-return has been passed.” The modernizers understand this and want to ensure that the rebirth of Islam takes place within Russia, while “the Islamophobes and ‘the forest brothers’ want this not to happen.”
“For different reasons, the one and the other do not want to see Islam within Russia.” But “sooner or later, a normal working system of interrelationships with Muslims will have to be developed. Those who have any doubts about this should carefully study the results of the last census of the population.”
“In order to avoid problems,” Kurbanov and Mukhametov say, “it would be better to do this sooner rather than later. The state, the Russian people, the Union of Muftis and ‘the modernizers’ have an interest in doing it sooner. The Islamophobes and ‘the forest’ want it to happen as late as possible or better still not at all.”

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Seeks to Reduce Concentrations of Muslim Soldiers in Military Units

2011-04-18T04:50:00.000-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 18 – Concerned about the impact on draft resistance and military readiness of clashes between ethnic Russians and soldiers from the North Caucasus, the Russian defense ministry has cut the size of the draft quota for at least some North Caucasus republics and is working to prevent the concentration of North Caucasian soldiers in any military unit.

A meeting of the defense ministry’s public council last Thursday concluded that problems between soldiers from the North Caucasus and those from elsewhere reflect broader problems in the society, including the failure of the educational system to promote tolerance (www.trud.ru/article/15-04-2011/261742_prizyvnikam_iz_dagestana_objavili_dembel.html).

And as a long term solution, participants at that session, “Trud” reported, believe that the solution to such problems in the military will be the creation of a cadre of professional sergeants. But because the Russian military needs approximately 100,000 of them and is producing only about 500 a year, that solution will not be available anytime soon.

Consequently, as the Moscow paper reported, “the generals without advertising this have already found a solution to the problems by reducing the size of the draft from the Caucasus by an order of magnitude” and by working to ensure that draftees from that region will not be concentrated in particular units.

At the meeting, Nikita Mikhalkov, the well-known film director, sharply critized “not the defense ministry but the education ministry for the fact that it was not involved in the moral training of the younger generation and even, in his words had eliminated the use of the term moral training.”

He and other participants agreed that the military thus must rely on its own resources to address inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions and that “the main figure in the harmonization of inter-ethnic relations must be the sergeant who will spend all the time in the barracks and will know all the nuances in the behavior of his subordinates.”

But as Anatoly Tsyganok, the head of the Moscow Center of Military Prognostication, pointed out, the Russian military is producing too few sergeants to make a difference. At the current rate, he told the paper, it will be more than 200 years before there will be the number needed to make a difference.

Consequently, Russian commanders are seeking to reduce the presence of North Caucasians in the ranks. As Andrey Doroniin, the former deputy commander of the Moscow Military District noted, there exist “simpler means” of preventing such conflicts: North Caucasian soldiers “must not be concentrated in one place.”

And yet another means, “Trud” reported, is to reduce draft calls in the North Caucasus. “According to the information of the military commissariat of Daghetan, this year only 400 people will be called to service, compared to 4,000” who were drafted from the republic in the recent past.

This short-term “solution” entails at least two serious problems, however. On the one hand, it will make it more difficult for the military to fill the ranks because an ever-growing share of the draft-age cohort consists of people from the Muslim republics in general and the North Caucasus in particular.

Military commissariats in predominantly ethnic Russian regions will have to use ever more force to meet their quotas, and Russian parents and potential draftees will see themselves as paying a higher “tax” than those in non-Russian areas, exacerbating Russian nationalist attitudes toward non-Russians in Russian cities and toward non-Russian regions as a whole.

And on the other, any reduction in draft quotas in the North Caucasus will increase the rate of unemployment there, complicating Moscow’s efforts to overcome the problems that have contributed to a seemingly unending flow of young men into the forests to fight against the Russian regime.

