Staunton, September 25 Valery Tishkov, former head of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology, says that Moscow should not grant “compatriot” status to ethnic Circassians now in war-torn Syria, thus allowing them to return to their ancestral homeland more easily, because such a step would open the way for radical Islamists to enter Russia. Officials and […]
Staunton, July 8 – One of the most cynical methods the Soviet government employed to divide and rule non-Russian nations was the establishment of republics with two titular nationalities because such arrangements guaranteed that the two were more likely to view the other as a problem and threat than to see Moscow as responsible. At […]
Staunton, June 6 – The economic crisis is leading to the de-industrialization of parts of the North Caucasus and that in turn is contributing to the flight of ethnic Russians from the region, a departure that is fundamentally changing the ethnic balance in many republics in that region. That trend can be clearly seen in […]
Staunton, May 26 – As it has done so often, the Russian government is increasing repression outside the capital and thus outside the field of view of Western journalists and diplomats at a rapid pace, something it may be able to do even more effectively if Moscow media outlets follow the advice of some not […]
Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]
Staunton, April 14 – While Russians have been focusing on Ukraine, the situation in the North Caucasus has deteriorated in two important ways, according to Maya Astvatsaturova. On the one hand, disputes of any kind are increasingly invested with ethnic meaning. And on the other, young people are better armed and ready to use guns […]
Staunton, October 3 – Deputies of the Kabardino-Balkarian parliament have appealed to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to include the Ubykhs, a subgroup of the Circassian nation, on the official list of numerically small indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation and thus take the first step to the revival of a language which has been […]
Staunton, September 11 – “’Rossiyane’ is a much broader category than ethnic Russians, and our compatriots,” Sergey Arutyunov says, are not only Russians in Canada or Argentina but Tuvins in Xinjiang, Buryats in Shemekhen and Circassians in Syria or the United Arab Emirates — at least as long as they want to consider themselves to […]
Staunton, July 25 – Angered by the success Circassians had at the time of the Sochi Olympics in focusing international attention on the Russian genocide of their ancestors in 1864 and by the insistence of Circassians that their co-ethnics in war-torn Syria should be allowed to return to the North Caucasus, Moscow has adopted a […]
Staunton, June 24 – At least since the beginning of the Soviet period, Moscow’s security services have sought to penetrate, divide and disorder ethnic organizations by covert means, an approach that has given the Russian government deniability because these actions typically are exposed only by inference from what is taking place or by opponents or […]
