Non-Russians in the Russian Federation Fighting a Two-Front Language War

By Paul Goble

The non-Russian nations within the Russian Federation are increasingly fighting a two-front war in their struggle to preserve their languages and national identities. On the one hand, they are seeking to ensure that members of their own nationalities continue to speak their native languages despite all the pressures from the Russian government and the increasingly pervasive Russian-language media environment. And on the other, they are pushing for the governments of their republics to require that all residents study the language of the titular nationality and not be able to opt out if they are ethnic Russians or non-Russians who view Russian as a path to preferment.

These struggles are nothing new, but they have intensified in recent months, with the non-Russians in some of the republics winning victories and those in others suffering clear if not yet irreversible defeats. Two republics on the front lines of these struggles are now Buryatia, a Buddhist republic adjoining Mongolia with whose people its nation is closely related, and Udmurtia, a Finno-Ugric republic in the Middle Volga that has developed ties not only with other Finno-Ugric republics in the Russian Federation but also with Estonia and Finland.

In Buryatia, a group of cultural figures have launched on YouTube an appeal to their co-ethnics to speak Buryat as much as possible (youtube.com/watch?v=ZIPQoRTozU4#t=53). They have also launched an online petition to Vyacheslav Nagovitsyn, the president of the Buryat Republic, to do far more to promote the use of the Buryat language there (change.org/ru/D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC).

On YouTube, the Buryat writers and artists say that “our language is who we are” and that any failure to use it or to view it as simply a legacy of the past condemns the Buryats to extinction. Significantly, at least from Moscow’s point of view, those making the appeal talk about the Buryats not only in the Buryat Republic but in the two Buryat autonomies that Putin has amalgamated into larger Russian-majority federal subjects.

And in the appeal, which is offered in both Russian and “Mongol,” given the shared language of the Buryats and the Mongols—the Buryats were called Buryat Mongols until the late 1930s, when Stalin changed their name to stress their distinctiveness and isolate them from Mongol influences—provides a more detailed enumeration of Buryat complaints and demands. It adds that if Buryats are deprived of their language, that will also undermine the Buddhist traditions of the people because Buryat is the language of prayer.

It notes that, at present, street signs in Buryatia are typically only in Russian, as are government documents and declarations. “This year,” the authors of the appeal say, Buryats even “were prohibited from writing commentaries and articles in their native language on the Internet,” even though “many national republics in Russia” permit that.

The time to act is now, the appeal continues, because Moscow media often refer to the Buryats as “the most russified nation in Russia.” Given that Buryat is a government language in the republic it says, that situation must be changed, and a necessary first step is to make the study of Buryat compulsory and the use of Buryat equal to that of Russian in all public spheres.

That is what the Buryat residents of the republic want, the appeal says, noting that at present some 15 to 20 young people compete for each space in the few Buryat-language schools and that demand for Buryat-language publications far outstrips demand. At least ten additional Buryat-language schools need to be opened, local television must increase Buryat-language programs, and the republic government should follow Tatarstan’s lead and give bonus pay to officials who know Buryat. Tatarstan currently pays officials who know Tatar 16 percent extra. In Buryatia, the appeal suggests, the figure could be 10 percent.

But perhaps the most intriguing demand the appeal makes is to ask for the introduction of lessons in schools in the Old Mongolian script, something that would open the common Mongolian past to Buryats today, and for the establishment of free courses in Buryat for all in the republic who want to learn it.

These are ambitious demands, and the Buryats are unlikely to have all of them satisfied. One indication of that is in Udmurtia where local nationalists have been pressing for making Udmurt a required subject for all students in the republic (nazaccent.ru/content/10147-udmurtskij-yazyk-mozhet-stat-obyazatelnym-dlya.html). Russian parents have actively opposed that idea, arguing that none of their children need to know Udmurt and that any time spent on Udmurt is wasted given that students must pass university entrance examinations in Russian.

According to reports this past week, the Russian parents have won, and the Udmurts have lost. In February, Udmurt officials will promulgate a law that says no one has to study Udmurt, an action that is likely to spark new protests there and elsewhere (nazaccent.ru/content/10245-udmurtskij-yazyk-ne-budet-obyazatelnym-dlya.html).

Is Moscow Equating Kabardino-Balkaria and Abkhazia?

By Paul Goble

Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia as an independent state is creating problems for Moscow in the North Caucasus. On the one hand, Abkhazia has not received the international recognition that the Russian government said it hoped for and thus remains in the minds of many a Russian project. And on the other, Moscow often treats Abkhazia like one of its own North Caucasian republics, an approach that may be tactically sound but that has the effect of sparking expectations of greater independence among the latter, something Moscow does not want.

