Window on Eurasia

Russian Officials, Media Said Ignoring Echoes of Kondopoga

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, September 29, 2006 – Just as the Russian government and Moscow
media were almost a week late in covering the clashes in the Karelian city of Kondopoga a month ago, since that time, some Russian commentators say, both have played down the ethnic dimension of those clashes and the
echoes of Kondopoga across the Russian Federation.

Among the loudest complaints have come from those groups, like the
Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), that would like to use
Kondopoga both to energize their base and to press for the exclusion of
non-Russians from various institutions and parts of the country.

Yesterday, for example, the main DPNI website complained that “many
members of the media were downplaying or distoring what has been taking
place” in the Russian Federation and urged its supporters to take the
lead in “distributing correct information by all available means”
[http://www.dpni.org/index.php?0++8110].

However noxious the xenophobic message of DPNI is – and a perusal of
its website demonstrates that many of its members are openly racist –
the site sometimes provides important information on developments other
media outlets have chosen to play down: the growth of Russian
nationalist activism among the population.

In its appeal yesterday, DPNI reproduced the resolutions of Russian
popular assemblies (skhody) not only in Kondopoga but also in
Petrazavodsk, Tol’iatti in Samara oblast, the Russian capital among
students, Sal’sk in Rostov oblast, and Syktyvkar in the Komi
Republic.

These informal groups called for a variety of steps, ranging from
organizing armed militia of veterans of the Chechen war to defend
Russians against immigrants, to the expulsion of non-Russians from
their regions, to the judicial punishment of any official who was in any way
involved in allowing illegal immigration to occur.

But the DPNI appeal is far from the only complaint. Russians in
Kondopoga are outraged that Duma and Social Chamber deputies who
visited their city had blamed the violence there on “drunkards and
deadbeats” among the Russian population rather than on “people from
the Caucasus”
[http://www.rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=152134].

And adding to their anger, “Russkaya liniya” continued, is that
when these officials were in Kondopoga, they had acknowledged the ethnic
roots of the problem and pointed to the failure of local officials to
take action, positions that some of them reversed when they returned to
the Russian capital.

The tendency among Russian officialdom and parts of the Moscow media to
ignore the ethnic component of violence of various kinds is becoming
increasingly obvious not only to non-Russians and non-Orthodox groups
who have routinely been its victims but also to Russians as well.

Over the past several years, as the Russian government has sought to
promote the notion that it is overcoming the ethnic and religious
divisions of the past, Moscow has routinely blamed attacks on mosques
and foreign students as “hooliganism” rather than the manifestation
of ethnic, religious, and racial hatred that they are.

Not only has that meant that the authorities have been less willing to
devote resources to tracking down those responsible and that juries
have returned either not guilty verdicts or sentenced those responsible to
softer punishments, but this form of denial of the obvious has deepened
the divisions rather than bridged them.

That approach could change. On the one hand, its absurdities are
becoming ever more obvious. This week, for example, Moscow’s
educational establishment denied that nationality was why a Georgian
pupil had killed an Azerbaijani one for the latter’s failure to speak
Russian
[http://www.nazlobu.ru/news/comments901.htm#comments].

And on the other – and this factor is certain to prove far more
significant in Russia’s current political environment –this
unwillingness to face up to nationality problems is beginning to affect
not just minority groups but members of the ethnic Russian majority
itself.

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