Dr. Alexander Osipov is a Board Member at the International Center for Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity Studies in Prague. His current research interests include ethnic and racial discrimination, autonomy arrangements, diaspora issues, and ethno-cultural diversity policies. He is also doing research on post-communist transformation in Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.
Some people anticipate that Russia’s ethnic mosaic and non-Russian peoples’ grievances and protests will be a driver of the country’s transformations. Recent history gives no weighty reasons for such expectations. Let’s recall the political movements of repressed peoples that emerged in the late 1980s, and seemingly had every chance to achieve their goal of redressing past injustices—yet failed to realize these opportunities. The movements’ demobilization and failure took place in a short time. By the mid-1990s, they had all but faded away, without pressure or intimidation from the then-half-democratic Russian authorities. Why?
About three million women, men and children were sent into exile to remote parts of the Soviet Union in the period from the 1930s to the early 1950s on grounds of their ethnic origins. The government’s major motivation was to remove populations it perceived as “disloyal” from strategically important areas, primarily borderlands.
Among the victims of deportations affecting 10,000 people or more were 16 large ethnicities, including Armenians, Balkars, Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, Finns, Germans, Greeks, the Ingush, Karachais, Koreans, Poles, Turks, along with some smaller groups. This massive population transfer entailed the elimination of territorial autonomous entities; human casualties due to malnutrition; and deprivation of civil rights under a special surveillance regime.
After Stalin’s death, in the late 1950s, most—but not all—repressed peoples were allowed to return to their homelands. Most—but not all—previously abolished autonomous regions were reinstated, but their administrative borders remained redrawn. Those peoples who were not allowed to return—primarily the Crimean Tatars, Germans and Meskhetian Turks—claimed their right to their respective homelands, but faced persecution.
During perestroika in the late 1980s, there emerged mass movements of “formerly deported peoples” (FDPs). Some, like the Meskhetian Turks, required the right to return to their homelands; some, like the Volga Germans, wanted the reinstatement of their autonomous republics or other administrative entities; some, like the Balkars and Ingush, demanded pre-deportation administrative borders. But regardless of their specific ethnicity, all of these peoples demanded that the Soviet government acknowledge their expulsions as a groundless misdeed and pay out compensation.
At first glance, these movements seemed poised for success. First, they had the capacity to mobilize against the backdrop of collective trauma and an obvious state crime fromthe recent past. Second, the authorities were ready to acknowledge past injustices and engage in undoing them. Third, the FDPs’ claims gained broad public support.
During the Soviet Union’s demise, in 1991, Russia enacted two interlinked laws intended to redress the crimes suffered by repressed peoples and to “rehabilitate” individual victims. At the time, the government demonstrated its readiness to satisfy the FDPs’ claims, yet the process of doing so was not smooth.
The legislation was only a framework and required additional executive orders to proceed. The law on individual victims of repressions entailed only tiny compensations—for example, payments for lost property never exceeded 300 USD per person. Meanwhile, the law on repressed peoples stipulated the reinstatement of old administrative borders, thus boosting ethnic conflicts. In the face of these obstacles, in July 1992, the government halted further territorial changes. Some FDP movements engaged in local politics, which diverted them from their initial goals. Many people emigrated or turned to merely cultural and commemorative, rather than directly political, activities.
In theory, the declining opportunities to make real change between 1992 and1993 were not, on their own, reason to abandon earlier goals. The movements could have pursued intermediary objectives, lobbying for legislative changes and more reasonable compensations, building political coalitions, negotiating trade-offs, and so forth. Yet nothing of the kind took place, and FDPs shortly disappeared not only from the headlines, but from politics themselves.
The statements and comments by the FDP leaders and activists of that time shed some light onto the reasons for their abandonment of their original mission. Most importantly, the members of the movements themselves beganadjusting their behavior to imaginary “state interests.”
First, the FDPs ceded agenda-setting rights entirely to the government and saw themselves as mere clients. Second, the FDP movements did not regard the repressive Soviet state and its successors as culprits, instead considering the deportations under Stalin a deviation from normalcy akin to a natural disaster.
Third, the key issue for most movements was the formal belonging of disputed territories to their “own” administrative units. The result of this framing was the threat of ethnic conflict, first and foremost around the Prigorodny raion in North Ossetia—and, conversely, a lack of mobilization in cases where territorial issues were not at stake. One aspect of this situation is a readiness, among many members of ethnic minorities, to engage in armed clashes defending the symbolic position of their homeland, and, at the same time, a neglect of individuals’ rights and interests.
In the face of this belligerence by some of their constituents, the FDP leadership (and, to some extent, the grassroots) grew fearful of conflict and destabilization—producing a disproportionate attention to the interests of the Russian government. In turn, these state-centered attitudes make it impossible to pursue a consistent, multilayered political strategy independent of the government. The longevity of these attitudes is assured by their status as a well-established worldview supposedly inherited from the Soviet past and widely shared by many in Russia regardless of ethnicity.
