Paul Goble
Staunton, May 14 – Because the population of Siberia is so small and the influx of Central Asian and Caucasian workers there for the extraction industries so large, a Moscow commentator suggests, Russia is at risk of "losing Siberia” not to China as many Russian nationalists have long feared but to Islamist groups instead.
And while outcomes are highly improbable – Chinese citizens now form fewer than five percent of the population of the Russian Federation of the Urals, and Muslims from Central Asia and the Caucasus likely form an even smaller share – they are exactly the kind of apocalypticism which increasingly infects the Russian media and Russian society.
In a commentary on KM.ru yesterday, Aleksandr Romanov says that recent events in Surgut are neither normal everyday conflicts or "inter-ethnic” clashes but quite possibly an effort by "radical Islamists” to make Siberia into "a base” ...