Window on Eurasia: Do the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Turkish Summer’ Point to a ‘Tajikistan Fall’?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 19 – The presidential election campaign in Tajikistan has not yet begun, but already those surround President Emomali Rahmon are “in a panic” that “the Arab Spring” and “the Turkish summer” may lead to “a Tajik fall” in which those now in office may not be able to cope with a rising tide of public protest, according to a Tajik commentator.

            In an essay on Centrasia.ru today, Saifullo Samarzoda suggests that the Dushanbe elite feels trapped “between the Scylla of dictatorship and the Charybdis of democracy” and that all its actions in the coming months are likely to reflect that fundamentally insoluble conflict (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1371643140).

            On the one hand, members of Rahmon would like to choose the former; but on the other, they know that they have to “choose” the other as well because without the trappings of elections, they know they will not be viewed as legitimate by the international community or accepted as such by their own population.

            Consequently, they are tacking between one and the other, Samarzoda says.  The first victim is “the much-suffering Party of the Islamic Rebirth of Tajikistan.” But because most Tajiks are Muslims, the regime has had to use “direct terror” and thus has further undermined its standing with the faithful.

            However, far more serious, Rahmon’s approach has led the members of that party to remember that the president promised the United Tajik Opposition that they would get 30 percent of all government posts if they agreed to make peace.  By failing to follow through, Rahmon has lost their support. “It is nothing personal; it is simply business” for both sides.

            That doesn’t mean that the incumbent president has anything to worry about from a candidate the entire opposition might agree on. No, the Tajik commentator says, “the strength of the opposition is not what it says about specific issues” but from the regime’s inability to propose anything given its failure to live up to its promises and widespread corruption.

            As a result, Rahmon has come up with simply “fantastic” projects like the Ragun hydro dam and railroads from China and the UAE, project that the government-controlled media say will over the next 30 years transform backward Tajikistan into “a heaven on earth, an Asian Switzerland.”

            No one believes this, not even those who proclaim it. Consequently, Rahmon has concluded that “each resident of Tajikistan” must feel the hot breath of “the Scylla of the authoritarian dictatorship” even as he goes forward with plans to hold the presidential elections as scheduled.

However, “international experience shows that in conditions when all opposition parties are under control and the pot of popular anger is tightly shut, something can break out in almost any place.” That is what sparked the Arab spring and the Turkish summer, and the Dushanbe elite fears it could happen in Tajikistan this fall.

Tajikistan has already had experience with football fans spilling out into the streets.  That could happen again, Samarzoda says, and with more obvious political consequences.  Blocking mobile phones or Internet connectivity is no insurance against that possibility.

According to the commentator, “the people are tired of Rahmon, his thieving little family, his fantastic projects, his hypocrisy and cowardice.” As the date of the elections approach, that exhaustion is likely to grow – and if people around Rahmon see that trend, they may take some unusual steps.

The ruling elite could decide “to sacrifice the capital in order to preserve the ship by organizing a palace coup.”  And that possibility means that “no pressure on the opposition, no denial of equal rights [in voting], not even 95 percent of the vote will guarantee Rahmon the love of the people or continuation in office.”

Window on Eurasia: Russians’ Lack of Trust Explains Their Xenophobia and Support for Top Leaders, Moscow Sociologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 19 – Strikingly low levels of inter-personal trust among Russians, the result of the experiences of Soviet times, explain both their xenophobic reactions to immigrants and their high rates of support for Russian leaders because “distrust in institutions is transformed into trust in the president and prime minister,” according to a leading Moscow sociologist.

            This is just one of the insights provided by Vladimir Mukomel, the head of the migration studies section of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, during the course of an interview published this week by “Konkurent,” the business supplement to “Vostochno-Siberskaya Pravda” (vsp.ru/social/2013/06/17/533332).

            Russian society, the scholar points out, was “not ready” for the influx of immigrants. On the one hand, it lacked “a tradition of immigration” and thus did not have its own precedents for coping.  And on the other, it displayed an extraordinarily low level of inter-personal trust” and thus has viewed immigrants as “a threat to social, political and economic stability.”

