Staunton, June 14 – The lack of local support in Crimea for the Russian occupation and the resistance of the Crimean Tatars to that occupation has prompted an imam from St. Petersburg to go to Crimea where he serves as Moscow’s point man against the Milli Mejlis which has just announced the Crimean Tatars will […]
Staunton, June 5 – Vladimir Putin has more support in the predominantly Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Chechnya than he does in Orthodox Christian Moscow, a reflection of the reality that “in terms of its content, Putin’s policies are Asiatic” rather than Christian, according to Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of Kazan’s Zvezda Povolzhya. The Russian […]
Staunton, April 22 – In what is becoming a defining feature of the Putin regime, the Russian authorities are saying things that many people want to hear at exactly the same moment that they are doing things that directly contradict what they say. Today, the victims of that are the Crimean Tatars, a Moscow commentator […]
Staunton, April 20 – Residents of the Republic of Tatarstan are now paying Moscow every year 4557 times more than did medieval Muscovy when it was under the so-called Tatar Yoke that Russians continue to describe as an unbearable burden and one they blame for many of the shortcomings of their political culture. That difference […]
Staunton, April 18 – Academician Valery Tishkov, director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, says that his institute’s monitoring of ethnic tensions in the Russian Federation does not support claims by the Club of the Regions and the Center for Research on National Conflicts that Tatarstan is “one of the [country’s] most unstable” […]
Staunton, April 13 – Vladimir Putin has attacked Muslims in the Russian Federation to divert attention from his goal: “the final solution of the nationality question” in that country “on the basis of [Stalin’s] well-known dictum that where ‘there is no person (in this case, a group of people or nation), there is no problem,” […]
Staunton, April 9 – Pro-Moscow groups in Bishkek are actively promoting the idea that “Kyrgyzstan is tired of being independent,” that the West is the source of all its problems, and that it is time “to sign everything that is required” in order to have once again a comfortable life, according to Edil Baysalov, an […]
Staunton, April 8 – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promise to secure the full rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars, a promise made to obscure Russian aggression and to try to attract the support of some in that nation for his occupation of their homeland, is echoing not only among the larger and more organized of the […]
Staunton, April 6 – “Russianness” is a “synthetic category,” one in which the father of a family can be Mordvin, the mother a German, and the children ethnic Russians, a reflection of the floating quality of identity in that country, government policies, and personal choices, according to a leading Moscow ethnographer. In an interview with […]
Staunton, April 5 – Russian nationalists in Crimea and in Russia are expressing their outrage at and opposition to what they see as Vladimir Putin’s “Tatarization” of Crimea, a policy that they argue does not reflect the ethnic balance on the peninsula and that calls into question Moscow’s portrayal of itself as a defender of […]
