THE NON-RUSSIAN RUSSIA: THE DECOLONIAL LITERATURES
People and Languages Reduced to Tourist Brochures
To regional officials and entrepreneurs, the relatively unknown linguistic and ethnic diversity within the Russian Federation is a great resource. Travel agencies use enticing terms like “northern nomads” or “Siberian shamans”. Read Stefan Ingvarsson's essay about the projection of language and people in today's Russia.
CREDITSTEXT: STEFAN INGVARSSON
OCTOBER 17 2024
In Moscow, a grand, interactive exhibition opened last fall, where each of the country’s regions shows off its distinctive character, attractions, advancements, and progress. Close to a tenth of Russia’s total population has visited the pavilions to date, according to official numbers, and the whole thing should be considered a tremendous success for the official self-image. The area is described as a large-scale projection of the vast, mighty Russia in all its diversity and abundance. One explicit goal is emphasizing how multifaceted the country is. To an outside observer, this may seem quite unexpected. Have the leaders of the country finally decided to change course from uniformity to acknowledging diversity. Isn’t this what Russia’s nearly two hundred ethnic groups have long been hoping for?
To foreign visitors, the impression of homogeneity has always been striking. Like many empires, the Russian and Soviet ones have left layers of uniformity behind, a monotonous repetition of government buildings, housing projects and railway stations. Anyone who’s formed an idea of the country through the window of a Trans-Siberian Railway car tends to conclude that the largest state in the world is remarkably one-note. Sure, there is variation depending on whether buildings are tsarist or Soviet, Stalinist or bear the stamp of the Brezhnev-era prefab blocks, but across thousands of miles from Moscow to Vladivostok, these fluctuations occur within a limited architectural framework. In addition, modern-day Russia has erected an astonishingly monotonous set of offices, shopping malls, and public monuments. The landscape doesn’t change a whole lot either, until the train nears Lake Baikal – traveling through similar-looking taiga forests with a few birch trees sprinkled in.
It is in light of this uniformity – which does represent one side of the coin – that regional tourism offices in Russia have shown such an interest in minority cultures. Finding whatever differences can be found following a century of exceptional, and often violent, homogenization. Until recently, the Russian middle class was a hard-to-please demographic, preferring to visit other parts of Europe, Turkey, Egypt, or Thailand – but during the pandemic, and especially following Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, more and more people are choosing to vacation domestically. At the same time, the number of foreign tourists in the country plummeted, and the hospitality industry has been bending over backwards to attract new visitors. The industry has shifted gears to court domestic and Asian audiences. The number of Chinese tourists is slowly growing. The main draws are dramatic mountain ranges of the Caucasus and the Altai, the bears and volcanoes of Kamchatka, the warmth along the Black Sea coast, and the distinctly German atmosphere in the preserved suburbs of Kaliningrad. In the hunt for hotel guests, or simply in efforts to put one’s own region on the map, there is careful stocktaking of whatever stands out.
To regional officials and entrepreneurs, the relatively unknown linguistic and ethnic diversity within the Russian Federation is a great resource. Travel agencies use enticing terms like “northern nomads” or “Siberian shamans.” Any Komi, Evenk, Nenets, Nganasan, or Altaians willing to package their handicraft, songs, dances, traditional dress and dwellings in a way that benefits local tourism can count on support and revenue, not to mention some long-awaited visibility. Provided, that is, that they choose expressions that fit into the pre-approved image of patriotic unity within a “large and diverse” Russian nation, as is the officially mandated formula. A nation that now lays claim to the occupied, and since September 30, 2022, formally annexed, parts of Ukraine. These, too, are now included and, as such, are a natural part of the great expo in Moscow.
Indigenous peoples and minorities with few other options – in other words, those most vulnerable and marginalized – are particularly exposed to this new attention. It is hard to turn down visibility and opportunities that have rarely been on offer before. Especially if one’s own language and culture are under threat. The picture looks slightly different in regions characterized by fairly large minorities like Tatars, Chuvash, Mari, Tyvans, Buryat, or Ingush, or regions like Dagestan or Bashkortostan where groups other than ethnic Russians make up the majority. Here, minority languages have been in stronger positions and had significant institutions, but even these federal subjects are now being controlled by elites mainly seen as guardians of Moscow’s interests, and even in these regions, there is pressure to force one’s own culture and identity into a limited and simplified box. Not unlike the great expo.
