← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20266 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-09-17
2005-09-17 18:13 | User Profile
[url]http://www.fsumonitor.com/stories/091505Russ2.shtml[/url]
[FONT=Arial][SIZE=5]Window on Eurasia:[B] 'Xenophobia in Russia Has Never Been So High,' Polls Show[/B][/SIZE]
Paul Goble [/B]
Tartu, September 15 ââ¬â A poll conducted ten days ago by Moscow's Levada Center found that 45 percent of Russians now blame non-Russians for all their problems and 60 percent want the authorities to block new immigration, prompting a senior analyst there to declare that "xenophobia in Russia has never been so high."
Boris Dubin's comment was published yesterday in a "Novyye Izvestiya" article by Mikhail Pozdnyaev as part of the latter's discussion of controversies arising from the appearance at the Moscow Book Fair of openly anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant publications.
[B]The scandal concerning Elena Chudinova's dystopian novel, "The Mosque of Notre Dame de Paris," which urges Christians to combat the Islamicization of Europe, has only grown over the last few days. (For a summary of the novel, see ââ¬Å¾Gazetaââ¬Â for September 12 and the description in the September 12 "Window on Eurasia.")[/B]
The Moscow section of the liberal party Yabloko has denounced the novel for its anti-Muslim message ([url]http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=news&id+36415[/url]). But Roman Silantyev, the secretary of the Inter-religious Council of Russia who is close to both the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kremlin, advanced a very different argument. [B] He said that Russia's Muslims themselves were to blame for this book: "For a long time, the Dzhemals, the Polosins, the Porokhovs and their less well-known colleagues have slandered Christianity ââ¬Â¦ If they wanted a Russian Oriana Fallaci, they have achieved their goal" ( [url]http://www.religare.ru?news21320.htm[/url]).[/B]
But Silantyev did acknowledge that the appearance of such a book in the current environment could prove dangerous: He said that Chudinova's novel by itself "can turn hundreds of thousands of people into Islamophobes, and there is already nothing that can be done about that."
This anti-Islamic novel was hardly the only work at the Moscow exhibition promoting hatred of minorities. Among the books on offer there were the notorious anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Hitler's "Mein Kampf," Shafarevich's "Russophobia," and. Yemel'yanov's "Dezionization."
The appearance of these books and others like them have generated demands from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the Russian Jewish Congress, and the Moscow Human Rights Bureau that the authorities consider prosecuting both the publishers and the promoters of this exhibit, "Novyye Izvestiya" said.
But other evidence of the rising tide of xenophobia in the Russian Federation has been provided by reports from far beyond the walls of the Moscow Book Fair. Two of the most interesting recent ones concern the rapidly deteriorating interethnic situation in Kaliningrad and a broader survey of changing Russian attitudes toward immigrants old and new.
On Tuesday, "Komsomolskaya Pravda ââ¬â Kaliningrad" reported that a majority of its readers had reacted in a sharply negative way to an earlier article in that paper reporting on the plans of the local Muslim community to build a mosque in that non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation.
In the past, the paper said, Kaliningrad has not been a place of religious or racial intolerance because almost all of its residents are themselves migrants from somewhere else. But despite that, "attitudes are changing, [and] in place of peaceful assimilation, there is now an aggressive unwillingness to deal with other cultures or faiths."
The paper included an interview with a Tatar who currently operates a tour business in Kaliningrad. Aleksandr Shamshiyev -- who said he was not religious but was proud to be a Tatar -- confirmed everything the paper had reported and added some significant new details on his own.
He said that in Kaliningrad, many Russians no longer make distinctions among people of other faiths but rather lump them together, viewing all Muslims as Chechen terrorists. And he added that one of the reasons he misses his native city of Kazan is that there one never hears negative comments about "persons of Caucasus nationality."
But perhaps the most disturbing conclusions of all with regard to the future of interethnic and inter-confessional relations in the Russian Federation were suggested by a survey of the impact of ethnic conflicts on relations between Russians and longtime non-Russian residents by Vladimir Golyzhev posted on the APN website on September 6.
In the past, non-Russian immigrants to Russian regions accepted many of the cultural values and norms of behavior of the dominant community, to the point of acculturation if not assimilation, and were viewed by Russians as allies whenever more recent immigrants arrived and violated the rules of the game that the two other groups accepted.
That not only limited any inclination to xenophobia among Russians and thus helped to keep many situations under control but also allowed the authorities to present most conflicts not as ethnic ones but rather as the product of of bad behavior by new arrivals who had not yet learned how to behave.
[B]But Golyshev found, in many recent cases, including the Yandyki events in Astrakhan last month and several high-profile trials in Moscow, many Russians are breaking with their former allies, the longtime immigrants, and just as Shamshiyev suggested as the case in Kaliningrad lumping them together with the new arrivals.[/B]
That in turn has lead at least some of the longtime immigrants to feel betrayed and thus to begin to line up with their newly-arrived co-ethnics against the dominant majority. This trend is only beginning to take off, Golyshev suggests, but it is already feeding both Russian xenophobia and presaging more serious ethnic and religious conflicts ahead. [/FONT]