Window on Eurasia: Are Russia’s Smallest Nationalities Now to Be Left to the Tender Mercies of Regional Officials?

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, September 2 – Members of the smallest nationalities of the Russian Federation have always looked to Moscow for what defense they can largely because the heads of the Russian regions within which they live typically have been far less sympathetic and supportive of their situation, deferring to the local Russian majority and business interests.

 

            Moscow has sometimes helped and sometimes not, but its record as far as most of these micro-nationalities is concerned has been better than that of the regional governments. Now, however, there appears to be a risk that the central government may be preparing to leave these groups to the mercies of the regional officials, something that could threaten their survival.

 

            In a commentary on Nazaccent.ru last week, Valery Tishkov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and a former Russian nationalities minister, says that in his view the Russian government of occupied Crimea not Moscow should decide the fate of the Karaims who number 670 and the Krymchaks who number 280 (nazaccent.ru/column/61/).

 

            The influential ethnographer writes that he “considers that there is not sufficient basis” for including these two nations in “the list of indigenous numerically small peoples of the Russian Federation” because they are not conducting a distinctive and “traditional” way of life but instead have become part of the surrounding urban milieu.

 

            In addition, he says, “in the current situation, when in Crimea are taking place serious political changes, dividing the population into indigenous and non-indigenous is not very correct because the Crimean Tatars are an indigenous people of Crimea as are the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Bulgars, and the Greeks.

 

            “Our position,” Tishkov says, is that “with regard to Crimea, it is necessary to do what has been done with regard to Daghestan and allow the local authorities themselves to decide this issue.”

 

            The Moscow scholar says that “we do not deny the existence of these peoples – the Karaims and the Krymchaks, their quite tragic fate in the years of the war when the German fascists simply wiped them out together with the gypsies. These peoples undoubtedly are indigenous and numerically small, but we are against including them in the list which exists in the Russian Federation.”

 

            In Russia, he continues, “many indigenous numerically small peoples live, but the law establishes definite criteria” that they must meet to get certain benefits such as quotas for fishing and hunting.  The list should not be expanded arbitrarily, although Tishkov says that this has happened in the case of the Shapsugs, a subgroup of the Circassians who lived in Sochi.

 

            Their inclusion, he suggests, was “insufficiently justified.” However that may be, Tishkov’s reference to them indicates that he is making a broader judgment than just about the situation in Russian-occupied Crime and that judgment is one that almost certainly will have negative consequences for the smallest nations who seek defense against local majorities.