“You have to be completely brainless to put forward such a strategy,” Marat Kulsharipov, a historian and analyst based in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, says. “It is literally a bomb in Russia’s basement.”
A potentially explosive political kettle has been simmering in Russia for months, and it may well boil over in the weeks to come.
Shortly after his return to the Kremlin in May, President Vladimir Putin ordered the drafting of a new State Nationalities Policy.
The document, which was to be unveiled on December 1, sets guidelines for political, economic, and cultural policies affecting Russia’s nearly 200 ethnic groups, and the drafting process has been followed closely by almost all of them, from Adyghe to Yakuts.
Drafting commission head Vyacheslav Mikhailov says the new policy aims to strengthen a single identity for the entire country, to develop its ethnic diversity, and to strength civic unity and interethnic harmony.
But critics charge that some of the ideas that emerged in the process, such as merging small ethnic republics with other regions, would lead to ethnic Russian domination and the erosion of the status of non-Russian nationalities.
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