Ukraine, the EU and Russia: Win, Don’t Whine

By Matthew Bryza

It is understandable that European leaders are angry with Russia for spoiling the European Union’s Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius by pressuring Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to “suspend” signing of Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement (see EDM, November 22, December 3, 4). Moscow’s hardball tactics created a diplomatic debacle for the EU, as President Vladimir Putin (yet again) violated his self-serving maxim of non-interference in countries’ internal affairs by yanking Ukraine from the EU’s open door at the eleventh hour, just as he had done earlier by forcing Armenia to choose the Eurasian Customs Union over the EU (see EDM, September 5). Putin’s closure of Russian markets to Ukrainian exports and his threat to raise natural gas prices struck at the heart of the personal interests of many of the oligarchs who dominate Ukrainian politics; these tactics also infuriated European leaders as economic blackmail aimed at sabotaging EU foreign policy.

But this European anger is somewhat misplaced. Moscow is indeed exploiting weaknesses in Ukraine for Russia’s geopolitical and geo-economic gain. But it is President Viktor Yanukovch and Ukraine’s political elite who are responsible for perpetuating these vulnerabilities. By exploiting Ukraine’s weaknesses, President Putin is acting rationally in pursuit of a centuries-old goal of Kremlin foreign policy, keeping Ukraine in Russia’s orbit.

Rather than being disappointed with Russia for behaving like Russia, the EU would be more effective if it recognized that Europe and Russia have been playing different games. The EU is engaged in a competition of values to attract Ukraine and the five other Eastern Partners (Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) to its consensus-based community that has replaced armed conflict with bureaucratic collaboration. Russia is engaged in a competition of power in pursuit of geostrategic influence through economic, political, and even military strong-arming. Regardless of how passionately European leaders argue that EU enlargement poses no threat to Russia, Russia’s top geostrategic thinkers will disagree, given their belief that any increase in EU influence in the region is a loss of Russian influence.

The EU would therefore be wise to stop romanticizing Russia as a strategic partner that shares European values, and then lamenting Russia’s pursuit of its own national interests as somehow immoral. Instead, the EU should start competing with Russia for Ukraine’s political soul.

Now is the time for decisive action. After buckling under Putin’s pressure and returning to Kyiv from Russia and China without an economic rescue package, Yanukovych can now expect hundreds of thousands of protestors on Kyiv’s streets. Absent physical presence by European leaders in Kyiv, pro-EU protesters risk being beaten again (or worse) by the police. And, absent intense political support from European leaders, the protests are unlikely to expand sufficiently to Yanukovych’s political stronghold in eastern Ukraine to compel him to heed his own pro-Europe citizens rather than his Russian counterpart.

Here in Estonia, leaders across society can play two important roles in this broader EU effort. First, Estonia’s top political leaders can sustain their visible presence in Kyiv in support of protesters demanding their democratic rights, as Foreign Minister Urmas Paet did on December 6 during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) ministerial meeting. Second, Estonian business and civil society leaders can advise their counterparts in Ukraine (as well as in Georgia and Moldova, which initialed EU Association Agreements in Vilnius) on the benefits of and way forward to EU accession. In these ways, Estonia could help the EU ensure a historic victory and underscore that Estonia is a net contributor of security to the Euro-Atlantic community.

Orenburg’s Bashkirs Look to Ufa and Islam for Survival

By Paul Goble

The Bashkirs of Orenburg, increasingly concerned about their present and past mistreatment by the authorities, appear to be stepping up their collective political activity. The Orenburg oblast was created by Joseph Stalin to prevent Bashkortostan from having an external border and thus be able to demand union republic status in Soviet times (for background on this issue, see EDM, November 19).

On November 23, the Bashkirs held the fifth Orenburg oblast kurultay or assembly. They were greeted by Oleg Dimov, the deputy head of the government of the oblast, a delegation from Bashkortostan, which read out a message from that republic’s president, as well as other officials, journalists and scholars (kurultay-ufa.ru/2013/11/27/v-kurultay-bashkir-orenburzhya.html). Among the issues discussed, however, were many that were far more sensitive and controversial: the preservation of the Bashkir language in Orenburg, the protection of Bashkir national sites and mosques there, and government support for the only Bashkir-language publication in the oblast, “Karavan-Saray.”

Nurislam Kalmantayev, a Bashkir from Orenburg oblast who now teaches at the Bashkortostan State University in Ufa, outlined many of the concerns and complaints that the Bashkirs of Orenburg have.  In his speech to the kurultay, he not only talked about Bashkir resistance to Moscow’s decision to transfer some historically Bashkir lands to what became Orenburg oblast, but also about the assimilatory pressures the Bashkirs of Orenburg now face (kurultay-ufa.ru/2013/11/26/pora-poiskov-i-derzaniy.html).

