POLITICS: ISLAM AND EURASIANISM
7. OFFICIAL EURASIANISM IN ORENBURG PROVINCE
SOURCE. Grigorii Kosach, 'Regional'noe "grazhdanskoe polietnicheskoe soobshchestvo": variant Orenburgskoi oblasti' [A Regional "Civic Multiethnic Community": The Orenburg Province Variant], pp. 53-76 in Real'nost' etnicheskikh mifov [The Reality of Ethnic Myths] (Moscow: Gendal'f for the Carnegie Moscow Center, 2000)
There are many Eurasianisms. Among the most important though least studied are the Eurasianist ideologies espoused by provincial elites in the ethnically mixed regions of the southeastern part of European Russia. And it is not only the elites of ethnic republics like Tatarstan who talk about Eurasianism, but also the elite of predominantly Russian Orenburg Province, who take pride in the traditional role of their province as "the gateway between Europe and Asia." The author, a historian at Moscow State University's Institute of the Countries of Asia and Africa, has provided a stimulating analysis of Orenburg Eurasianism and its political function.
Ethnic communities in the province are represented through the system of extra-territorial cultural autonomy. (1) By the mid-1990s there were 34 ethnic cultural associations: Russian, German, Polish, Mordvin, Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, etc. Representatives of the leading bodies of these associations sit on an "inter-ethnic coordinating council" attached to the Committee for Inter-Ethnic Relations of the provincial administration. The council is advisory in nature; it can only make recommendations. Each year the provincial administration works out a "purposive all-sided program for support of the ethnic cultures of the peoples of the Orenburg region" (although the financial subsidies, Kosach remarks, are "far from generous").
The prevention of ethnic and religious conflict is the responsibility of the Committee for Inter-Ethnic Relations together with the Committee for Liaison with Religious Organizations. The author notes that despite the rhetoric of fruitful interaction between different cultures and religions not a single member of this committee's staff comes from a Moslem background.
This point highlights a general disjuncture between the official ideology of a "Eurasian" and multi-ethnic civic provincial community and the underlying reality of a political system created unilaterally by Russians and motivated by specifically Russian geopolitical concerns.
Orenburg Province is a long wedge sandwiched between newly independent Kazakhstan to the south and the semi- sovereign ethnic republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan (and Chelyabinsk Province) to the north. Although Kazakhs, Bashkirs, and Tatars comprised in 1989 only 5.1, 2.4, and 7.3 percent respectively of the province's population as against 72.3 percent Russians, these groups are concentrated near the borders of their own republics and are believed to pose an irredentist threat. For these reasons Orenburg is pictured by the local elite as a beleaguered Russian outpost in the midst of Turkic and Moslem peoples -- as it was when the fortress was first built there in tsarist days. Thus although ethnic Russian nationalism is officially repudiated there are threads under the surface that link it to the official Eurasianist ideology.
The Eurasian ideology and the accompanying system of formal ethnic representation therefore function as means of placating and co-opting groups perceived as potentially threatening. Their purely cultural needs are recognized as legitimate, though not satisfied very well in practice: survey data cited by the author show that media provision in minority languages is felt to be inadequate, while it is still very difficult to open schools using those languages. But recognition of cultural needs comes at the expense of de-legitimizing political and economic demands. In fact, the Turkic groups remain poorly represented in Orenburg's real power structures: only in 1998 did the number of Turkic deputies in the provincial legislative assembly increase from one (a Kazakh) to five (two Kazakhs and three Tatars; still no Bashkirs).
[Official Orenburg Eurasianism may be contrasted with the Eurasianism propagated by prominent ideologists of the Shaimiev regime in Tatarstan -- in particular, by Rafael Khakim (or Khakimov), a top political adviser to Shaimiev. Khakim seeks to legitimize a Russian-Tatar partnership by appealing to the intertwined imperial legacies of Muscovy and the Golden Horde. (2) -- SDS]
NOTES
(1) See RAS No. 8 Item 6.
(2) See Rafael Khakim, "Russia and Tatarstan: At a Crossroads of History," Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia [M. E. Sharpe], Vol. 37 No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 30-71.
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