Kennan Institute (Washington DC)
www.wilsoncenter.org/kennan
November 10, 2008
In Honor of Galina Starovoitova: Ten Years After
Event Summary
The Kennan Institute commemorated the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Galina Starovoitova at a 10 November seminar. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Research Professor, Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Georgetown University; and Harley Balzer, Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs, Georgetown University reminisced about Galina Starovoitova’s remarkable life.
M. M. Balzer first discussed the career of Galina Starovoitova the academician. Starovoitovia was a pioneer in urban anthropology, especially in her work on Leningrad ethnic groups. She also conducted field work in virtually every ethnic hot spot in the former Soviet Union, including Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. As M. M. Balzer noted, Starovoitova’s academic research crossed over into the area of public policy in 1988, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party invited her to come and talk about the situation in Karabakh. This was just after she had sent a message of solidarity to Armenia's Karabakh Committee.
Starovoitova quickly transitioned from the life of a scholar to the very public life of a policymaker and politician. As President Yeltsin’s first nationalities advisor, Starovoitova struggled to prevent the disintegration of the Russian Federation. “Despite President Yeltsin’s famous phrase ‘take all the sovereignty you can swallow,’” M. M. Balzer noted, “Starovoitova advocated a viable federation, not secession of the republics.” Starovoitova later received a United States Institute of Peace grant, where she enumerated a series of conditions for when secession was morally acceptable. Based on these criteria, Starovoitova concluded that only two republics – Tuva and Chechnya – remotely could be considered for possible secession from the Russian Federation.
According to M. M. Balzer, Starovoitiva would have been horrified by the second Chechen war, Beslan, Nalchik, and Russia’s involvement in Ossetia. M. M. Balzer described how Starovoitova herself represented a moderate Russian nationalism that was balanced by a fascination with western values. Starovoitova reaffirmed her Orthodox faith and rejoiced at the resurgence of the Church, but she was also worried about the 1997 law on traditional religions and the rise of the Red-Brown coalition and other extremist groups, observed M. M. Balzer.
M. M. Balzer concluded by noting how Starovoitova would have enjoyed some of the changes that have occurred in Russia over the past decade. Starovoitova would have loved the increased dynamism of the Internet and the new travel opportunities for young people, a particularly important constituency for Starovoitova. One of her most serious slogans in her last political campaign, noted M. M. Balzer was that “the most important [aspect] in my platform is the future of those whom today cannot vote.”
Harley Balzer picked up on the development of Starovoitova’s political career. According to H. Balzer, Starovoitova believed that the oligarchs, as dangerous as they were, represented a phenomenon which Russia could handle. Starovoitova was much more concerned with corruption within the bureaucracy and in the budgetary process, and it was these types of issues that dominated the latter part of her life. The nature of Starovoitova’s political career served as a critical reminder of what politics was like in Russia during the 1990s, a period which is now being lost, concluded H. Balzer.
H. Balzer described his final meeting with Starovoitova about six weeks before her death, during which Starovoitova talked about the numerous threats on her life. H. Balzer referred to her assassination as a turning point in recent Russian history. Earlier killings were linked to money and economic motives, but Starovoitova's murder was a purely political assassination. It is also one in a long list of unsolved killings that causes serious damage both to the credibility of the Russian legal system and to Russia's standing in the world. H. Balzer concluded by citing Levon Abrahamian's comment that Galina Starovoitova set an example for all of us by never responding to a difficult situation by saying "That's not my problem."