            Mukomel says that Russians need to recognize both how much they need immigrants for various jobs and how rapidly the face of immigrants is changing.  A decade ago, Central Asians formed only six percent of legal immigrants in the Russian Federation; now, they form more than 70 percent of the total.

Most Central Asian gastarbeiters are from Uzbekistan, the Moscow sociologist says, with smaller groups from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The influx from those two countries has “stabilized” because their population resources are “exhausted.” Uzbekistan with its 30 million people will be main source in the future.

Another way in which the face of the immigrant population as changed is its shift from seasonal flows in which workers come in the spring and go home in the fall to one in which almost 40 percent of the total now remain in Russia all year, returning home for visits only occasionally.

And yet a third change, Mukomel continues, is that women make up an increasing part of the flow.  A decade ago, most gastarbeiters were working-age males. Now women are coming as well. Most immigrants from Ukraine and Moldova already are female, but this trend is “increasing among people from Central Asia, in the first instance, from Kyrgyzstan.”

Precise information about these trends is difficult to obtain, the sociologist notes. “With the collapse of the USSR, the statistics system collapsed as well.”  There are problems with records at border crossings. And the movement of people generally reflects personal choices about economic betterment rather than orders from the authorities.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “the Soviet approach,” which was based on the Leninist idea that those in power could control everything, “continues to dominate the mentality of those who make decisions. This is a serious problem.”

But it is possible to collect information about them through surveys.  “Migrants are quite open,” although on sensitive issues, they may choose not to answer. The big problem is finding funding to do this kind of research as most officials are having to deal with declining budgets and see money for sociological studies as an expense they can do without.

Russia needs this expertise because it needs migrants, the sociologist says. They help make up for the increasing demographic decline of the Russians as a nation and the growing interest among Russians in pursuing higher education and the white collar jobs that such training leads to.

In addition to immigration, Russia also faces the challenge of dealing with largely uncontrolled flows of people within the country, largely east to west and north to south andto the major cities like Moscow.  But in the future, the size of this form of migration is going to be relatively small because there are so few people who have not already left. The only exception is the North Caucasus where populations continue to grow.

Asked about quotas, Mukomel responded that “quotas do not regulate anything.” At best, they “fix only the relationship between legal and illegal migrants. The lower the quotas,the more migrants will work without having the legal basis to do so. The higher the quotas, the fewer of these there will be.”

Related to this is “the paradox” that “quotas are set by the federal authorities” who often do not know the needs of businesses in the regions as the recent crisis showed. Moscow insisted that the regions reduce their quotas and said that if they didn’t, their subsidies would be cut.  “A very market-like approach,” Mukomel said.

The Moscow sociologist was also dismissive of many myths held by Russians about migrants. Many Russians believe immigrants are a burden on the country’s infrastructure. Many believe that they take jobs from Russians. And many think they are source of illness and crime. But none of these is true.

As far as promoting the integration of immigrants is concerned, Mukomel argued that Moscow has adopted a one-size-fits-all approach instead of recognizing that many migrants only want to make money and leave while others in fact do want to become citizens and remain in the Russian Federation.

“The main challenge for Russia is a flood of people with different social experiences, culture and tradition,” and that challenge is going to increase because the differences between Russia and the non-Russian countries of origin of the immigrants is “increasing” as “the process of nation building” goes on in both.

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Window on Eurasia: MGIMO Analyst Sees Border Changes Ahead for Central Asia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 18 – Andrey Kazantsev, the director of the Analytic Center of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Moscow Institute for the Study of International Relations (MGIMO), says that the borders of the countries of the Central Asian region are likely to change over the next century and that this prospect should worry Russian policy makers.

            In an 1800-word essay on the Rusichi Center portal, the MGIMO analyst outlines five different scenarios under which these changes could occur, the role of external and internal factors in this process, and the probabilities for each of them (rusichi-center.ru/e/3170795-pyat-stsenariev-buduschih-granits-tsentralnoy-a).

