Prime minister Putin’s recent remarks on the need to curtail illegal migration, barring the entry into the country to persons found guilty of multiple breaches of residence regulations, provoked all kinds of reactions. Even the supporters of a humane attitude to the labor migrants acknowledge that the problem has got out of hand in the last few years. In this situation, it makes sense to put the story into a larger context of Putin’s recent article on ethnic issues.
The article “Russia: the National Problem” published by the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta (NG) touched upon several sensitive ethnic and psychological subjects. Largely silenced under the Soviet Union and frowned upon by the mainstream liberal media under president Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, “the Russian question” had until recently been exploited mostly by ethnic Russian nationalists. The majority of these ethnic nationalists was opposed and continues to be opposed to the administrations governing Russia under presidents Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev. By publishing his article in NG, Putin became the first statesman of the highest stature who did not shy away from tackling the issue, unleashing a debate in which both the government’s loyalists and opponents participated.
The first, and most important, issue tackled by Putin is the issue of the new Russian identity. The second is the issue of migration – both into Russia and out of it.
Identity comes first, of course. Russia, while being the largest state created on the territory of the former Soviet Union, is by no means a modernized copy of the old USSR, both ethnically and psychologically. The new Russia is a 20 years old young nation, with ethnic Russians making up the majority (at least 80 percent) of its population (which had not been the case in the Soviet Union). The most important development, however, is the fact that the new identity, that of Rossiyanin (a citizen of Russia and a member of the multiethnic Russian civic nation, as opposed to russkyi, an ethnic Russian) is slowly but steadily taking root.
In his article, Putin does not burn bridges connecting this new Russia to the old Russian Empire and its twentieth century successor, the Soviet Union. Here is what he writes on the events of 1991: “Even at the moment, when the state became critically weak, Russia did not disappear. What happened was a repetition of the situation summarized by [Russian historian] Vasily Klyuchevsky in his writings about the “Times of Troubles” [a period of civil wars and interventions in Russia’s seventeenth century]: “When the political structure of society cracked, the country was saved by the people’s moral will.” In Putin’s view, the main victory of Russians, both in the seventeenth century and now, was not over foreigners’ intervening into Russia’s internal affairs, but over themselves, over “internal strife and divisions.” “We can rightfully call this holiday [the “Day of the People’s Unity”, celebrated on November 4, to mark the day when Poles were forced to leave the Moscow Kremlin in 1612] the birthday of our civic nation,” Putin wrote in NG.
In his article, Putin had to make a fine balancing act between shying away from the ethnic theme and playing into the hands of ethnic Russian nationalists, who demand Russia’s “separation” from the troubled Moslem areas of North Caucuses and shutting the borders with the impoverished and unstable Central Asia.
“The stem, the core bringing together this unique civilization is the Russian people, the Russian culture. Our enemies and all kinds of provocateurs will try to uproot this stem, to take it out of Russia by all means. They will do it to the tune of entirely fake talks on the rights of Russians to ethnic self-determination, on “racial purity”, on the need to “bring to the end the cause of 1991 and to destroy the empire hanging on the Russian people’s neck.” The final aim is to make people “destroy their motherland by their own hands,” Putin writes. Hence the prime minister’s call for further fostering of the Russian “civic nation,” built not so much on the Russian ethnic “core” as on Russia’s “cultural code” which has shown itself to be a strong integrating force for centuries.
This view of the prime minister came under sustained and easily predictable attacks from both the liberal and nationalist opponents of Putin, who, in a peculiar way, confirmed Putin’s words, since they fitted his image of “provocateurs” so well.
“We view Russia as a European nation, which should have open borders with the European Union, and not with the Chechnya of [Moscow-supported Chechen president] Ramzan Kadyrov or with the dictatorships of Central Asia,” said Vladimir Milov, the leader of the liberal Democratic Choice movement, which recently announced its intention to become a registered political party and form an alliance with Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko party.
The controversial blogger Alexei Navalny, the most publicized of Putin’s critics, very popular in the West despite having been expelled from Yabloko for “nationalist deviations” several years ago, called Putin’s article “a bit of plagiarism.” In the opinion of Navalny, who took part in the openly racist “Russkyi” march in November last year, the North Caucuses is “Russia’s Gaza strip” and it deserves to be left to its own devices. As for the nations of Central Asia, they are, in Navalny’s view nothing but a source of illegal migration.
Migration, indeed, is a challenge to Russia, and for this reason it holds a prominent place in Putin’s article, second only to the identity problem. There is the statistically indisputable fact that in the last 15-20 years Russia was the largest recipient of migratory flows in the world, second only to the United States (at least 5 million recent migrants live and work in Russia at the moment). This fact is well known and visible to anyone walking Moscow’s streets. Millions of migrants from the impoverished former Soviet republics of Central Asia and from unstable areas of the Transcaucasus are constantly making themselves visible in Russia’s big cities, Moscow in the first place. A certain segment of Russian business and even the state-owned city services viewed this situation as an opportunity to get a cheap and undemanding workforce. This situation gave these companies an edge over their competitors, who continued to employ the local Russian workforce with all ensuing obligations, such as paying for their employees’ health insurance and pension accounts. This led to discontent among the local population, especially its poorest part, forced to compete with the newcomers for the low-paid jobs. The other “conflict area” is small business which felt by its own experience that corruption among state officials in fact equalized the business opportunities of citizens and non-citizens. The “informal” common market of the workforce, capitals and state services, which established itself on the territory of the former Soviet Union in the last two decades, often gives preference to the outwardly closed, disciplined groups of newcomers, long familiar with the culture of “informal” settlement of problems.
In his article, Putin acknowledged that Russia’s state policy on migration needs improvement. But he also warned against limiting the response to new challenges by purely police measures. “Nowhere and never can illegal migration be reduced to zero, but it has to be minimized, and there is a possibility to do so,” Putin wrote. “However a simple mechanical tightening of migration screws won’t yield the desired result. In many countries such tightening leads only to the growth in the share of illegal migration.”
So, Putin called for a combination of methods limiting illegal migration: better police oversight and sustained efforts to improve the living conditions in the depressed areas of Russia and neighboring states.
“This is a difficult way forward, but it is the only right one,” said Taras Shamba, the president of the Abkhaz community in Russia. “I am especially glad that the prime minister agreed to reestablish the nationalities’ ministry in Russia. I worked there for many years under president Yeltsin and I hope our ideas can be revived. A lot of them I saw in Putin’s article.”
Please rate: