Window On Eurasia: Olympic Construction Threatens Sochi Residents, Visitors With Mercury Poisoning
|
posted by eagle on June, 2009 as Imperialism
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 5 – Construction for the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi threatens to disturb traces of mercury on the surface there with potentially disastrous health consequences for residents or visitors, according to geographer who said local officials had told him they knew nothing about about this potential problem but now have promised to investigate.
Nadezhda Didenko, the academic secretary of the Sochi Section of the Russian Geographic Society, told Kavkaz-uzel.ru yesterday that the danger of stirring up the highly poisonous mercury deposits in the course of Olympic construction was especially great in the Krasnaya Polyana district (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/155002).
She said that anyone who wanted to see what the traces of this mineral look like should visit the local museum which has a display of mercury sulfite, “the most widely distributed mercury mineral” in the region. And she ...
comments (0)
Window On Eurasia: Can The People Of The Altai Republic Become The ‘Altai People’?
|
posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 5 – In order to boost their numbers in any upcoming census and thus block any attempt by Moscow to amalgamate their federal subject with a neighboring region, the leaders of the Altai Republic are pushing its residents to shift from their narrower ethnic identities to a broader and territorially defined one .
But regardless of whether they succeed or not, their effort to create a supra-ethnic “Altai people” seems certain to become, as participants in a conference there last week argued, extraordinarily important in the future “not only for the Altai Republic but also for Russia as a whole” (www.gorno-altaisk.info/news/2601).
On the one hand, it represents an effort to move expand upon an ethnic identity like the one that some Soviet ideologists discussed in the early 1970s and another some Russian officials ...
comments (0)
Window On Eurasia: Moscow’s New Dam Plan Triggers Tensions In Middle Volga
|
posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 5 – President Dmitry Medvedev’s order at the end of May for the Russian government to draw up plans for a new hydroelectric dam on the Volga is already drawing fire from ecologists and church leaders and generating anger among members of various ethnic groups, parts of whose historical homelands will be flooded if the dam is built.
But whether that will happen remains to be seen, given the way in which opponents of dams in other parts of the country have mobilized and succeeded in slowing similar projects, the success ecologists have had in recent court cases, and new polls showing rising concerns among many Russians about the difficult ecological situation in their country today.
Russian news agencies reported at the end of May that Medvedev had formed a special government commission, including Prime ...
comments (0)
Window On Eurasia: Putin Policies Generating Backlash In Buryatia
|
posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 3 – Vladimir Putin’s campaign to amalgamate two Buryat districts with predominantly ethnic Russian ones and his installation of a personal loyalist as head of the last surviving Buryat social-political organization are producing a backlash among intelligentsia of the Buryat Republic in Russia’s Far East.
According to a report in this week’s “NG-Regiony,” a group of them are calling for the convention of an extraordinary Congress of the Buryat People to consider what they should do, especially after Putin orchestrated the election of Vladimir Buldayev, a United Russia deputy in the republic parliament as head of the All-Buryat Association for the Development of Culture.
That Association, as “NG-Regiony” journal Sergey Berezin points out, is “the last of the major social organizations created by the [Buryat] national intelligentsia at the beginning of the 1990s” and Putin’s move appears intended ...
comments (0)
Window On Eurasia: Moscow’s Plans To ‘Save’ Mordvins Could Destroy That Finno-Ugric Nation
|
posted by eagle on as Imperialism
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 2 – Moscow-backed plans to combine the two literary languages of Mordvinia into one, have speakers of both declare themselves “Mordvins” in the census, and celebrate the millennium of their “union” with the peoples of Russia could kill off that Finno-Ugric nation, one already subject to a very high rate of assimilation in the Russian Federation.
And that danger, one that some other non-Russian groups face as well, lends particular urgency to a Tatarstan government appeal to the Russian State Duma to ratify the European Charter on Minority Languages, an accord that Moscow had hoped to exploit to promote Russian within the EU but now fears might be cited against the center by groups at home.
Last month, officials and scholars met in Mordvinia to discuss the possibility of creating on the foundation of ...
comments (0)
|
