"Strategy of the state national policy" - a way out of the impasse or a new impasse? "
The Council for Interethnic Relations under the President of the Russian Federation has developed a draft Strategy for the State National Policy of the Russian Federation.
No doubt, a document of this kind should have long been concerned about the state minds of Russia and thinking about it has unduly delayed. It can be seen, the proverb says the truth: “Until the thunder clap, the peasant does not cross.”
Thunder struck at Manezhke - under that name in history An explosion of popular Russian outrage 11 December 2010 of the year on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow (the second anniversary of this event is coming). The reason for outrage was the murder of a young Russian football fan by visitors from the Caucasus. However, the protest against the actions of the police, who almost let go with the world of murderers, took a grand scale, and the slogans of the 15-thousandth electrified crowd gathered in the square went far beyond the specific occasion. For the first time, the demands already accustomed to the "Russian marches" sounded so impressive and persistent, and under the very walls of the Kremlin.
The terrible rumble of popular protest showed: the legendary Russian patience is on the verge of threatening to burst. This signal made the Presidential Administration and President Medvedev, who immediately brought together the political elite to the Gorki meeting, to turn to face the national problem.
The most sensitive politicians reacted instantly and accurately. The first speaker was the head of the LDPR faction Igor Lebedev. He proposed giving the Russians the official status of the state-forming people by amending the Constitution. Following his thesis, Gennady Zyuganov repeated on behalf of the Communist Party.
This turn was sharply disliked by President Medvedev, who tried the old-fashioned way to appeal to the values of multinationality and multiculturalism. Medvedev even threatened sanctions to those who try to "play the national card" during the election campaign.
The threat had the opposite effect: now three of the four parliamentary parties have officially included the thesis about giving the official status of the state-forming people to Russian in their election programs. "Fair Russia" has joined the LDPR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
The meaning of this requirement is extremely justified and clear: status is necessary in order to legally substantiate the priority care of the state to strengthen the physical, political and moral well-being of the Russian people. It is precisely because the well-being of all Russia, along with all the other 192 peoples found in it by the last census, including the Nigerians and the Dutch, depends on it.
The only people without which Russia will instantly cease to exist is precisely and only Russians. This simple idea seems to be understandable to everyone. You cannot say about any other nation.
But how to reconcile the need for priority concern for the Russian people with Art. 19 Constitution of Russia, proclaiming (and rightly!) The equality of all citizens regardless of nationality? How to reconcile these two necessities?
It was precisely such an attempt that the parliamentary parties made, which proclaimed the task of introducing into the Russian Constitution an article on the official status of the Russians as the state-forming people.
Russian public organizations supported this initiative. 19 on April 2012 of the Year The World Russian People’s Council (whose head, we recall, is the Patriarch of All Russia), held a hearing “The Social Situation in Russia and the Future of the Russian People”. The resolution noted that the Russian people are experiencing a crisis period of their existence: its number is decreasing, the geographical area of its distribution is narrowing, the number of people who speak Russian is decreasing. Accordingly, “in order to overcome the crisis tendencies, decisive measures are needed in the interests not only of the Russian people, but also of all citizens of the Russian state, whose unity and prosperity directly depends on the national well-being of the Russian people.” As the main way to improve the case, it was proposed “to seriously consider the issue of formalizing the status of the state forming for the Russian people”.
Not only representatives of the political establishment felt the main nerve of modernity: the counter-elite reacted to Manezhka as quickly, precisely and unequivocally. The leaders of the liberal opposition also understood everything and, reluctantly, offered the Russian nationalists allied relations, recognizing in them an upward force. For example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who claims to be the spiritual leader of the liberals today and apparently sees himself as a presidential candidate in the future, has broken out into the concept of national liberalism as the basis of such a union.
Sober-minded political analysts expected that the Kremlin would also see the obvious and would not remain aloof from the search for ways to dialogue with the Russian people and the Russian movement. This is what happened.
