Window on Eurasia: Russians Say They're Victims of Ethnic Discrimination in Karelia

24.06.06

Vienna, June 23 - Russians are victims of ethnic discrimination in Karelia, the result of the continuing application of what one Russian writer there says was the mistaken Soviet approach of promoting the national consciousness of small groups to the detriment of the ethnic Russian majority.

In a lengthy essay posted on the Russkaya liniya website, Grigoriy Saltun, a Russian writer who lives in the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk, argues that "discrimination against the Russian people is being imposed by the authorities [there] in all spheres of cultural life" (http://www.rusk.ru/st.php?idar=104393).

And he traces what he says is this "illegal" and "unconstitutional" situation to Soviet ideas about nationality, ideas that he links with the late Soviet ethnographer Yulian Bromlei and says fail to recognize both the absence of ethnic identity among many groups before 1917 and the natural "process of historical assimilation."

Saltun's comments are some of the sharpest Russian criticism yet to appear about continuing government support for small ethnic groups in the Russian North, communities many Russian nationalists often view as their junior partners and whose interests they assume they can represent. 

His remarks were prompted by a new book by S.I. Kochkurkina entitled "The Peoples of Karelia" (in Russian, Petrozavodsk, 2005) that traces the history and culture of groups like the Karels, Veps, Saami, and Russians from the time of their first settlement in Karelia until the 17th century. 

Saltun is infuriated by the fact that the book devotes "less than two percent of its text" to "the state-forming nation, the Russian people," claims that "there were no Russians in Karelia in the middle ages," and says that the Russians were responsible for preventing the local peoples from developing into full-fledged nations.

Such views, Saltun argues, reflect not only a woeful ignorance of the history of these various peoples but also ignore the fact that the Russians are a people full of "passionate energy" - Lev Gumilyev's term - who have grown by assimilating neighboring peoples and cultures, something that he says has benefitted all of them.

"The Slavs," the Petrozavodsk writer says, "never destroyed their neighbors physically.unlike the European educated Germans . or the 'civilized Anglo-Saxons who in the 17th to 19th centureis almost completely wiped out te Indian tribes in North America, driving the remainder into reservations for the amusement of tourists."

Instead, in Karelia up to the 1917 revolution, the Russians lived in peace with these various tribes, sharing their culture and religion with them and not discriminating against any of them. But after the coming to power of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, with their ideas about nationality, the current problems began.

"Only the communists began actively to divide peoples on the basis of nationality, at first in order to realize the goals of the World Revolution and then by repressing certain of our peoples out of fears that the Ingermanlanders and the Karels would side with the enemy during the course of World War II."

Prior to the Communist period, he continues, people were classified by their religious affiliation rather than defined as "progressive" or "not progressive." And as a result, "Catholics, Protestants, Calvinists and Jews became after the acceptance of Orthodoxy the founders of well-known families and noble dynasties" within Russia.

But the Communists divided people up according to linguistic criteria, drew administrative lines which ignored the former commonalities, and set one nationality against another, often to the detriment in the first instance of the Russian people, Saltun writes.

"Everything was subordinate to the great Leninist imperialist idea," a situation that the Russian writer claims has not been overcome but rather continues to function 15 years after the end of the Soviet system.

One reason for this, he says, is that the notion of "indigenous nationalities," deserving special privileges, remains the basis of state policy, something that means small groups, even if they moved in recently as is the case for some of the Finns in Karelia, are treated far better than the Russian majority.

An example of what infuriates Saltun is his report that the Finnish-language journal "Karelia" currently pays honoraria to its writers "1,000 times larger' than does the Russian language journal "Sever" even though the former has far fewer readers and the latter has a print run too small to satisfy the local Russian community.

In support of this claim, Saltun describes his own experience: when he recently published a story in "Sever" did, that journal could not pay him any honorarium in addition to giving him four copies of the magazine. And he adds that librarians reportedly say they must make copies of "Sever" in order to meet demand.

In such a situation, the Petrozavodsk writer says, it is time to ask "who is exploiting whom in Karelia on the basis of nationality? [And] who here is the newly-arrived 'occupier and 'parasite' and who is the representative of the 'indigenous' population?"

Saltun caps his argument on this point with two disturbing observations: On the one hand, he asks rhetorically, who today stands behind people like Kochkurkina and the national language policies he says continue to work against the Russians who form 87 percent of Karelia's population?

And on the other, he argues that what he calls the unjustified support of small nationalities at the expense of the Russian majority who have to pay for this is powering extremism in the Russian Federation just as it did in Germany in the wake of its defeat in World War I. 

"Fascism arose in Germany in the 1920s," he says, as a reaction to an organized famine and the chaos there after the Versailles peace treaty, when extraordinarily high reparations drained out of the German people all their vital forces.  When by constant provocations were denigarted the feelings of the national dignity of the Germans."

Given what is happening in Karelia now, Saltun says, it should not surprise anyone that "among young and semi-literate Russians nationalistic and [even] fascistic groups" are beginning to appear - and for the same reasons that they appeared in Germany 80 years ago.

Paul Goble