Almost a year ago, Izvestiya reported that Moscow was planning to create a defensive perimeter for the Sochi Games along the borders of Abkhazia and Kabardino-Balkaria, in effect, as a close observer in the region put it last week, placing the two behind the same border and thus treating them the same—at least for this purpose—and effectively equating their status (izvestia.ru/news/543324/; timur-kuashev.livejournal.com/171856.html).

Given how careful Russian officials are about discussions of dividing lines—in Soviet times, the annual publication of guides to the administrative-territorial division of the country was one of the most politically sensitive of all government public documents—many will read Moscow’s decision to group Kabardino-Balkaria and Abkhazia together as significant. At the very least, this decision may indicate that some in Moscow are thinking about status changes in the future.

At the same time, however, mistakes or at least apparent mistakes in this realm do happen. Two of them are particularly noteworthy in this regard. In 2005, a Russian military mapping agency published an atlas showing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) “rose of the four winds” as part of the official shield of Kaliningrad, the non-contiguous exclave of the Russian Federation between Poland and Lithuania. Book dealers said at the time that the edition of 10,000 had immediately sold out and that copies had become “bibliographic rarities” (regnum.ru/news/471075.html).

A second and more intriguing “mistake” came in March 1990. At that time, Soviet generals told Philip Peterson, then a distinguished Pentagon researcher, that their defense planning maps for the year 2000 did not include the three Baltic countries as part of the USSR. They were certainly prescient: within two years, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had recovered their independence and in 12 years, the three had joined NATO.

But the way in which that Soviet judgment surfaced raised questions as to whether the generals’ comments were really a mistake. On March 12, 1990, The Washington Times reported on its front page the dramatic celebrations in Vilnius after elections there had allowed a newly formed parliament to declare the recovery of Lithuanian independence. The very same day, that paper carried on an inside page an article about the judgments of the Soviet generals as reported by Philip Peterson.

That conjunction had real consequences: it led some in Washington to fear that overt Western support for Lithuania at that time might be seen in Moscow as a tilt against the Soviet Union. One needs to ask: Is Moscow again sending a signal—and if so, to whom?

Traditional Islam Does Not Mean What Moscow Thinks It Does

By Paul Goble

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian government, the Russian Orthodox Church, and most leaders of Russia’s Muslim community have said that “traditional Islam” must be the dominant form of the Islamic faith in the Russian Federation. Although few define it, an examination of their statements makes clear that what the advocates of this kind of Islam have in mind mostly resembles what existed in Soviet times: an Islam largely confined to the mosque and to rituals and one that plays only the smallest role in public life.

But now Ildar Bayazitov, a mullah in Tatarstan, has taken up the challenge of using that term but giving it a very different meaning than the one many in Moscow would like. Writing in “Tatar Zamany” last week, Bayazitov notes that “traditional Islam” is today “one of the most discussed terms” among Russia’s Muslims, many of whom consider it to be some kind of “innovation”—one of the most damning words in the Islamic vocabulary (tatartime.com/?p=16255).

According to the Tatar mullah, “traditional Islam is Prophetic Islam,” and the term itself had to be introduced in Russia relatively recently because there have appeared so many “sects and pseudo-Islamic doctrines” which have sought to use Sunni Islam for their own purposes. It does not mean “ethnic Islam”; indeed, that combination of words should not be used. Moreover, he says, “traditional Islam is scientific and enlightened Islam,” always contemporary and always involved with the most advanced educational and scientific work. It is thus “a stimulus for development.” And “traditional Islam is social Islam,” invariably involved in the public sphere. “As never before,” Bayazitov writes, “social work has great importance,” including charity work, “the resolution of social problems, and the social integration of Muslims in the societies where they live.”

“It is obvious,” he continues, “that Muslims also must make a significant contribution to the resolution of social problems that have arisen in the country. For that reason too, social service is the obligation of each Muslim, from the ordinary member of a congregation to the imams and members of the ulema.”

Bayazitov concludes that “as we understand the term, ‘traditional Islam’ is the quintessence of the entire meaning of Islam, its letter and its spirit. It defines the tradition of following the Koran and the sunna as the foundation of the life of Muslims, the recognition of local conditions and culture, which do not contradict Islam, the resolution of social problems and the active participation in contemporary achievements such as the development of science, industry, economics and art.”

What “traditional Islam”—as Bayazitov defines it—clearly does not include is a requirement to reduce the faith to a matter of ritual within the walls of the mosque. That poses a serious challenge both to the leadership of the Muslim Spiritual Directorates that the Russian government hopes will control the country’s Muslims as well as to Moscow itself. Indeed, Bayazitov’s article may have the effect of forcing the central authorities to define their terms, making clear to all that what they understand by Islam does not necessarily reflect the understanding of the Muslim faithful.

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.