The “Strategy of State National Policy” appeared in the implementation of Vladimir Putin’s decree “On ensuring inter-ethnic harmony”, the appearance of which indicates that an understanding of the importance of the national problem for society has matured in the Kremlin. And President Putin was absolutely right in setting the appropriate task before his specialized Council.
However, was this instance at the height of the task? Did she propose a solution that is really capable of alleviating the severity of national contradictions, and most importantly - to harmonize the relations of the Kremlin with the state-forming Russian people? After all, it is precisely to this problem that modern history has brought us close together; it was in this that the true, main meaning of the document should have consisted!
Ex-Ministers Conspiracy
An analysis of the Strategy suggests: no, its authors did not understand the full complexity of the current moment, did not realize the challenges and threats facing Russia, did not appreciate the key role of the Russian question in solving these problems.
It is not by chance that even the Parliament of Yakutia from afar immediately saw the Achilles heel of the project, writing in its review: “The Russian people are reduced to the concept of ethnic community, there is no concept of state-forming people, the self-determination of which was created by the de facto state of the Russian Federation.” Yakut deputies are concerned: "Equating all ethnic groups with more than 59 thousand to 110-million people of the Russian people in one concept of" ethnic community "can create a conflict of interests and identifications."
By the way, according to Kommersant, the previous draft concept of state policy, prepared by the Ministry of Regional Development, contained the most important thesis on the "state-forming role of the Russian people." However, the new document, on which as many as four former ministers of nationality affairs have worked (all as if for a selection who have a very bad reputation with Russian nationalists) - Valery Tishkov, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, Vladimir Zorin, Ramazan Abdulatipov - no longer contains these words. They say the ex-ministers threw them out of the text in favor of the national republics, where they allegedly provoked fierce criticism.
But here Ramazan Abdulatipov, one of the co-authors of the Strategy, gave a completely different version of the substitution of meanings that took place (now the status of the Russian people has been changed instead of “state-forming” to “uniting”). In an interview with the newspaper “Vzglyad”, he scares us: “Each national republic will want to write in its constitution that the people who dominate there are the state-forming people on its territory. In Khakassia they will write that there the state-forming people are the Khakas, in Chechnya - the Chechens, etc. ”
He is scared, but we are not afraid. Well, where the title people constitute an absolute majority of at least two-thirds or more, they are indeed state-forming. Why fear the truth? Why lie to yourself? For example, Chechens, of course, the state-forming people in Chechnya, who would have doubted this. How else?! And the Russians, in the whole of Russia as a whole. This is true.
True, Abdulatipov made another reservation: “If we, in relation to one, let the dominant people introduce the phrase“ state-forming, ”we will have to change the Main Law of the country.”
But it’s precisely for this that the leaders of the three parliamentary parties are calling. Is the Constitution a sacred cow? After all, she had recently been changed just once ...
"Calculated without a host"
In essence, we should be primarily interested in two things: 1) how the Strategy takes into account the rights and interests of the Russian people; 2) whether it reflects and consolidates the state-forming role of Russians in Russia.
However, was it possible from the very beginning to expect something like this from the notorious Strategy? This is unlikely, judging by the composition of the developers.
Many peoples of our country have found their official authorized representation in the composition of the Council under the President of Russia for interethnic relations. For example, Armenians, Assyrians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Gypsies, Karachays, Kazakhs, Lezghins, Belorussians, Poles, Greeks, Azeris, Jews, Chuvash, Koreans, and even indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation have their own lawful Council - I will underline this word! - representation.
And only the Russians were deprived of any legitimate representation, since neither Valery Ganichev, Deputy Head of the International Public Organization “World Russian People’s Council”, nor Alexey Zhuravlev, Chairman of the All-Russian Public Organization “Homeland-Congress of Russian Communities”, ever had any legal mandate to represent Russian people. Not without reason in the list of members of the Council next to their names is the derogatory and vague expression "as agreed." Who, what and with whom agreed - this document is silent. But, in any case, not with the Russian people.