Recent sociological research shows, he said, that most Bashkirs in Orenburg oblast aged 35 to 60 speak Bashkir but that those younger than that do not—the result of two waves of Bashkir-language school closures there, first in the 1960s and then during the last several years.  Despite the claims of some officials, Orenburg’s Bashkirs do not want their schools closed and want Ufa to pressure Orenburg.  But “unfortunately,” Kalmantayev said, “this decision does not depend” on Bashkortostan.

Bashkir activists have asked Orenburg officials to stop the current wave of school closings and to create Bashkir-language sections of Russian schools, where preventing the closures of Bashkir academic institutions is not possible for financial reasons. The Ufa-based scholar said that, in talking with Bashkir parents in Orenburg, he had found that they were ready to sign a petition to that effect.  “The time has come,” he continued, “to speak out on this problem. Today it is not yet too late; tomorrow, it will be.”

He said that the Bashkirs of Orenburg also want the Bashkortostan culture ministry to work with Orenburg to revive national customs. Moreover, the scholar noted, Orenburg’s Bashkirs believes that “for the consolidation of the people, [they] need to use the possibilities of the Muslim religion, to which the young are drawn.”  And they want to rely on organizations like the oblast kurultay because they are finally coming to understand that “no one will solve these problems” except themselves. Kalmantayev appealed to the kurultay to overcome its divisions, to work closely with Ufa, and to ensure that “the Orenburg Bashkirs will occupy a worthy place” in the future.

For Moscow, the ‘Tyumen Matryoshka’ No Longer Exists

By Paul Goble

Vladimir Putin’s plan to eliminate all “matryoshka” autonomies has stalled at the political level. Nevertheless, Moscow is using a reorganization of its oil and gas agency to downgrade the status of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District (AD) and the Yamalo-Nenets AD, which are surrounded by the larger Tyumen Oblast. Indeed, according to Larisa Rychkova, a URA.ru analyst, “for Moscow, the ‘Tyumen matryoshka’ no longer exists.” Yet, what is “unprecedented” about all this, she argues, is that this latest move also represents “a terrible threat” to Tyumen because it means that Russia’s real “oil capital” will be Yekaterinburg rather than in any of the aforementioned three (ura.ru/content/tumen/26-11-2013/articles/1036260799.html).

Last week, Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology announced that by April 2014 it will divide the country into 11 districts that Rosnedr, the federal agency that oversees oil and gas extraction, will use in place of its offices in federal subjects. While this may appear to outsiders as a simple act of bureaucratic housekeeping, the three governors of the Tyumen “matryoshka” immediately recognized its political consequences and are opposing it behind the scenes. 

The three saw this move by Moscow as a threat to their prerogatives and power because it would concentrate control over the most important part of their economies even though they are far more important producers than Yekaterinburg, where the new office would be located. Indeed, last year, the three produced 50 percent of Russia’s oil and 90 percent of Russia’s gas, giving them the kind of economic clout that for five years has blocked Putin’s plan to combine them into a single federal subject.

But now, the Kremlin, by depriving the three federal subjects of their longstanding role in the management of this sector, will force all three governors to go to Yekaterinburg. The latter will handle all the lucrative auctions in this sector.  And the three “matryoshka” units will be so weakened that Moscow may finally be able to combine them—but in such a weakened state that even the Tyumen leadership will remain opposed to such a step.

According to URA.ru’s Rychkova, this “reform” was dreamed up in Moscow in order to ensure that “the ‘Tyumen matryoshka’ [...] will lose its status as the chief oil and gas province of Russia.” Such a step will allow Moscow to further centralize power and weaken the federal subjects involved “by using the logic of an imperial bureaucracy” and appointing someone to oversee Moscow’s interests “who does not have any connection” with the sector over which he is nominally in charge.

The immediate result is that the struggle against regional consolidation is now taking place behind the scenes in the offices of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology. And the best measure of how it is going, Ruchkova says, will be the number of oil and gas geologists who have been working for the federal subject governments but who may now choose to offer their services to private companies.

Mongolia TV Broadcasts to Buryatia and Tuva

By Paul Goble

Ulaanbaatar has launched television programming directed at the Buryats, with whom the Mongols are closely related linguistically and religiously, and at the Tuvins, with whom they share a common Buddhist heritage. This represents another way in which Mongolia, rather than European Russia, is becoming a center of attraction for the non-Russian peoples in what has sometimes been called “the Baikal cork,” the small strip of land south of Lake Baikal through which passes almost all of Russia’s communications and transportation links with the Russian Far East (mungen-tobsho.com/k-mezhdunarodnomu-dnyu-buryatskogo-yazyka-v-mongolii/; asiarussia.ru/news/social-1021/).

