Записки Егора Погрома

А вот, например, наши "потенциальные друзья" из влиятельнейшего американского Foreign Affairs закладывают идеологическое обоснование для поддержки со стороны США новой кавказской войны, зацените. На этот раз вместо рассказов про "борцов за свободу" нас ждут рассказы про "борцов за права угнетенных меньшинств", все в полном соответствии с актуальным внутриамериканским политдискурсом. Так сказать, адаптация identity politics к внешнеполитическим вопросам: "Sadly, the language law is just the latest development in a long-running process of estrangement between Moscow and the North Caucasus, with the former increasingly treating the latter as colonies. At the end of the Soviet period, ethnic Russians made up some 75 percent of the urban population in the North Caucasus. Yet nearly 350,000 Russians had left the region by 1999, and their share of the population in Chechnya has since fallen to a mere 1.5 percent. As Russians have departed, the North Caucasus’ relevance to Moscow has fallen accordingly. The starkest example of this new colonial mindset is in Dagestan: last September, the Kremlin appointed Vladimir Vasilyev, an ethnic Russian from outside Moscow, as the republic’s new governor. Vasilyev, the first non-Dagestani to head the republic since 1948, has staffed his administration with other non-Dagestanis, eliminating any semblance of political participation on the part of the local population. Ingushetia is perhaps the one republic to buck the trend—local leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov enjoys some genuine popularity and is seen to have local interests in mind. Yet he, too, has been criticized for a lack of effort to develop and preserve the Ingush language. Last year, he was embroiled in a scandal in which Ingush textbooks, having been printed and sent to the republic, sat inaccessible in a warehouse since the government had not allocated the funds to purchase them. There already exists an ominous precedent for the treatment of ethnic minorities under Putin. The Mari El Republic, where Putin gave his now infamous language speech last July, was ruled by an ethnic Russian, Leonid Markelov, from 2001 to 2017. Markelov, in the words of one local activist, “simply hated the Maris.” Under his rule, the Mari ethnic group, which speaks a language related to Finnish, experienced nearly two decades of policies targeted against their language and identity. Where Mari villages once had signs in both Russian and Mari, now only the former remain. In some districts, Mari children already receive only one hour of native-language instruction per week, guaranteeing that they will not have a strong command of the language. Now thoroughly Russified, local activists say Mari El is “a national republic in name only,” its cultural heritage systematically destroyed. Putin is hoping that the new law can achieve similar results in the North Caucasus, but the potential for blowback is dire. Although the Kremlin seeks to throttle any possibility of future ethnic mobilization, its policies are having precisely the opposite effect. Civil society has been resilient in the North Caucasus, growing during Putin’s third term despite the near total destruction of the region’s armed insurgency. The clear danger to ethnic identity posed by the new law has already generated a wave of nationalism and activism, even among groups such as the Circassians that had previously been dormant. Although there is no direct link between this upsurge of nationalism and the region’s insurgency, many of the factors that induce individuals to participate in the former, such as a sense of political disenfranchisement and anger toward unresponsive authorities, overlap with the reasons they join the latter. With an ominous spike in violence in the region earlier this year, including conflict incidents in long docile republics such as Karachay-Cherkessia, the situation is potentially volatile. In attempting to assimilate the peoples of the North Caucasus, Putin is playing a dangerous game and jeopardizing the security of the entire region".