In a commentary published in “Izvestiya” December 13, Dmitriy Furman suggests that Russians concerned about the future should consider what has happened in the past before they advance such demands or even allow the slogan “Russia for the Russians” to become “respectable.”
That is all the more so because the ongoing efforts to transform the Russian Federation into “a unitary state with a quasi-monarchical presidential power” is leading ever more Russians to view “their” state as a traditional “Russian” one in which minority groups must accept a lesser status.
Such views are not new, Furman says, but they are extremely dangerous.
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, he points out, Russian nationalism pressed the tsarist government to “liquidate” the special rights of Finland and the Baltic provinces.
As a result of those long-ago actions, Furman says, the central government helped create “powerful separatist movements” among the Estonians and Latvians and drive the Finns into revolt. And consequently, the Russian nationalists unwittingly pushed the empire they wanted to save to its end in 1917.
Much the same thing happened at the end of the Soviet period, he continues. With the collapse of the “supranational” communist ideology, many came to view that country as a “Russian state.” But such views helped to power anti-Russian nationalism in the non-Russian republics. And in 1991, the USSR fell apart as a result.
Today, Furman argues, Russians enjoy the advantage of forming a far larger percentage of the population than did their ancestors. But there are too many analogies with the past to allow anyone to think that the non-Russians of today can be ignored or that contemporary Russian nationalism does not threaten the country’s survival.
The national minorities in the Russian Federation now are not only large but growing. And the “unitarization” President Vladimir Putin has promoted has not so much resolved nationality problems as driven them deeper inside people, thus creating a situation that “at the very first crisis” could lead to a 1917 or a 1991.
“If Russia is for the Russians, then Chechnya is for the Chechens and Tatarstan is for the Tatars,” Furman says. And ‘if Russia requires the Tatars to write in the Cyrillic alphabet, then this means that the transition to the Latin script will become ‘the great dream of the Tatar people.’”
Moreover, he says, “if there is a cross in the symbolism of the Russian state [as many assume or are now demanding], then for the Muslim peoples [of the Russian Federation], the crescent must be one” as well. Such demands are fully consistent with the spirit of the times as seen in the EU and the United States.
But in the Russian Federation of today, Furman laments, there are “very few chances” that the central government and Russian people will listen to them. Indeed, if these demands are heard at all, it is far more likely that they will be viewed as “only the latest attempt of domestic and foreign enemies to dismember Russia.”