Comment: One funny - and very notable - thing about russophobia in the West is that even when analysts criticize Russia they can't help but admire it. The following 'smart' article for 'smart Westerners' is a case in point...
Kazan City, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, lies 800km east of Moscow. Over 1,000 years old, the city has been completely redeveloped (beginning in 2000, funnily enough)
Russia, more than most other countries, knows the difference between nations— ethnic, cultural, geographic bodies — and sovereign countries. The Russian Federation alone contains dozens of discrete nations: ethnic Russians, of course, but also Yakuts in the east, Chechens and Ossetians in the Caucasus, ethnic Ukrainians, Russian Jews, and a widely dispersed population of Muslim Tatars. Each nation speaks its own language, practices its own religion, and follows its unique traditions. They are citizens of, and outsiders in, a Federation dominated by ethnic Russians.
This diversity poses a major obstacle to Russian President Vladimir Putin's political agenda. Since the early 2000s, Putin's government has pushed for a strong, conservative patriotism across the Federation. Russia, as Putin sees it, is on the rise, well on its way to resuming its old status as superpower. That new power needs shoring-up at home. Slavophile clubs, nationalist militias in Russia's European enclaves, and an invigorated Orthodox Church are key buttresses in Moscow's snarling ascent.
Comment: "Snarling ascent", very clever! But is it applicable? Where are Russia's killing fields? Where are its torture chambers? Where is its global, intrusive mass surveillance system? Where are the memos and recorded phone conversations in which it dictates policy to others?
This new, aggressive Russian patriotism has resonated in some strange places — notably among Russia's Tatar population, which constitutes 13 percent of the Federation's population, and that only twenty years ago wanted nothing to do with the new Russia.
Comment: Right there, the author undercuts his description of this patriotism as "aggressive".
Descendants of the Asian horsemen who overran Russia in the Middle Ages, the Tatars are neither Slavs nor Christians, and their interactions with the Russians have long been tense. Even after the heyday of mounted marauding, the Tatars often befriended Moscow's enemies, such as the Ottoman Empire; when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the SS recruited all-Tatar units.
Moscow, in return, has treated the Tatars harshly. Stalin notably exiled the Crimean Tatars en masse to Central Asia.
Comment: Moscow... in 1944. In November 1989, the USSR recognized the deportation as a "crime against humanity of the highest degree." If we're assessing the US' treatment of blacks today, do we conflate it with its treatment of blacks in, say, the 1960s? Well, arguably we could...
The point is that, clearly, Russia's treatment of minorities in Putin's Russia is incomparable with the USSR's treatment of minorities in Stalin's 'Russia'.
In the 1990s, Moscow shut down a popular Tatar push for independence. And today's Crimean Tatars, allowed back only in 1988, widely resent last year's Russian takeover of their homeland.
Comment: For what its worth, one survey conducted jointly by Soros' Open Democracy and the Levada Center, published in March of 2015, revealed that 50 percent of Crimean Tatars supported the Crimean independence referendum and accession to the Russian Federation.
But Putin's program declares itself to be patriotic, not nationalist. This is a critical distinction. A nationalist program would foster loyalty to the Russian nation — the ethnic Russians, at the expense of the Tatars (and the Ukrainians, and the Chechens, and the Federation's other constituent nations). A patriotic program, on the other hand, directs the people's devotion to the sovereign state of Russia. Nationalism pits nation against nation; patriotism unifies ethnic groups. At least, it purports to. The organ of Tatar patriotism under Putin is the RTNKA, a government agency whose initials stand for Regional Tatar National-Cultural Autonomy. Housed in the historic Moscow mansion of a wealthy Tatar, the RTNKA seeks to promote Tatar culture in tandem with loyalty to Russia. The organization's longtime president, Rasim Akchurin, summed up the agency's patriotic mission in 2007:
"I think that patriotism must not have any nationalist dimension. We must have a patriotism of Muscovites, patriotism of Russians [citizens of the Russian Federation] but not a Russian or a Tatar [ethnic] patriotism. I am profoundly convinced about it. If I am ready to give my life, I will give it for the Russian, the Jew, the Armenian... for all the people who live here, because I am a real patriot."To this end, RTNKA publishes hagiographic titles like Tatars: Soldiers, Workers, and Patriots (2007) and biographies of carefully selected Tatar luminaries, such as Musa Dzhalil, a Lenin Prize laureate and Hero of the Soviet Union. RTNKA also hosts folk dance recitals and concerts, offers Tatar language lessons, and promotes a moderate, apolitical Islam. In all this, RTNKA assiduously avoids politics, especially questions of nation. Such discretion allows the Tatars to celebrate their native culture, and to proclaim the Tatars' integral role in Russian history and in the fabric of Russian society.
It's an optimistic vision: the Tatar nation fulfils itself while, even by, aligning itself with the greater Russian motherland. And like most optimistic visions, it has its critics: a number of prominent Tatars balk at the RTNKA's blithe patriotism, which does not take on the marginalization of Tatar culture by a rearing Russian nationalism. "My personal opinion," said Tatar politician Refkat Galimov in 2011, "is that the [RTNKA was] created to mislead public and international opinion. Until the law... in Russia is changed and as long as the media and power institutions continue to stigmatise people of 'Caucasian nationality'... the artificially created [RTNKA] will do nothing."
Comment: It's difficult to interpret this statement without the context in which it was said. Clearly the "Caucasian nationality" referred to by this supposed skeptic is not the one Westerners are familiar with, i.e. 'white nationality', unless - bizarrely - this Tatar was bemoaning the 'stigmatization of white people'? In any event, it's a strange example to use for 'the dissenting view' on whites' treatment of non-whites in modern Russia.
The question at hand, beyond the Tatars, is whether Putin's patriotic mission is really in good faith, or whether it's Russian nationalism in disguise. There is an element of both at play: Tatar culture, after all, has seen something of a renaissance under the aegis of RTNKA and the Russian government. But in the context of government-funded nationalist biker gangs...
Comment: Hold on a second: the 'biker gang' in question is a far cry from US biker gangs. The former does good works; the latter deals in contraband and prostitution.
...a Russian Orthodox clergy publicly damning their Ukrainian counterparts...
Comment: Rightfully so: their Ukrainian counterparts are, as a rule, blessing and aligning with fascist murderers and bandits.
...and Putin's endorsement of aggressive irredentism among the Russians of Ukraine and Moldova,
Comment: 'Putin aggressively looks to the past' has been a recurring theme in Western analysis; a tacit admission that relatively recent wrongs done to Russia ought to be righted, not the least of which is the plight of the 25 million ethnic Russians who overnight found themselves living in hostile, US-friendly, foreign countries in 1991.
...Russian patriotism does not seem that far removed from Russian nationalism. Under the rice of the Tatar pilaf, it seems, is a fat Russian pork chop.
Source: Françoise Daucé, "Patriotic Unity and Ethnic Diversity at Odds: The Example of Tatar Organisations in Moscow," Europe-Asia Studies, 67:1 (2015) 68-83
Comment: A healthy, organic, and delicious pork chop at that!
What choice meats might we find if we peeked under the social fabric of US or European society?
If Russian integration of minorities has been successful (and that during a time when religious and ethnic fracture lines are being ruthlessly ruptured all around the globe), while in Western societies Muslims (and others) are treated like dirt, what does that tell us about the nature of Western regimes vis a vis Putin's regime?