The historical unity of the Slavic and Turkic peoples is the foundation of the creation of the Russian state and has become a pledge for the future development of every people in Russia, Sergey Naryshkin said in a greeting sent to a scientific-practical conference in the Altai Republic – Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, quoted by TASS, writes BTA.
The "Upper Altai" forum – the ancestral home of the Turks. To the history of the birth of Turkic civilization“ with the participation of Turkologists from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan was held on October 8 and 9 in Manzherok in Russia's Altai Republic in Western Siberia, which has a population of 212,263.
A little earlier, on September 26, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia released a message in connection with a report on the rights of indigenous peoples in individual countries. The report said that the US, Canada and other Western countries are trying to accuse Russia of violating the rights of indigenous peoples in order to divert attention from their own problems in this area. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow points out that “recently, the US, Canada and their allies have increased their activity in international forums, in regional formats and in the media, trying to shift the focus of attention from the current problems of indigenous peoples in North America, in the West countries of the Arctic region, and also in Australia, New Zealand and Japan to allegedly existing “violations of the rights of indigenous peoples” in Russia and in a number of large developing countries.
However, as noted in an analytical material on the subject in the English-language publication “Moscow Times” (MT) activists Pavel Sulyandziga (of Udegean descent) and Dmitry Berezhkov (of Itelmen descent), “armed conflicts between the Russian state and subjugated peoples in Siberia demonstrate that Russian colonization differs little from European colonization in Africa, Asia, and the Americas . The only obvious difference is how the colonizers treated the conquered peoples. While the Spanish conquistadors carried out large-scale massacres in search of gold, the Siberian Cossacks were more interested in extracting lucrative benefits from the local people. These taxes, paid in the form of skins with fur, provided by legendary hunters from the conquered peoples, became the main source of enrichment for the Russian tsars, Sulyandziga and Berezhkov note. The legend that the indigenous peoples were such skilled hunters that they could shoot a squirrel in the eye is still relevant to this day”, MT activists point out.
The two also recall a case from 1997, when at an academic conference on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russian historians could not provide enough arguments to support the myth that the region “voluntarily“ united imperial Russia”. When it became clear how untenable their arguments were, one of the scientists remarked: “Well, there was colonization, but it was a good colonization.
In the late 1990s, Russia planned to celebrate the anniversary of the “voluntary unification” of Kamchatka and Russia. But Thansom – However, the council of the Itelmen (indigenous people of Kamchatka who speak a language related to Koryak and the Chukchi language) made an official decision to boycott the celebrations, because the annexation of Kamchatka could in no way be described as voluntary. In fact, this unification represented a violent conquest of the peninsula by the Russian Empire, MT summarizes.
The publication summarizes that in the second half of the 20th century, the right of peoples to self-determination gained more and more support and culminated with its inclusion in the UN Charter, and then in the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and nations. Thus, one by one, the overseas territories of the European powers began to gain independence.
Meanwhile, however, Soviet leaders, who are happy to use these arguments whenever they can, prefer to pretend that the USSR is an exception to these principles, Sulyandziga and Berezhkov summarize.
Kremlin willingly uses UN declarations to actively promote the anti-imperialist struggle around the world, but this does not affect the way it treats people in the Russian state, is MT's position.
This year, authorities in Moscow added an unprecedented 54 indigenous groups in the Russian Federation to a growing list of “extremist” organizations, writes in another summary material MT. The Russian Ministry of Justice has declared unrelated organizations to be divisions of the vaguely defined “Anti-Russian separatist movement”, banned in June by the Russian Supreme Court as “extremist” organization.
The new additions to the list of “extremists” groups include the “Asians from Russia“ and “Free Buryatia“, the “Free Ingria“ movement, “Saha Pacifist Association“ and “World Chechen Congress”. According to the Ministry of Justice, the “Anti-Russian separatist movement” is trying to “destroy multinational unity and territorial integrity” of the country. The label “extremist“ means that anyone convicted of ties to this organization could face up to 6 years in prison.
Viktoria Maladaeva – founder of the “Indigenous Peoples of Russia” foundation, tells MT that even before the ban on the non-existent “Anti-Russian separatist movement” people have not dared to like social media posts or write comments in support of indigenous human rights groups because security forces closely monitor such activity.
According to Stefania Kulaeva – human rights activist and expert at the Brussels-based "Memorial" Anti-Discrimination Center, the issue of criminal prosecution of the so-called separatism is not new. People have been arrested in Russia, Kulaeva points out, simply for advocating for the federalization of regions such as Siberia, the Kuban, Karelia, etc. Kulaeva added to MT that Russians who say that the occupied Crimea or Donbass are Ukrainian lands have previously been brought under criminal responsibility.
Abubakar Yangulbaev – a Chechen lawyer, human rights defender and activist, summarizes that with these actions, in short, “the prison of the peoples is making an effort to remain a prison”.
The founder of the “Free Yakutia” Sargalana Kondakova explains that the Kremlin first fabricated an “anti-Russian separatist movement” and then declared it extremist. It seems that their fear of the country falling apart is so great that they have decided to find a universal solution against all movements from ethnic republics, regardless of what views they profess, Kondakova believes.
Furthermore, over the past two years, activists have noted that Russia's ethnic minorities continue to bear a disproportionately large number of casualties in the war against Ukraine. It amounts to a “terrible tragedy that no one talks about… After another generation, these nations will simply disappear”, warns Buryat researcher Maria Vyushkova.
She explains to MT that the disproportionately large number of those killed is the result of a combination of factors: a huge number of mobilized representatives of ethnic minorities, regional inequalities, structural discrimination, efforts by the authorities to minimize discontent among the politically active Russian majority.
The researcher concludes to MT that this is how the Kremlin limits political risks to a minimum: it wages war by using population groups, which the average politically active Russian will not be bothered by.
As noted by the Tatar-Bashkir service of Radio Free Europe; on September 25, soldiers from the Republic of Tatarstan and from the Republic of Bashkortostan, whose population is about 4 million people, died in Ukraine, the most compared to all other regions in the Russian Federation.
Otherwise, at the end of June MT announced that “Google Translate“ has added 12 more languages of ethnic minorities in Russia: among them Bashkir, Chechen, Udmurt, Yakut, Crimean Tatar (except Tatar, which is spoken in Tatarstan).
Exactly a month ago, RFE reported that activists demonstrated in Warsaw in memory of the 79-year-old Udmurt scientist Albert Razin. 5 years ago, on October 10, 2019, he set himself on fire in front of the regional parliament building in Izhevsk – capital of the Udmurt Republic located in European Russia with a population of one and a half million, in protest against the language policy in education.
Then Razin holds a placard with the text: “If my tongue disappears tomorrow, I am ready to take my last breath today”. A year before his death, Razin was among the signatories of an open letter urging the Udmurt parliament not to adopt a bill that would abolish the compulsory teaching of indigenous languages in regions and republics where non-Russian ethnic groups are widely represented.