{"id":14136,"date":"2009-08-10T19:45:54","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T17:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2023-04-05T10:33:33","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T07:33:33","slug":"group-says-power-vertical-threatens-republics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/08\/10\/group-says-power-vertical-threatens-republics\/","title":{"rendered":"Group Says Power Vertical Threatens Republics"},"content":{"rendered":"

06 August 2009<\/span><\/p>\n

By Paul Goble \/ Special to The Moscow Times<\/span><\/p>\n

A draft of Russia\u2019s future nationality policy prepared by the Moscow Institute of Ethnology calls for \u201cthe systematic destruction of the federal and democratic foundations\u201d of the Russian Federation and contains elements from Soviet practice that could lead to \u201cthe disintegration of the country,\u201d Middle Volga activists say.<\/p>\n

The World Kurultay of Bashkirs and the World Congress of Tatars released a joint appeal this week attacking the Moscow proposal in the name of \u201cpreserving the constitutional bases of the ethno-cultural diversity of the peoples of the Russian Federation.\u201d Mordvin activists yesterday announced that they support the provisions of this declaration as well.<\/p>\n

And while all three groups have been denounced as radical in the past, the decision of the Turkic Tatars and Bashkirs to issue this statement and the readiness of the Finno-Ugric Mordvins to join them suggest that the issues that the appeal raises reflect the views of many people in that region and perhaps those of others as well.<\/p>\n

The Tatar-Bashkir declaration begins by asserting that \u201cthe situation that now exists in the country threatens the existence of the multi-national Russian Federation\u201d because \u201cauthoritarian tendencies are increasing \u2026 and have begun to penetrate all spheres of sociopolitical and socioeconomic life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cConstruction of the so-called \u2018power vertical\u2019 has resulted in the systematic destruction of federal and democratic foundations of the new Russian statehood that arose after the destruction of the totalitarian regime of the CPSU,\u201d the appeal continues. The document then focuses on what its authors see as the primary threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs is well-known, at one time in the USSR, the authorities persistently attempted to create \u2018a single Soviet people\u2019 without ethno-national characteristics,” they write. “[Such efforts] generated strong tension in society, especially in the sphere of inter-ethnic relations and, in the final analysis, led to the collapse of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the document continues, not having learned from the past, \u201ccertain political forces of Russia today are repeating the very same mistakes by attempting to construct a so-called \u2018all-civic Russian nation,\u2019\u201d an effort likely to entail equally \u201cdestructive\u201d consequences for the country in the future.<\/p>\n

The latest manifestation of such efforts, the appeal says, is the draft conception of a federal law titled “On the Foundations of Government Nationality Policy in the Russian Federation\u201d and the explanatory supplements that were prepared by the Institute of Ethnology and that have been released with the draft concept paper.<\/p>\n

The Tatar-Bashkir declaration with which the Mordvin group has associated itself points to five problems with the draft legislation. First, the declaration says, the concept \u201ccompletely ignores the existence of national republics and their priority rights in the conduct of nationality policy in their own republics.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, the Middle Volga appeal continues, the draft, in calling for \u201c\u2019new approaches to the development of legislation in the sphere of government nationality policy,\u2019 is based on the leveling of all subjects of the Russian Federation, which in practice would mean the gradual liquidation of republics\u201d within the country.<\/p>\n

Second, the appeal notes, in the draft, \u201cthe role of the national republics in the resolution of nationality problems is subordinated to federal, regional and local national-cultural autonomies,\u201d another violation of the historic rights of the people involved and a threat to their future existence.<\/p>\n

Third, it continues, the draft conception ignores \u201cthe ethnic rights of the peoples of the Russian Federation\u201d by declaring in what the Tatar and Bashkir appeal says are \u201cabstract\u201d and \u201cmeaningless\u201d terms that the proposed legislation will promote \u201cthe unity of ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fourth, the appeal says, the proposed legislation, while invoking the Declaration of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination, in fact promotes precisely the \u201cunification\u201d and \u201ccentralization\u201d of public sphere \u201cin the sphere of nationality policy\u201d that the Declaration is intended to counter.<\/p>\n

And fifth, the appeal argues, the draft lays heavy stress \u201con the problems of national and ethnic minorities but at the same time minimizes issues concerning the ethnic development of republic-forming peoples,\u201d yet another indication of the way in which the legislation would work to the detriment of the republics.<\/p>\n

In its concluding section, the Tatar-Bashkir appeal says that in its current form, the draft prepared by the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology is directed at the covert revision of the Russian Constitution, \u201cthe destruction of the language, culture and history of the indigenous peoples\u201d of the country, and their \u201cassimilation\u201d into \u201ca Russian civic nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the comments left on the Mariuver site after it posted the Tatar-Bashkir declaration were two that are especially intriguing. According to one, the draft legislation shows that \u201cpeople in the Kremlin are living absolutely in another dimension\u201d and are trying to unite \u201cwhole peoples\u201d with \u201cthe poor Russians whom the entire world dislikes.\u201d<\/p>\n

And according to the other, \u201cthe last sentence of the population of Yugoslavia showed that very people identified as Yugoslavs. After several years, out of this country arose five new states. No one in our century is running to fulfill the inventions of those in power\u201d as the authors of the draft seem to think.<\/p>\n

Instead, the author of the post says, \u201ceven the Roma respect their own nation and hardly are likely to identify as [non-ethnic] Russians. That is all the more the case for [ethnic] Russians and Tatars. Besides, it seems that in recent times, [Moscow] has begun to respect the Tatars and Bashkirs \u2014 apparently as a result of [their] resistance to Russification.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

06 August 2009 By Paul Goble \/ Special to The Moscow Times A draft of Russia\u2019s future nationality policy prepared by the Moscow Institute of Ethnology calls for \u201cthe systematic destruction of the federal and democratic foundations\u201d of the Russian Federation and contains elements from Soviet practice that could lead to \u201cthe disintegration of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":179175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[2026,604,820,460],"class_list":["post-14136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia","tag-bashkirs","tag-tataristan","tag-tatars","tag-tatarstan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}