            The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, he says, showed that “the collapse of states of this region which had ceased to be able to control their borders could have serious consequences at the other end of the world” and prompted the US and other powers to get more involved there.

            Such external involvement, which focuses on the resolution of regional problems like terrorism, drug trafficking, and failed states and the use of this region as a north-south or east-west trade route, is likely to have an impact on the borders of the Central Asian countries in the future.

            If the outside powers cooperate, Kazantsev says, then “the current borders of the states will be preserved,” but if as seems more likely they compete or even come into direct conflict with one another, then the borders are almost certain to change along the lines of one of the five scenarios he outlines

The first scenario, he says, would involve China taking “complete” control of the region. Beijing will be able to do so because it will find “a common language both with the secular elites of the region an also (with the help of its ally Pakistan) with the Islamic extreists by directing their energy against Western influence.”

The expansion of China, the MGIMO analyst says, would represent not something new but the return of China to a region where it once was the dominant power.  Diplomatists should remember that the borders of the Tang empire of Chin were much father west than the current ones.”

The second scenario would involve “the re-establishment of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire.”  This is much less likely than the first, but its probability is “not zero even now,” although the prospects for such an outcome, Kazantsev says, “are rapidly decreasing with each passing year.

The third scenario for border changes in Central Asia over the next century would be the creation in the region of a Central Asian system on the model of the European Union to deal with problems like sharing water.  This could happen either by agreement or “by the establishment of a military-political block around a strengthening Uzbekistan.”

The fourth scenario would be the creation of an Islamist khalifate on some or all of the territory of the region. That would reflect both external influences and internal developments.

Finally, there is a fifth scenario, one that has more to do with internal factors than with external ones.  That would see border changes happen as a result of the weakness of the existing states, the continuing strength of supra- and sub-national identities, and the inability of governments to block fragmentation or even collapse with new states emerging on the model of Southern Sudan.

Despite the fact that “ethno-national identities have arisen in all the republics of the former Soviet Central Asia and even a civic (Kazakhstan) identity as arisen in Kazakhstan, these states have not overcome either the smaller or larger identities, and these could play a role in future border changes.

Of these five possible scenarios, Kazantsev argues, the first – Chinese expansion – and the last state failure and disintegration –“are more probable than all the rest.” Moreover, they do not contradict one another because the dangers of disintegration to its west would be a particularly powerful motivating force for Beijing to extend its control over that region.

Window on Eurasia: Three Re-Interpretations of the Soviet Past and Russia’s Future

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 18 –Three new re-interpretations of the Soviet past –one that argues Stalin’s greatest mistake was annexing Western Ukraine, a second that asserts the communist struggle against religion led to the collapse of the USSR, and a third that claims the GULAG helped Moscow win World War II – could have serious implications for Russia’s future.

            At the very least, these new approaches to some of the most sensitive issues in 20^th century Russian history underscore how difficult Moscow will find it to come up with a single history textbook for Russian schools and how dangerous it may be for the Russian authorities to re-open some of these old wounds.

            First, concerning the annexation of Western Ukraine: “All of the present-day events which are taking place in Ukraine are the logical result of the results of the well-known Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” under the terms of which Moscow annexed Western Ukraine “or as it was called earlier, Galicia,” Andrey Lebedev writesin the latest issue of “Voyennoye obozreniye” (topwar.ru/29505-prisoedinenie-zapadnoy-ukrainy-k-sssr-kak-neobhodimost-ili-oshibka-stalinskogo-perioda.html).

            It is clear, he continues, that because events at that time were developing at such a rapid pace, “the Soviet leadership apparently simply was not able to correctly calculate all the negative consequenes with the unification of Western Ukraine to the USSR,” but now the Moscow military analyst says, those consequences are increasingly obvious.

            Whatever the Soviet and Russian governments say, Lebedev argues, “Galicia before [1939] had never been Russian, and despite the passage of more than 73 years, it has not become genuinely Ukrainian either.” That is because its residents for centuries lived in other empires and states” and thus had different experiences and expectations.