The lack of their subjectivity among Russians directly affected the draft document. There was no one to represent the Russians, to protect their rights and interests in the Council for Interethnic Relations.
It is also important to consider the fact that the head of the Working Group was Vyacheslav Mikhailov, famous for his Ukrainophilism pet of the Lviv Polytechnic Institute. When he was Minister for Nationalities, he was famous for having first of all liquidated the Department for the Problems of the Russian People, created by his predecessor, Dagestan Abdulatipov. Such an attitude towards the Russian people and their problems, he, apparently, moved the State Policy Strategy to the field.
As a result, having familiarized himself with the notorious Strategy, a Russian can only dissolve his hands with the words: “They married me without me.” For the umpteenth time! And it would be even more accurate to say with the words of the Russian saying “Calculated without a master.”
It was expected that the draft Strategy would be amended by national communities. Not only various leaders of the leading national-cultural autonomies and inter-regional movements, traditional faiths, but even the parliaments of the national republics actively joined the discussion of these.
Against this background, the voice of the World Russian People’s Council, which was held on November 12 in November “Discussion of the draft Strategy of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation”, was very lonely. The Council adopted a resolution, which pointed out the gaps of the draft. The main idea sounded like this: it is necessary to legally ensure the rights and interests of the Russian people in Russia to the same extent as it was done in relation to other peoples. What the authors of the Strategy forgot.
Opening the hearings, Deputy Heads of the ARNS Valery Ganichev (Chairman of the Writers' Union of Russia) and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin (Head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations) stressed that, in particular, state assistance is needed in developing the Russian national infrastructure, in creating a network of cultural, educational , educational centers focused on the preservation and development of the Russian tradition.
O. Vsevolod Chaplin, among other things, recalled that the Russian people had already been called "state-forming" in one of the texts of President Putin when he was Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. He also called on the government to officially recognize the existence of such a special form of national hostility and hatred as Russophobia, and to take measures to eradicate it. Many speakers supported this view.
It was said at the Council that it was necessary at the legislative level to recognize the Russian people as a divided people. Much practical was said about the painful problem of labor migration. The speakers emphasized the inadmissibility of the transformation of our Motherland into a “melting pot”, threatening to erase its national diversity.
Some experts emphasized from the rostrum that often the best guarantee of national consensus is informal national quoting of places in public institutions, ensuring proportional representation of each people - as is done, for example, in multinational Dagestan.
As is known, as a result of the work on the Strategy, the working group took into account most of the proposals and comments developed by national public and religious organizations and republics.
One gets, however, the impression that the wishes of the World Russian People’s Council, on the contrary, were neither heard nor taken into account, like a voice crying in the wilderness.
Is it right, is it fair?
Rotten goods
The list of fundamental shortcomings of the State Policy Strategy is considerable, but I would like to dwell only on one striking contradiction, “not noticed” by the authors of the concept. Or rather, consciously embedded in the concept.
The fact is that among the authors there is such a “heavyweight” as the head of the head scientific research institute of ethnology and anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a convinced constructivist and first-wave liberal democrat who served in the government of Gaidar as Minister for Nationalities Affairs, Valery Tishkov.
This peculiar scientist, who has matured on the study of the American and Canadian ethnopolitical experience and who dreams of transplanting this experience to Russia, is distinguished by the fact that he does not believe in the future of ethnic groups. The titles of the works of the noble “ethnologist” are good: “Forget about the nation”, “Requiem for the ethnos”, etc. The Leninist aphorism “Nations are bourgeois inventions” is immediately recalled.
Tishkov became famous for a public statement from the rostrum of the Federal Assembly that the Russian people as such does not exist, as well as by many years of exceptional efforts to impose on the society a stillborn concept of the “Russian nation” by analogy with the former “Soviet people”.
