Russia's "internal aliens"

By Sergei Markedonov, special to Prague Watchdog

Sergei Markedonov is head of the department of inter-ethnic relations at Russia’s Institute for Political and Military Analysis, and associate professor at RGGU and MGU.

With every day that passes, the socio-political situation in the North Caucasus increasingly gives grounds for alarming conclusions and prognostications. Possibly the only attempt in the past ten years to provide at least some kind of coherent interpretation of the North Caucasus crisis was made by President Dmitry Medvedev, who in June 2009 listed the region’s main problems, which he termed "systemic." Among them he included unemployment, "a monstrous scale of corruption” and the inefficiency of government. As is often the case, the president’s "systemic" approach quickly became a fashion among Russian officials. Discussing the incident which took place in the Stepnovsky district of Stavropol on June 21 (a large-scale clash between Dargins and Nogays), the governor of Stavropol Kray said that "160 young people cannot ...