Window On Eurasia: Tatarstan’s Shaimiyev Again Challenges The Kremlin
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posted by eagle on March, 2011 as Imperialism
Window on Eurasia: Tatarstan’s Shaimiyev Again Challenges the KremlinPaul Goble
Staunton, March 22 – Mintimir Shaimiyev, the longtime president of Tatarstan, has laid down a broad challenge to Moscow not only by announcing his decision to resign from the leadership of the United Russia Party which he helped to found but also by reaffirming his belief that Russia must remain a federation in which all its indigenous nations have a voice.
Not surprisingly, Shaimiyev’s resignation from the leadership of United Russia has attracted the greater attention from Moscow analysts who have speculated about the possible impact of that step on the upcoming elections, but in reality, Shaimiyev’s views on federalism and support for the nations within Russia may have a greater impact.
That is because Shaimiyev and the republic he long headed and whose current leadership he formed has often served as the bellwether of attitudes and policies in the ...
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Window On Eurasia: National Districts Of Russian North, Born In Violence, Now Face A Sad End, Local Writer Suggests
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posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Window on Eurasia: National Districts of Russian North, Born in Violence, Now Face a Sad End, Local Writer SuggestsPaul Goble
Staunton, March 21 – Moscow’s drive to amalgamate the autonomous districts that some of the numerically small peoples of the Russian North have has prompted one writer there to recall that these peoples actively and violently resisted Soviet ethnic engineering in the 1920s and 1930s, an implicit warning that at least some of them might mount a similar resistance now.
Writing in ”Nyar”yana vynder,” a newspaper in the Nenets Autonomous District, Irina Khanzerova notes that Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous districts last year marked their 80th anniversaries, often with tears because "no one knows” whether they will have the chance to celebrate any future ones (nvinder.ru/?t=sm&d=11&m=0003&y=2011&n=9).
And precisely because of these doubts about the future, she writes, people are again reflecting "about the past and -- what is the main thing ...
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Window On Eurasia: Medvedev’s Offer To Resettle Japanese In Russian Far East Angers Nationalists And Regionalists
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posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Window on Eurasia: Medvedev’s Offer to Resettle Japanese in Russian Far East Angers Nationalists and RegionalistsPaul Goble
Staunton, March 21 – President Dmitry Medvedev’s suggestion at a meeting of the Russian Security Council that Moscow should consider offering Japanese the chance to resettle in the underpopulated areas of the Russian Far East has outraged both Russian nationalists at the center and Russian activists in that region.
At the end of last week, Medvedev said that in the wake of the problems Japan has been having with the tsunami and nuclear power plant, "we now ought to think about the use in the case of necessity perhaps of part of the labor potential of our neighbors especially in the under-populated regions of Siberia and the Far East” (www.utro.ru/articles/2011/03/18/963182.shtml).
This notion was broached earlier in the week by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the outspoken leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who said ...
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Window On Eurasia: ‘Russky’ And ‘Rossiisky’ Are ‘Identical,’ Russian Nationalist Argues
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posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Window on Eurasia: ‘Russky’ and ‘Rossiisky’ are ‘Identical,’ Russian Nationalist ArguesPaul Goble
Chattanooga, March 4 – In a comment that will enflame passions among non-Russians living in the Russian Federation and annoy those in Moscow seeking to promote a supra-ethnic civic identity, Andrey Savelyev, the leader of the Great Russia Party, argues that there is no difference between the ethnic "Russky” and the ostensibly non-ethnic "Rossiisky.”
Responding to an article by Vyacheslav Nikonov on these two terms and the reasons they are not the same (www.russkie.org/index.php?module=fullitem&id=20961), Savelyev, who is also a Moscow State professor, says there is nothing in the one that is not in the other and vice versa (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/02/28/net_nichego_rossijskogo_chto_ne_bylo_by_russkim/).
People like Nikonov, Savelyev continues, "who never occupied themselves with the question of Russian identity somehow are trying to promote themselves” as experts. "First they become leaders of a government financed structure and then they begin to thing that ...
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Window On Eurasia: Religion As Organized By The Kremlin Unlikely To Play An Integrative Role In Russia, Experts Say
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posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Window on Eurasia: Religion as Organized by the Kremlin Unlikely to Play an Integrative Role in Russia, Experts SayPaul Goble
Chattanooga, March 4 – On the day the Kremlin created a Commission on Inter-National and Inter-Religious Relations, experts at a Moscow conference on the social role of religion expressed skepticism that religion by itself could play an integrative role in the multi-religious and mutli-national Russian society.
Indeed, in the words of Professor Ekaterina Elbakyan of the Moscow Academy of Labor and Social Relations, "to speak about the integrating role of religion in poly-ethnic and multi-cultural societies is not serious.” Instead, she argued, "it is necessary to seek a different basis for integration, for example, law” (www.ej.ru/?a=news&id=10434).
And another expert, Aleksandr Verkhovsky of the SOVA analytic center, said that the creation of this new commission could be valuable as religious leaders have a role to play in helping individuals and groups ...
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