The Mongolian government announced this new channel, MN2, at the sixth annual meeting of Mongolians with Tuvans from the Republic of Tuva and Buryats from the Republic of Buryatia, Irkutsk oblast’s Ust-Orda District (which was a self-standing federal subject of the Russian Federation prior to Vladimir Putin’s regional amalgamation campaign), and Inner Mongolia of the Chinese People’s Republic. Both the meeting and the new channel are being supported with assistance from UNESCO.

But television was far from the only topic at last week’s meeting in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolian officials also discussed how to improve Buryat-language media in Buryat regions of the Russian Federation and how to promote a Buryat-language Internet community, something that many Buryats have felt they currently lack.  As such, this Mongolian-UNESCO effort will help promote the survival and even growth of Buryat and Tuvinian identity at a time when Moscow is cutting back on support for non-Russian languages.

Moreover, this Mongolian program gives both the Buryats and the Tuvins new international contacts, something that will help them defend their nations against russianization and russification, giving them a new focus beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. As this session demonstrated, they welcome this new opportunity. The spread of such opportunities for other nations within the borders of the Russian Federation will undoubtedly worry Moscow, however successful it has been in limiting Western broadcasting to the country as a whole.

Cossacks’ Contradictory Demands Suggest Kremlin Meddling

By Valery Dzutsev

On November 18, an association of southern Russia’s Cossacks issued a strongly worded address to the Russian leadership. The Cossacks demanded that Moscow provide preferential treatment for ethnic Russians in comparison to other Russian citizens, in particular, the North Caucasians. The Cossacks warned that “the loyalty of the [North] Caucasian corrupt elites [will] disappear, when the money they receive from the 80 percent of the Russian population of the country [ethnic Russians] runs out.” Instead, the Cossacks proposed that Moscow support them as the protectors of Russia’s unity, especially in the North Caucasus region. The Cossacks also attacked Moscow’s envoy to the North Caucasus, Alexander Khloponin: “The empty promises to Russians and Cossacks of the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President in the North Caucasian Federal District made everybody wonder. Perhaps, the abandonment of the region by Russians, Cossacks and other Slavs is the strategic goal of his [Khloponin’s] activities?” the Cossack address questioned (http://www.ng.ru/regions/2013-11-18/1_kazaki.html).

Russian nationalists in Stavropol region have been voicing their concerns about the changing ethnic makeup of the region for some time. Large swaths of eastern Stavropol region are especially vulnerable to the influx of North Caucasians, especially Dagestanis, in the opinion of the Russian activists. One Russian activist, Sergei Popov, told the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta that, according to official data, about 25,000 “indigenous people” (i.e. ethnic Russians) left the eastern areas of Stavropol region since 1995. At the same time the population of ethnic Dagestanis reportedly increased to 50,000 or even 100,000 people (http://www.ng.ru/regions/2013-09-06/6_stavropolie.html). Ethnic Russians still comprise over 80 percent of the total population of Stavropol region, so ethnic Russians’ concerns are hardly well-founded but, over the long term, the population dynamics indeed do not favor ethnic Russians (Russian census 2010).

The Cossacks’ address reflects the contradictory wishes being expressed by the Russian community of Stavropol. On the one hand, ethnic Russians want to keep at bay the North Caucasian population, but on the other, they call on the central government to disband the titular ethnic republics. A disbandment of the republics and an increased effort to assimilate the North Caucasians would result in an even greater influx of people from the North Caucasus to the Stavropol region. So the ethnic Russians of Stavropol would have to deal with ever larger numbers of non-Russian migrants. Therefore, the Stavropol ethnic Russians’ genuine discontent notwithstanding, arguably it appears that their protests are being used by Moscow to advance the federal government’s goals to diminish and eventually eliminate the republics of the North Caucasus. 

Russia’s Cossacks Increasingly Diverse, Numerous and Important

By Paul Goble

With each passing month, the number and diversity of Russia’s Cossack community become greater, with both aspects increasing faster than Moscow can keep track. Last week, the regional development ministry published its latest count of members of the 11 Cossack voiskas (“armies”), but even before the ink was dry on that document, both the number and diversity of this group, now recognized as a nation by some Russian regions, increased with the return of 2,000 Semireche Cossacks from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan (nazaccent.ru/content/9780-ministr-regionalnogo-razvitiya-vstretitsya-s-atamanami.html).