Moreover, and this may be the most serious consequence of this unannounced policy, the decision to draft fewer non-Russians because of the problems they supposedly cause will lead ever more of them to view both the Russian military and Russia itself as being just as much an alien occupier as the Islamist militants insist that the two are.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Patriarchate Official Says Muslim Crescents Could be Put on Coats of Arms of Russia’s Muslim Regions and Republics

2011-04-15T16:01:00.002-05:00

Paul Goble

Staunton, April 15 – Religious leaders, heraldry experts, and other commentators have rejected Mufti Talgat Tajuddin’s call for putting a cresent on the coat of arms of Russia, but a senior official in the Moscow Patriarchate has opened the way for more controversy by suggesting a Muslim crescent could be put on the coats of arms of Muslim republics and regions.

That is because the suggestion of Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Patriarchate’s Department for Relations between Church and Society, could open the floodgates by demands from Muslims in various parts of Russia for just such representation and create a checkerboard of Muslim regions as opposed to non-Muslim ones.

And the symbolism of such an obvious division – and it would certainly change over time – would undercut efforts by Moscow to overcome inter-religious hostility and promote a common national identity and could reignite calls by some Muslim leaders to create Muslim political parties, something not now allowed by Russian law, to press for crescents.

In a statement to the media today, Chaplin, who is a close protégé of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, spoke out against Tajuddin’s proposal to put a Muslim crescent on on of the equals on the coast of arms of Russia, arguing that such a change was unnecessary given the tradition the current shield with crosses reflects (www.nr2.ru/society/328369.html).

“That historical form of the Russian coat of arms,” Chaplin said, “which has existed already for many centuries is historically justified. Islam is a local phenomenon for Russia [as] it is distributed as the dominating religion in particular regions. On the coats of arms of these regions may be both crescents and other Islamic symbols.”

“But on the Russian coat of arms, a cross has been present on the crowns over many centuries,” the Patriarchate official continued, adding that in his view “it is not necessary to change anything” at least for this symbol of the Russian Federation and its centuries-old traditions.

Chaplin’s remarks came in reaction to a proposal Talgat Tajuddin, who has occasionally styled himself as the “Mufti of Holy Russia” and head of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD), made in the course of an interview published in “Moskovskiye novosti” earlier today (mn.ru/newspaper_freetime/20110415/301066658.html).

Tajuddin, who has a reputation for flamboyance, told the paper’s Elena Suponina that he had sent his proposal to replkace on of the crosses on the Russian coat of arms with a Muslim crescent moon to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and had discussed it with President Dmitry Medvedev.

As the mufti pointed out, “the Russian coat of arms is a two-headed equal. All three crowns of this eagle – two on the head and one inbetween above them are marked with crosses. But in Russia there live 20 million Muslims. This is 18 percent of the population, and we are Russian Muslims, not from Saudi Arabia … Africa or the moon.”

“Our ancestors have lived here for millennia. By the will of the Most High we are united in a state. And a neighbor is equal to a brother. We are a constituent part of a single state. But then, where must a Muslim carry his passport on which the coat of arms is reproduced? In his left pocket, of course, near the heart!”

Prior to 1917, Tajuddin continued, “Muslims in the army gave their oath on the Koran. There were regimental mullahs andimams. They were assigned by spiritual administrations. During the war with Turkey, our ancestors did nto consider they were fighting against Muslims: they were defending their motherland, great Russia.”

“Recall the heroism of the Bashkir cavalry in 1812,” Tajuddin said; “they went into attack first. And in 1945, for example, my grandfather advanced to Berlin.”

“In Russia has been achieved a synthesis of a kind that never was in Europe or America,” the mufti continued. Here met East and West. In order that this patriotism not disappear among our children and grandchildren, we humbly ask to introduce certain changes in the coat o farms of our common land.”

Specially, he said, “we ask that one head of the eagle be crowned with a crescent moon and the other with an Orthodox cross. And that crown which is in the middle be both. Then not one enemy will be able to use the religious factor to harm the unity and integrity of our fatherland.”

In response, Russia’s master of heralds rejected this idea (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=40352) as did many Muslims (echo.msk.ru/news/766358-echo.html), Jews (www.argumenti.ru/society/2011/04/102414), and representatives of the human rights community (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=40350).

That united front of rejection makes Chaplin’s remark all the more curious – and at least potentially all the more dangerous, even though it may be walked back by other Orthodox hierarchs or used by them to suggest that the Moscow Patriarchate is, on this issue at least, more liberal and tolerant than many suspect.