Staunton, August 1 – In order to weaken the Crimean Tatars by muddying the water about them, the Russian occupation authorities are backing a new group that would combine Azov Greeks, Don Armenians and Crimean Tatars into a single group representing what its organizers call the “older resident” communities on the peninsula. These disparate groups, […]
Staunton, July 24 – The central Russian narrative on the emergence of the three modern nations of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, a narrative on which Vladimir Putin relies, is that there was a single Russian nation a millennium ago and that Ukrainians and Belarusians were byproducts of Russian ethnogenesis, the result of outside interference. That […]
Staunton, July 21 – Russian officials have often argued that the amount of government support for the titular nationalities of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation should reflect their share of the population rather than the fact that these republics are the national homes of those nations. But in fact, a Muslim commentator says, […]
Staunton, July 7 – In Soviet times, Moscow’s nationality policy was based on the idea that the non-Russian nations should be “national in form but Soviet in content,” a goal intended to Sovietize them by playing up common social ideas and playing down the varieties of their cultures and one that many non-Russians saw as […]
Staunton, July 3 – “Ukraine is not simply a country,” New Region news agency chief Aleksandr Shchetilin says, “it is precisely Rus, where all Slavic and all human values have not been forgotten” and thus a magnet for all Slavs who have been horrified by the direction that Russia has taken both as a society […]
Staunton, June 6 – Vladimir Putin has adopted the rhetoric of national self-determination and federalism in Ukraine, but a leading Russian regionalist site says that this is “hypocrisy and a farce” which should deceive no one and especially not regionalists and federalists in Russia because it is only “a cover for an aggressive imperial policy.” […]
Staunton, 1 June – If the leaders of Kazakhstan or Belarus adopt policies like those Ukraine did, there is no guarantee that those two countries might suffer the fate that the eastern regions of Ukraine are now facing, according to Valery Tishkov, director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and a former Russian […]
Staunton, May 23 – Vladimir Zorin, a former Russian nationalities minister, says that the Crimean Tatars continue to think about themselves in terms drawn from the Soviet past but have infused these terms with anti-Soviet attitudes and that this contradiction explains many of their current problems. In an interview given to Yuliya Taratura of TV […]
Staunton, May 21 – It is now common ground that Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and subversion of southeastern Ukraine have done more to boost and solidify the national identity of Ukrainians and their commitment to taking the steps necessary to be part of the West than have the actions of anyone else. But it […]
Staunton, May 21 – As Harvard historian Richard Pipes documented a half century ago, Stalin’s first great act of ethno-political engineering was the division of the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Middle Volga as part of a broader effort to weaken Kazan’s influence and that of the Muslim national communists led by Sultan-Galiyev. Now, that […]