The Semireche Cossacks, whose “voisko” was established only in 1867 to provide a Russian defense line in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan, are among the least well-known of the Cossack communities.  But they now take their place beside and add to the numbers Moscow announced: 126,000 members of the Grand Voisko of the Don, 75,000 of the Central Cossack Voiska, 14,000 of the Volga Voisko, 66,000 of the Yenisey Voisko, 6,000 of the Trans-Baikal Voisko, 4,500 of the Irkutsk voisko, 146,000 of the Kuban Voisko,  25,000 for the Orenburg Voisko, 6,000 for the Siberian Voisko, 30,000 for the Terek Voisko, and 6,000 for the Ussuri Voisko, for a total of 506,000 Cossacks now registered with the Russian state (minregion.ru/press_office/news/3747.html).

Most Cossacks on this list are members of the Triune Cossacks of the Don—Kuban and Terek—about whom most Russians have some knowledge albeit distorted from Michail Sholokhov’s novels and about whom most people outside Russia have a very distorted image thanks to Hollywood.  The knowledge of both is inadequate in at least three respects.  First, although almost all Cossacks stood at the defense of the borderlands of the Russian Empire in the past and seek to reprise that role now, they were hardly all the same: The Trans-Baikal Cossacks, to give the clearest example, were mostly Buddhists, a fact that does not fit easily into either Russian or Western imagery.

Second, the numbers the Russian government is offering are far too low.  Many Cossacks refuse to register with the authorities, and Cossack groups have offered estimates of the total number of Cossacks as two million or more. And third, there is a problem in defining who is a Cossack and who is not. Many Cossacks now view themselves as a nation rather than a social stratum, as the Russian and Soviet governments defined them, and thus stress descent from earlier Cossack generations.  But many who identify as Cossacks now are self-declared. They have no such roots but simply identify with what they see as Cossack values. Some Cossack leaders accept these “neo-Cossacks” as welcome members to their ranks, but others do not.

There are currently three all-Russian laws and 21 regional laws governing the Cossacks. Yet, judging by the Russian legislation, as well as the increasing use of Cossacks not only as symbols of Russian state power but as the core of popular militias intended to maintain order in Russia’s regions and cities, the Cossacks are going to play a growing role in Russian life—even if ever more of them celebrate their diversity and distinctiveness from the Russian nation.

Russians, Tatars and Chuvash Share Considerable ‘Psychological Similarity’

By Paul Goble

A survey conducted by scholars at the Naberezhny Chelny Institute for Social-Pedagogical Technologies and Resources found that Russians, Tatars, and Chuvash living in Tatarstan’s second largest city share many positive and negative stereotypes about their own nation and the other two, something the researchers say may be the basis for developing inter-ethnic tolerance there.

Members of the three largest nationalities of Naberezhny Chelny were asked to say what they thought were the positive and negative features of their own group and each of the other two. The answers they offered provide an unusual window into the way in which members of these groups, who have been living together for centuries, view each other (chelny-izvest.ru/city/23903.html).

Concerning the Tatars, the titular nationality of the republic and the largest group in that city, both ethnic Russians and Chuvash noted the Tatars’ love of work and their hospitality, but they also both said that Tatars are clannish and overly clever. According to the lead author of the study, Rezida Khusnutdinova, the Tatars agreed with both these positive and negative characterizations of themselves.

In reporting her findings, Khusnutdinova suggested that the Tatars’ love of work reflected their adoption of Islam. Their clannishness stemmed from the fact that most of them had lived in rural areas until relatively recently, and their reputation for cleverness originated from their past as merchants in Volga Bulgaria.

Concerning the ethnic Russians, the Tatars and Chuvash said their positive qualities included kindness, generosity and openness; and their negative ones included laziness and a proclivity to drink too much. The Russians themselves used exactly the same terms to describe themselves positively and negatively. According to Khusnutdinova, the positive features of the Russians are “the reverse side of the negative and therefore inseparable from the latter.”

And concerning the Chuvash, who are Christian Turks historically, the Tatars and Russians noted the honesty and directness of members of that community but said the Chuvash tended to be sloppy and dirty.  Perhaps significantly, the Chuvash used the same terms, positive and negative, to describe themselves. Khusnutdinova notes that Gennady Matveyev, an expert on the Chuvash, provides an explanation for this pattern. He says that “for the overwhelming majority of the Chuvash, they ‘stereotypically’ seek to live by their own labor... They remain attached to the land.  They accepted Orthodoxy not so long ago, in the 16^th century, and therefore they still display aspect of agrarian pagan cults.” And as a result, both they and others view them as sloppy or dirty.

Khusnutdinova says the most important finding of her investigation was not this or that positive or negative description of other groups but the fact that members of each of the groups characterized themselves in the same terms that others used to describe them.  That suggests, she adds, that “there is a high level of mutual understanding” among them and that there is a great deal of “psychological similarity.”  That in turn means, she suggests, that “there are fewer possibilities for the growth of ethnic intolerance.”