Window on Eurasia

Russia’s Northern Peoples Again Look Abroad for Policy Ideas

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, September 27, 2006 – Members of the numerically small peoples of
the Russian Arctic, groups who continue to be disproportionately victims of
central government policies, are one again turning their attention to
the arrangements Northern peoples in other countries have made with
their governments in order to survive in the 21st century.

The untrammelled development of the North both in Soviet times and more
recently, A.A. Maksimov writes in a new study of the region, has hit
the numerically small peoples of the North far harder than it has the other
peoples of the Russian Federation
[http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid=12289].

In addition to overwhelming the small groups with an influx of ethnic
Russians and others, this policy led “on the background of the
general lack of well-being in Russia” of “estraordinarily high levels” of
unemployment, mortality, alcoholism, suicide, and infectious
diseases” among these Northern peoples.

Still worse, Maksimov continues, even now, the peoples of the North
“do not have adquate mechanisms for the expression and realization of
their interests,” and consequently, they are often unable to force
Moscow to live up to its often “contradictory and [simply]
declarative” laws regulating their lives.

And that situation in turn is exacerabated by the lack of concern most
Russians show to the problems of the peoples of the North and the
interests of major corporations and the Russian state in the
exploitation of the immense natural resources in the lands where these
people have lived for centuries, even millenia.

As a result, the intellectual elites of the numerically small peoples
of the North are increasingly examining how Arctic peoples living in the
Scandinavian countries, Greenland, Canada, and the United States are
interacting with the governments of those countries in order to advance
their rights.

Maksimov’s article includes a survey of Russian and Western studies
of these policies, some of which like the Canadian government’s
relationship with the Nunavut appear to be successful and a possible
model for the groups in Russia and others of which have been less
successful and thus are less likely to be copied.

But in summing up his 6,000-word article, Maksimov says that “the
most important thing for the Northern peoples are not programs, not the
invention of new structures for the resolution of particular problems
(such as alcoholism, health, education, and so on), and not simply the
acquisition of land rights and particular powers.”

Instead, what matters are people “who see that the state respects
thieir individual and collective rights, who believe that their
children will live, knowing that ‘life has meaning, that they are valuable’
and worthy of love and respect, that they have the keys to their own
future and all the possibilities of a society of equals.”

Such a faith, he suggests, has animated many of the movements of Artic
peoples outside of the Russian Federation, but unfortunately, few of
the members of the numerically small peoples living within that country
share that optimism. And unless they are able to gain it against all
odds, the future for them will be bleak.

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |