Translated material
Defectors
The Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University presented a report on the situation of Russians in the North Caucasus
Yesterday, RIA Novosti hosted a presentation of the report “North Caucasus: Russian Factor”, dedicated, as the title suggests, to the problems of ethnic Russians on the southern outskirts of the country, recently allocated to a special federal district. The report was presented by Valery Korovin - in the 1990s, a member of the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov, one of the leaders of the so-called Eurasian Youth Movement, and now deputy head of the Center for Conservative Research at the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University. Mr. Korovin was assisted by the editor-in-chief of the North Caucasus News Agency, Stepan Vasilenko. In addition to them, three respectable elderly representatives of the “titular” peoples of the North Caucasus were present at the presentation: journalist, social activist and former official from Kabardino-Balkaria Hakim Kuchmezov, former deputy of the Supreme Council of Checheno-Ingushetia and chairman of the presidium of the Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus (RCNK) Aslambek Paskachev and co-chairman RCNK Denga Khalidov.Mr. Korovin, whose solid beard resembled the Emir of the Caucasian Mujahideen Doku Umarov, led the presentation and uttered several phrases that called into question the possibility of a serious attitude towards the team of authors, who, of course, raised a very important and painful topic, which remains, in fact, taboo from the beginning 1990s. Mr. Korovin, in particular, announced that the Chechen people have their own geopolitical mission, therefore the Russian leadership in vain stopped in August 2008 the fighters of the Chechen special forces battalion "Vostok" who fought in South Ossetia - it would have been better if the Chechens had continued to advance, then Ramzan Kadyrov now he would create “a Cossack state at the borders of the empire on the border with Turkey.” Mr. Korovin also said that, according to the observations of the authors of the report, Chechnya is now the least problematic North Caucasian territory in terms of relations between Russians and Chechens. For this reason, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov could become Russia's Interior Minister, presumably to extend his experience of cultivating interethnic friendship to the rest of the country.
The fact that the Chechen units that fought in South Ossetia not only had nothing to do with Ramzan Kadyrov, but were in a severe conflict with him, the victim of which was the commander of the Vostok battalion (he was assassinated a year ago in distant Dubai), and about Mr. Korovin either doesn’t know or forgot to say that there are few Russian-Chechen conflicts in Chechnya due to the fact that there are almost no Russians left there. The report, however, mentions that now there are less than 1% of ethnic Russians in Chechnya, whereas in 1989 they made up 23% of the population of Checheno-Ingushetia.
According to the authors of the report, 293.8 thousand people left the territory of Chechnya and Ingushetia, which were finally divided in 1992, in the first half of the 1990s. Moreover, unlike the Chechens, who fled the war but most often returned back, this number mainly includes Russians, or, more accurately, non-Vainakh residents of the region. In Ingushetia, the number of ethnic Russians has decreased by 13 times over the past two decades. Many villages in Ingushetia, which were predominantly Russian back in the 1980s, now retain very small Russian communities, disappearing in the sea of the “titular” population.
The attention of the press is often focused on the consequences of the Ossetian-Ingush conflict of 1992. But few people know that in the same 1992, dozens, if not hundreds of Russian families were forced to leave Ingushetia. Some of them still live in refugee settlements, squalid hostels of the Federal Migration Service or half-abandoned villages, where the local Russian population often paradoxically perceives them not as Russians from Chechnya or Ingushetia, but as Chechens and Ingush.
The upcoming population census will most likely show disappointing results for Russians in Dagestan, where until relatively recently they were among the five most numerous ethnic groups in the republic, and in 2002 their number amounted to less than 5% of the population.
The monument to a Russian teacher, which was recently erected in Makhachkala as a symbol of gratitude to Russian specialists who have done a lot in the Caucasus for the development of education and technological production, looks like a dark irony, although it is precisely the community of Russian teachers who ended up in the Dagestan mountains as part of the Soviet post-graduate assignment and got married there , still remains one of the most stable. The same cannot be said about the peasants, for example, in the northern regions of Dagestan, who daily face pressure from the ever-increasing communities of Avars and Dargins, who previously lived permanently in the mountains, but are now uncontrollably descending to the plain in search of a less harsh lot and fertile land.
North Caucasian officials answer questions about ethnic conflicts by rote that everyone is equal before the law and the police protect everyone. However, in most cases, when a Russian pensioner, whose window was hit by a stone thrown from the street, dares to complain to the police, in the duty station she sees a person for whom the one who threw the stone is in all respects closer than the complainant.
In the relatively calm republics to the west of Ingushetia, troubles are also happening to the Russians. Although their communities still make up a third to a quarter of the population in Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, and they have significant representation in government, since the beginning of 2000 they have been practically excluded from the political process in which they took an active part back in 1999 . The authors of the report find the most problematic situation in Kabardino-Balkaria, where in March in the regional center of Maiskoye, several people attacked the Cossack cornet Sergei Koptev, shouting: “Russian pigs, it’s time to kill you.” And on April 7, a mass fight with ethnic overtones took place in the village of Yantarnoye, where adult Kabardians beat and maimed Russian schoolchildren after they had won an amateur football match. However, the situation in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic looks no less deplorable, where in a number of remote areas the Russian population, after the collapse of collective farms, found itself in some cases in the position of disenfranchised farm laborers for local entrepreneurs of “titular” origin.
As a result, the outflow of Russians continues from the relatively calm Caucasian west. It is difficult to argue with the authors of the report that the Russians are a vital element of stability in the region. Their urban and rural communities are an obstacle to the archaization of life in the region and the spread of radical Islam, a basic element for the possible future return of quality education and technological production to the Caucasus. The authors believe that stopping the outflow and returning Russians to the Caucasus is a priority task of the state and, in particular, the presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin.
Proposals regarding the retention and return of Russians remained in the part of the report that has not yet been published. True, at the state level, such proposals have long been formulated - for example, in Chechnya and Ingushetia there are government programs for the return and settlement of the Russian-speaking population who previously lived in these republics. There is virtually no doubt that these programs are written from the heart and imply financial assistance and security guarantees. But for those few who have used them, the same friendly and intelligent men in ties who created these programs and gave them life are most often waiting on the spot as neighbors. Some Russians are openly afraid to return to the Caucasus, while others do not want and cannot - those who fled in the 1990s are already old, and their children have settled in Russia. And they get used to living in the cities of the country, where the Russian ethnic majority, still beyond doubt, is melting before our eyes for various reasons.
The North Caucasian guests of the presentation warned the authors against bias, said the usual words that young people have always fought, and seriously referred to the “world behind the scenes” that wants to destabilize the Russian Caucasus in order to disrupt the Olympics in Sochi. From the words of the speakers it followed that even the militant raid on Nalchik was led by the Jamestown Foundation, an American non-governmental organization that also studies the situation in the North Caucasus.
In the very text of the report, it turned out to be written in black and white that the recipe for building a single Russian nation, that is, co-citizenship of people of different ethnic groups and religions who realize that it is good for them to live in a common, rich and prosperous state, is unsuitable because it was invented by liberal scientists. It is obvious that if the real and difficult problem of Russians in the Caucasus (and the related problem of relations between immigrants from the Caucasus and the local population of large Russian cities) is solved from such “enlightened” positions, success is hardly achievable.