            By annexing, the Soviet leadership unintentionally and “with its own hands” brought within the borders of the USSR “’a Trojan horse’” which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and lies behind anti-Russian developments in Ukraine over the last two decades.

            That does not mean that Stalin had an easy choice. Galicia had been a hot bed of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism before that time, Lebedev says, and the Soviet leader clearly preferred to try to transform it before a war with Germany would break out.  But he lacked the time to overcome the legacy of Western Ukraine which would continue to be a problem.

             “It was thus impossible not to annex these territories at that time,” the “Voyennoe obozreniye” writer says, but at the same time, joining this center of Western Ukrainian nationalism toSoviet Union was extremely unprofitable and dangerous as is confirmed by the entire post-war history of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.”

            Second, concerning the impact of Soviet anti-religious policies: In yesterday’s “Vzglyad,”  Aleksandr Razuvayev argues religion helped make the Russian Empire great, the fight against faith in Soviet times led to the destruction of the USSR, and the revival of both Orthodoxy and Islam can make Russia great again (vz.ru/columns/2013/6/17/637561.html).

            His argument is not only intriguing on its face but carries with it some potentially far-reaching consequences.  “After 70 years of godlessness and the troubles of the 1990s,” the business analyst writes, “Russia is slowly but surely returning to its historical values, among which Orthodoxy and Islam are playing a key role.”

            In tsarist Russia, he notes, “the church was not separate from the state and this fact undoubtedly helped Russia survey many tests, although it did not save it from the catastrophe of 1917.” And today, Orthodoxy and Islam are helping Russia once again and should not be separate from the state because they promote Russia’s national interests.

            Many liberals believe, he continues, that the separation of church and state is necessary in order to have “a successful competitive economy.”  But in fact religious values help promote entrepreneurialism and hard work, and the destruction of these values undermine those positive trends, as Europe is demonstrating today.

             “From the point of view of a believer, turning away from God automatically leads any nation or person to self-destruction and death,” he writes. And it was “precisely the turning away from God that in the final analysis destroyed the Soviet Union” by undermining the work ethic of the population of that country.

            The communists have advanced another “’red’ myth” about religion, Razuvayev says. They argue that “a real believer must be poor and unhappy” and that in turn means that “a successful individual in the best case is a great sinner, and in the worst is a servant of Satan himself.”

            But the facts are just the reverse, he argues.  Religion encourages believers to be “strong and successful people.” And in an update of Weber’s writings about Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism, Razuvayev says that “in classical capitalism, poverty is almost always a synonym for laziness. And laziness is a sin because to be poor is simply shameful.”

            Today, he concludes, “Russia is one of the most promising markets in the world,” a reflection of the ways in which religion, Orthodoxy and Islam, are reducing to an absolute minimum something that plagued Soviet times, too many lazy people, by encouraging Russians to work hard.

            And third, concerning the contribution of the GULAG to Soviet victory: Russian and Western scholars have either ignore the role of the Soviet prison camp system during World War II or suggested that the USSR won despite rather than because of it, Yury Tarasov writes in “Voyennoye obozreniye.”

            But in fact, the military analyst says, the GULAG played a large, even critical role in supporting the Soviet military effort, providing a disproportionate share of the country’s extraction of needed raw materials and of military-related war production (topwar.ru/29590-gulag-i-nasha-pobeda.html#comment-id-1255504).

                On the basis of various scholarly works, Lebedev says that during the war there were approximately three million Soviet citizens in the GULAG or in special settlements and they produced more than 12.5 percent of the USSR’s industrial output. Moreover, they played a key role in the extraction of absolutely essential natural resources in Siberia and the Far North.

            And while he acknowledges that “the productivity of the labor of the prisoners was not great,” he argues that those who argue that the GULAG was not a major contributor to the war effort are simply wrong.  The Soviet leadership at the time recognized its value, and Russians today, he suggests, ought to do the same.