In this regard, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin aptly put it: “The draft Strategy focuses on the development of a“ civil ”or“ political ”nation. But it is not necessary to again go on about the idea of creating a kind of “new person” who has discredited itself and has shown its lifelessness, and will be deprived of its ethnic characteristics. They tried to create this “new man” in the Soviet Union and are now trying to do the same in the West. Nothing happened. ”
Chaplin echoes, oddly enough, the Yakut parliament. The deputies noted the imperfection of the definition given in the draft Strategy: “The definition is given in the European understanding, which does not correspond to the existing conceptual apparatus of Russian science and the ordinary Russian consciousness and resembles the repetition of our recent experience when we tried to create a single Soviet people in our multinational state.”
Truly, someone does not learn anything from history!
Everything suggests that the authors of the Strategy either do not see, or do not understand, or do not wish to see and understand that the nation and citizenship are not the same thing. However, what and demand from those who laid down the definition of the people in the Strategy, which goes back to the formula of Stalin!
At the same time, its authors strangely do not notice that the concept of the “Russian nation” is fundamentally incompatible with the federal structure of modern Russia, where there are national republics, districts and other national-territorial formations, due to which some nations turn out to be “more equal than others”, as they used to say unforgettable George Orwell.
What kind of “Russian nation” can we talk about, if Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Jews, Yakuts, Adygs, etc. have their own national-territorial formations, their sovereignty, and they are not going to give up either their sovereignty or its special, separate from the "Russian" national identity? However, in the Strategy there is not a word about the transition to a unitary state, as we would have rightfully expected from the preachers of the “Russian nation”.
Where is the logic? Alas, it is not and is not expected.
And this means that the adoption of such a Strategy will not resolve, but will only drive deep into and aggravate all national problems that have become painful in Russia.
The document is not empty. He is mischievous
So, what does the National Policy Strategy offer to the state-forming people of Russia? What Russians are - 80% of the population! - find it to solve their national problems?
The answer suggests itself immediately and unequivocally: NOTHING.
At the first glance at the Strategy, it becomes clear that it completely lacks an understanding of the simple truth that the Russian question is the key to solving the problem of national relations in Russia. And in general there is no understanding of the reasons for the growth of interethnic contradictions and tensions, as if the text was written by aliens. Not only Manezhka, but the collapse of the USSR along national borders, it seems, did not teach the authors anything.
In the text of the Strategy, Russians are told briefly and unclear about the “unifying role of the Russian people” and about the fact that Russia was created as a “state, whose historical core is the Russian people as the strategic core”. Everything. More about the Russian people, no matter how hard you try, there is nothing substantial in the text. Not a single word about Russian problems and how to solve them is found in the document. Merci side, as they say, thank you for seeing us at all.
Meanwhile, the current position of the Russian people is not such that it would be possible to blithely brush off the threats facing its national existence. For example, from the fact of its separation, from the fact of its multi-stage genocide in the twentieth century, from the fact of its depopulation, exhaustion and distortion of the gene pool, from the fact of its cultural and biological degradation, from attempts to separate Russian subethnos from it, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
According to scientists, the main source of the gene pool of all nations is the village. But do we not know in what position the Russian village turned out to be today, in general, the Russian province?
Let me remind you: this is about the Russian people, whose state determined, determines and for a long time will determine the fate of Russia. Seeing everything that is happening today, it's good to beat all the bells! However, this did not even occur to the authors of the State National Policy Strategy.
So, there is a paradox. The strategy of national policy in our country of Russia, named after the Russians, was adopted, one can say, without Russians and not for Russians, that is, without regard for the rights and interests of the main people of the country.
It is rather absurd to wait after this correction of imbalances in interethnic relations and the harmonious union of power and people. It must be said bluntly that the authors of the National Policy Strategy have done the Kremlin a bad and disservice. They managed to completely ignore the threats and challenges facing the Russian people today.
How will the Russians react to such “supreme care”? Will the Russian people agree to the role of fertilizer, in which two hundred flowers thrive? It is doubtful. So, the Strategy will play only the role of a gasoline player in the smoldering fire of interethnic contradictions.
How will this end?
We invite readers to reflect on this issue.
Information