Russia is not only the largest country in the world; it is also in a phase of territorial expansion. The ideological foundation of this expansion – and thus of the war of aggression against Ukraine – can be summed up by the term “the Russian world.” It is the belief in “Russian civilization” as wholly unique, but it also contains the claim that this “Russian world” does not end at the current borders of the Russian state. In this view, Russia extends to wherever someone claims to belong to that world; anyone who speaks Russian or has a Soviet background is welcome. What is proven by the war of aggression in Ukraine is that no one is expected to reject such an offer. The brutality wrought upon Ukrainian civilians by the Russian state sends a clear and horrific message, not just to Russia’s other neighboring countries, but in equal measure to the non-Russian population within the country itself. The attempt to invade Ukraine was preceded by several years of rolling back the rights of non-Russian peoples. And among those currently being mobilized as cannon fodder in this war, those peoples are clearly overrepresented. The situation was already difficult for many groups looking for a way to survive; it has now become critical.
To provide more specific examples, I’d like to bring you to the inland of the Kola Pensinsula, to a village I visited a few years ago with writer and journalist Liza Alexandrova-Zorina. She grew up in this landscape of lakes and mountain birch. Spoken here, sixty or so miles east of the border with Finnish Lapland, was the now-extinct language of Akkala Sámi, an Eastern Sámi dialect. In the last three decades, a handful of languages have gone extinct within the borders of the Russian Federation, while about twenty others risk facing the same fate very soon. Different reports give slightly different estimates since language activists and researchers use differing criteria, and since few have access to a truly comprehensive picture.
In the Soviet Union, like in the Nordic countries, the Sámi endured harsh assimilation policies. This could mean forced slaughter of entire reindeer herds and the relocation of former fishermen or reindeer herders to places where collective farms, mines, and large forestry operations were established. Many Sámi, primarily men, also fell victim to the terror of the Stalin era and were imprisoned or executed. Following World War II, Akkala Sámi was spoken by a small group of women who had managed to survive and hold on to their identity. Most of them married men recruited to the peninsula as workers from elsewhere in the Soviet Union, many of them miners from Ukraine. Around these parts, Sámi identity and Sámi customs mixed with newly arrived ones. If anything was passed down, it was passed down by the mother. The last woman fluent in Akkala Sámi passed away in 2004 and the language died with her, but in the small village of Jona, there are still women who protect their Akkala Sámi roots and know a few words and sentences in the language of their grandmothers. Some of them joik in a mixture of Russian and Sámi. Opinions differ among the women of the village on how to ensure the survival of their Sámi heritage. Some cling for dear life to what is known about and preserved from the culture of their foremothers, while others, in the time before the war and the closing of the borders, traveled to Norway and got their hands on blue gáktis in a cut that never existed in this part of Sápmi. Women in such colorful and more complete ensembles are rewarded by local authorities and brought on stage for local holidays and festivals. On those occasions, no mind is paid to whether clothes, drums and joiks are truly local or have been borrowed from other Sámi traditions.
The tiny fragment of Sámi descendants in the village is too small and under too much outside pressure for these differing views on their shared heritage to cause any true enmity, but the difference in attitudes does create obvious tensions. One woman feels she has made a connection with beings in the surrounding landscape and now considers herself a noaidi. She has acquired a drum in Norway. More traditionally minded women dismiss this as pure fancy with no basis in the customs they have inherited. They let their spiritually reborn neighbor do her thing, but fiercely cherish whatever has been passed down to them, even if it is incomplete and rife with holes. The woman with the drum, in turn, is convinced that local customs will go extinct unless elements are borrowed from a still-living Sámi culture, and in comparison, the Sámi cultures of her neighboring countries seem vibrant and well on their way to recover from a form of oppression not entirely unlike theirs. To the women of Jona, the Sámi of Norway are almost strong enough to be an assimilating force in itself, given how little remains of their own heritage.
Before Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, this tiny fragment of Sámi women wouldn’t dare meet foreigners without prior approval from the FSB security agency. Today, all contact with the Nordic countries is cut off and would be downright dangerous. It was because the Sámi had ties across borders that they were persecuted and executed by Stalin’s secret police, and today, they are afraid of history repeating itself. The border with Finland is not a well-guarded fence but a firebreak through a forest. Yet it seems more and more like a new iron curtain.
