Paul Goble

Staunton, December 27 – As ethnic tensions in the Russian Federation have intensified, many non-Russian officials in the Middle Volga and North Caucasus have called for the re-establishment of the Ministry for Nationality Affairs that then-President Vladimir Putin disbanded in 2001.
But today, incumbent President Dmitry Medvedev said he would not take that step because such institutions, which people always call for when there is a problem, had not been effective in the past and would only create more bureaucracy rather than lead to better policies and inter-ethnic relations(www.vestikavkaza.ru/news/obshestvo/meznaz/30900.html).
He thus rebuffed calls this past week for the restoration of such an institution from the State Council of Tatarstan (karim-yaushev.ru/2010/12/24/1052/), the World Congress of Tatars (islamportal.ru/novosti/104/1354/), and a leader of the Moscow Daghestani community (www.sknews.ru/main/45052-rossiyu-spasti-ili-raschlenit.html), among others.
These and other advocates of the restoration of such a ministry argue ...

Paul Goble

Staunton, December 27 – In the tradition of its Soviet predecessors, the current Russian powers that be are promoting radical Russian nationalism not only because it reflects their own private views but because such feelings direct popular anger away from itself and toward labor migrants from the North Caucasus and Central Asia, a prominent Moscow publicist argues.
In an article in yesterday’s "Moskovsky Komsomolets,” Leonid Mlechin says that "nationalism in Russia has flourished because this is useful to the powers that be” because it redirects popular anger away from them and because nationalism "doesn’t require any rational arguments” (www.mk.ru/politics/article/2010/12/26/555142-mastera-delit-i-vyichitat-.html).
Poll show that "the majority of the population willingly supports the slogan, ‘Russia for the Russians’ although the very same people will never permit the Caucasus to leave Russia” after two wars. Instead, Mlechin says, ...

Paul Goble

Staunton, December 28 – Yakov Gilinsky, one of Russia’s most distinguished criminologists has outlined the sources of xenophobia and nationalism behind the ethnic clashes this month in major Russian cities and discusses why the reactions of the powers that be thus far have been not only ineffective but counterproductive.
In a comment on this blog (crimpravo.ru/blog/616.html) that has been reproduced by the Polit.ru portal (www.polit.ru/dossie/2010/12/28/ghilinsky_about_nationalism.html), Gilinsky argues that there are five major "of the mass xenophobia and still limited nationalism (Nazism? Fascism?) in contemporary Russia.
The first of these causes, he suggests, are "the biological preconditions,” the differences in human appearance that have been the basis for humans at all times to make distinctions between "we” and "they,” "our own” and "the outsider.” With the development of civilization, these differences have come to matter less.
Indeed, ...

Paul Goble

Staunton, December 29 – Developments over the past year which highlight the continuing "degradation of the state, society, culture, science and technology,” liberal Moscow politician Vladimir Ryzhkov says, raise questions about Russia’s capacity to survive in its current form and about its ability to remain "a single state” over the next decade. 
In a comment on his Ekho Moskvy blog yesterday, Ryzhkov says that during the 1990s, this decline was "linked to the weakness of the state, the collapse of the old Soviet economy and the low prices for oil, in the Putin years,” it reflected the diversion of enormous oil earnings by the elite and their neglect of the basic infrastructure of the country and the needs of the people.
Indeed, Ryzhkov continues, "if one put aside the stereotypes and propagandistic clichés, Russia ...