Window on Eurasia

'Russia for the Russians' Said a ‚Cry of Despair,’ Not a Xenophobic Program

Paul Goble

Tallinn, June 15, 2006 – Increasing popular support for the slogan
„Russia for the Russians” is not powering a rise in ethnically or religiously based crime or pointing the way toward fascism, according to a St. Petersburg political scientist. Instead, it is „a cry of despair” by
both Russians and non-Russians alike who have suffered so much over the last 15 years.

In an interview conducted by the PanArmenian.net web portal, Araik
Stepanyan, the head of the Political Science Association of St.
Petersburg, says that the Russian Federation today is indeed suffering
from a serious and frightening crime wave but that „there is no wave
of crime on an ethnic basis”
[http://www.rusk.ru/st.php?idar=104385].

The percentage of ethnically or religiously motivated crimes among all
crimes while deplorable and attracting intense media interest is
„infinitesimally small,” Stepanyan argues, and it is thus simply
wrong to say that „a threat of fascism exists or that, for example,
‚Petersburg is the capital of fascism’” in the Russian Federation
today.

Stepanyan advances a parallel argument against those who assert that
the slogan „Russia for the Russians” points to or helps to provoke
ethnic or religiously based crime. That is simply not the case,
Stepanyan asserts. Instead, it is an understandable reaction to
Russians to the question that the times pose to them: „will the Russian ethnos exist or not?”

Expanding on President Vladimir Putin’s recent message to the Federal
Assembly, Stepanyan suggests that the demographic and social situation of the Russian community is far worse and far more threatening than many officials in Moscow have been willing to acknowledge.

Every year, he says, as many as 250,000 Russians die from alcohol
poisoning. Twenty-five percent of Russian school children are now ill.
Four million Russians are addicted to drugs, and many have the diseases connected with such abuse. And in the country’s large cities, he reports, up to 40 percent of men under 26 are impotent.

Moreover, Stepanyan writes, „the psychological situation of the
Russian population is stupifying.” In Vologda oblast, for example,
every other resident now needs some form of psychiatric care. The
country’s educational system is in disarray.Additionally, in the
words of one commentator he cites, „the dehumanization of man” is
proceeding rapidly in Russia.

And he notes, „there is no branch of government which is not
corrupt,” there are an increasing number of illegally owned guns in
the population, and there is a rising amount of illegal drugs being
produced and consumed – more than 130 times as much as in Japan, for
example.

These are the underlying factors, not ethnic or religious hatred, which
explain the rise in crime in the Russian Federation today, Stepanyan
says, and given this, „if the Russian people had a collective voice,
then it would long ago have called out an SOS.” But lacking that and
reflecting their despair, Russians are supporting the slogan „Russia
for the Russians.”

Even that slogan, one that many have seen xenophobic, however, is not
what it appears. Indeed, Stepanyan, himself an ethnic Armenian, notes,
„many representatives of non-Russian nationality” are among those
who say they back it, something that would not be the case if it were
as narrowly nationalist as typically described.

Stepanyan then focuses on the problems of the skinheads, a group that
he says reflects the collapse of both the child welfare system of Soviet
times and of many families as well. Today, according to the St.
Petersburg scholar, there are some five million young people growing up
without adequate supervision.

Ten years ago, he notes, scholars and commentators in the northern
capital warned that such children would fill the ranks of the criminal
world when they r eached maturity. And in 2000, these same people
warned again that in five or six years there would be an outbreak of street violence.

Unfortunately, Stepanyan says, neither the government nor the society
has faced up to these problems. Instead, the Russian people have found themselves in an increasingly impossible situation: If they call for
Russian unity, „they are accused of being fascist. But they do not
want to be quiet and slowly die away.”

As a result -- and this may prove to be a far greater tragedy than the
ones Stepanyan himself has outlined or that many who do believe there
is a serious rise in xenoophobic crime in the Russian Federation fear –
all Russians seem to be allowed „to hope for is a ‚Russian
miracle,’ something that is born in revolts and revolutions.”