It is increasingly evident that the emperor of the newly reborn Russian Empire has no clothes. The violence the Russian state is perpetrating against civilians in the occupied parts of Ukraine speaks volumes about the true view of national community in Putin’s Russia. This may not have been a coherent ideology at first. The inner circle around Putin tried out different political strategies, but over time a beaten path becomes accepted as truth. Historically, Russian nationalism has made no distinction between East Slavs who trace their roots back to medieval Rus. “Being Russian,” or perhaps more accurately “being of Russia,” where the ”Russian world” reaches far beyond the borders of the Russian Federation, is definitely inclusive of, and open to, any Ukrainian who chooses to belong, but any Ukrainian who holds on to the notion that their culture is distinct from Russian culture becomes an enemy in need of reeducation, deportation or, ultimately, execution. Even non-Slavs are included in this “Russian world” if they agree to certain common codes and the centrality of the Russian language. This inclusion is not free of problems, particularly for those whose looks don’t read Slavic, but any identities that once served as alternatives to being Russian/being from Russia are being pushed down. The sole exception is Chechnya, functioning as a de facto satellite state. Russia is more centralized today than ever before. This is the paradox behind the multitude of customs and traditional clothing on display at the Moscow expo. Past empires that were ruled from Moscow and St. Petersburg relied on a high degree of autonomy for the peoples they conquered or offered protection. With the exception of Stalin’s time in power in the Soviet Union, none of them hold a candle to the Russia of today in terms of top-down control. During Putin’s public addresses and state ceremonies, TV cameras zoom in on lamas, muftis, and rabbis in traditional garb in the back rows, while the Orthodox Patriarch is always at the very front. A new message is conveyed about a vast and varied nation recognizing its diversity, albeit one where the Russian people, the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church serve to lead, unite, and uphold the state.
How, then, does this mesh with the growing visibility of minorities in travel brochures and at cultural festivals? Since Vladimir Putin came to power, linguistic and cultural rights have been under heavy attack. In 2018, education in any language other than Russian was made optional by a new federal law. This applied to the so-called national federal subjects or republics. Historically, these regions have given special status to their titular nationality, such as the Komi in the Komi Republic or the Khakass in Khakassia. Preceding the new language legislation was an official visit to the republic of Mari El in 2017, during which Putin expressed the opinion that forcing people – ethnic Russians being the implication – to learn a language other than their native tongue in school was unforgivable, while also draining resources from important Russian classes. This comment was made regarding the then-compulsory Mari language classes for all residents of the republic. His statement was met by acts of protest in the neighboring republics of Tatarstan and Chuvashia emphasizing the importance of their respective native tongues. Mikael Nydahl tells me about Putin visiting Chuvashia as well around the same time, and local leaders changing all the bus stop signs, which were usually bilingual, to Russian-only signs. Following his visit, the bilingual signs were put back. Nevertheless, all resistance had been squashed within a year. In line with increasing repression against independent media and civil society in general, organizations representing ethnic minorities in each region were seen as a potential venue for resistance and were pushed down or banned. Anything that might be able to channel for discontent or dissent is removed in today’s Russia. Conditions for minority languages in the Russian Federation have changed radically over the past six years. Languages that used to be mandatory for everyone in a republic are now relegated to a facultative periphery where they are expected to wither away. The repressive political line is suspicious of all forms of ethnically based organizing.
In 2019, the new language policy was met by a one-man protest in Udmurtia’s capital Izhevsk. Albert Razin, an Udmurt researcher and activist, took a stand outside the regional parliament holding two posters. One of them read, in Russian: “If my language dies tomorrow, then I’m ready to die today,” and the other asked: “Do I have a fatherland?” The first poster quoted Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov, who wrote in his native tongue of Avar. Remaining in that position for a while, Razin then set himself on fire and later died from his burns.
Self-identified Udmurt people currently make up a little over a third of the population in the republic where they are the titular nationality. Fewer and fewer speak the language. The capital is a center for domestic arms production, led by the world-famous Kalashnikov factories. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, malls in the city have been converted into drone factories. Russia’s need for munitions creates new jobs, which in turn attract workers from far beyond the borders of the republic. Earlier legislation would have ensured their children learned basic Udmurt in school and knew a thing or two about the culture that shaped these areas; today, they will at most see some local handicraft at a city festival. It is not without reason that a new generation of Udmurt activists embrace Razin as a role model and a whistleblower.
Things are progressing along a few contradictory paths. One of them leads through the travel brochure version of diversity seen at the Moscow expo and at televised state ceremonies. To those who lack other options, this heavily conditioned form of visibility may offer some hope. Another path is lined with decisions revoking language rights and canceling funding for some organizations representing ethnic minorities while banning others. Beneath these two paths is a third, one more difficult to spot, driven by the will to say something true about oneself, one’s home and one’s history. This path finds ways forward that can’t always be controlled or banned.
Stefan Ingvarsson works as analyst at Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies, SCEEUS. He has a background in publishing, journalism and literary translation. From 2015 to 2020 Stefan was the cultural council at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. Before that he worked as the producer of the international festival Stockholm Literature at Moderna Museet.
