Robert A. Saunders, Farmingdale State University, USA, ‘New Media, New Russians, New Abroad: Towards a Non-Nationalist Paradigm’
In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated creating 15 newly independent states across the Eurasian land mass. Some—like the Baltics states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were simply reconstituted polities which had been deprived of independence within the current century. Other such as Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova were curious entities, lacking strong historical legacies as state formations. The Russian Federation—the legal and spiritual successor to the USSR—remained the world’s largest state; however, it was now separated from its historical periphery by international borders, foreign currencies, and eventually a political reordering which involved regional and transatlantic military and economic alliances. Trapped between these Newly Independent States and the Russian rump state was a new minority: the Russians of the ‘new abroad’.
Under the Soviet system, ethnic Russians (as well as Russophones) enjoyed rather high levels of mobility. The ubiquity of the Russian language and governmental preferences for demographic dispersal of the Russian population throughout the non-Russian republics promoted significant outflows of Russians (as well as Russophone Slavs) to the Baltics, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. While Belarus and Ukraine had historically contained sizable ethnic Russian (russkie) populations, Stalinist and post-Stalinist industrialization development buttressed the numbers of Russians living in these states. By late 1991, there were few places in Eurasia which lacked at least a nominal Russian population, and in some states the Russians accounted for upwards of a third of the population. In the wake of the USSR’s dramatic denouement, these Russians and ethnically-mixed Russophones—many of whom were quite comfortable with their de-ethnicized ‘Soviet’ identity a few years earlier—were forced to come to grips with their status as national minorities in their states of residence. While ethnic diversity was enshrined in certain post-Soviet republics (e.g., Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), other states pursued policies which doggedly promoted the indigenization of the public sector and even made private life difficult for many non-titulars. This was especially true of the Russians who came to be viewed as unwanted vestiges of previous imperial subjugation.
This paper explores the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) and new media (especially the Internet) in providing social, economic, and political moorings for minority Russians in the ‘new abroad’. The findings presented draw on the author’s field research conducted in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Estonia, and through the medium of cyberspace during the 2002-2005 timeframe.[1] My analysis is constructed around the relatively simultaneous and often interlinked emergence of three phenomena: 1) new media — the various digital communication and entertainment platforms that have appeared since the introduction of the computer; 2) new Russians — rather than the ‘novye russkie’ or nouveau riche Russians who emerged from the transition of Russia to an open market, I use this term to refer to those individuals whose identities were transformed by the political fragmentation of the USSR—these people saw themselves transformed into political units based on their ethno-linguistic characteristics;[2] and 3) new abroad — the geopolitical space which includes all post-Soviet republics except Russia, and which were all part of the same country (i.e., the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) until 1991. Drawing on the extant literature of minority nationalism and new media usage, this essay presents a case study of one of the world’s largest minorities’ use of the Internet for purposes of identity production and maintenance. My research challenges the predominate findings of the above-mentioned field and suggests that the Internet is weakening rather than strengthening national identity among minority Russians in the near abroad. Rather than employing the Internet for nation-building, transborder jingoism, or as tool for mobilizing friendly elites in the Russian Federation, Internet-enabled Russians are developing transnational economic and social networks across Europe and North America. I suggest that sustained Internet use actually has a de-politicizing effect on minority Russians, with Russian Netizens professing less allegiance to either the USSR or the Russian Federation than their non-Internet using counterparts. Increasingly, these Russians are placing themselves in a global rather than a national or ethnic context. Using the language of Szerszynski and Urry, this emergent worldview can be described as ‘banal globalism’.[3]
Minority Politics in Post-Soviet Space
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 brought forth a host of new (and resurrected many old) identities onto the world stage. During the Stalinist era, the politicization of national identity had long been ‘officially discouraged’ by Moscow, while the cultural aspects of ethnic identity were tolerated (Drobizheva 2003). The Soviet Union, which assumed much of the multinational Russian state in 1917, oscillated on its policy toward national groups for a brief period, but ultimately chose to institutionalize national distinction within the state while encouraging linguistic and cultural Russification.[4] Kolstø refers to this policy as one of simultaneously and contradictory encouragement and retardation of national identity (Kolstø 1999). This decision has visible and resounding repercussions today as the legacy of Soviet nationality policy bears unintended fruit in the form of ‘projects of redemption’ for erstwhile suppressed titular majorities[5] in their newly independent states.
As Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s triad of reforms (perestroika, glasnost, and uskorenie) began to alter Soviet society, nationalism and the politics of national identity grew in popularity soon dominating much of the public consciousness. In this environment, politically-ambitious elites deftly made use of the national question to maintain and increase their power in the waning years of the Soviet Union. When the USSR disintegrated, these nationalist elites often found themselves at the apex of new state structures. In this environment, the long-enduring façade of the Soviet nation (sovetskiy narod) cracked to reveal a cacophony of competing nationhoods and irredentist movements—many of which were contradictory. It soon became apparent that Soviet nationality policy had both created national competition where none had ever existed and plastered over lingering and deep-seated ethnic conflicts, thus creating an often volatile mixture. Russians were in effect the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of the idea of a Soviet nation, and thus saw themselves not as immigrants, colonizers or invaders, but mobile Soviet citizens regardless of what republic they lived in. As Laitin argues:
Russians outside the RFSFR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic] were protected from coming to terms with their ‘minority’ status…Russians in other republics beyond the RSFSR would no longer be called ‘minorities’ as they had been during the korenizatsiia [indigenization] period when they were classified as nontitulars…But for Russians in the non-RSFSR republics, minority status was unnecessary; they were a plurality in the Soviet Union. These Russians…were the quintessential new Soviet men and women (Laitin 1998: 69).
The 25 million Russians who found themselves outside the borders of the newly independent Russian Federation at end of 1991 faced a particularly challenging crisis of identity. Nearly three-quarters of all Russians living in the non-Russian republics considered the USSR to be their homeland as late as December 1990 (Payin 1994). Within a year, this ‘homeland’ no longer existed. These Russians now lived in what was deemd by Moscow as the ‘new abroad’: lands which had hitherto been part of the Soviet Union but were now the sovereign territory of one the 14 non-Russian republics birthed by the demise of the USSR.
Strangers in a Not-So-Strange Land
Russians in this new abroad represented a unique diaspora with only limited commonalities to other dispersed immigrant communities. During the 1990s, its was common for scholars to refer these Russians as an imperial minority, with frequent comparisons to the Eastern European Germans marooned outside the rump successor states of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires (see Brubaker 1996). Other analogies were drawn to societal remnants of failed colonial settlement policies of the seafaring empires of Western Europe, e.g., Englishmen in Rhodesia, Afrikaaners in South Africa, and pieds noirs in Algeria. New abroad Russians, however, do not neatly contour to either historical example, though they share characteristics with both models referenced above.[6] In the states where Russians represent a substantial percentage of the population (Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Estonia), their communities are relatively contiguous with the Russian nation residing in the Russian Federation. This causes them to somewhat resemble German minorities in interwar Eastern Europe. In other states (Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc.), Russians are generally located in metropolitan areas and lack contiguity with the rest of the Russian nation; in such cases, they more closely mirror the overseas colonists of the great maritime empires.
An additional parallel can also be drawn, i.e., with Mexican settlers who ended up on the ‘wrong’ side of the border at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). During the mid-19th century, Mexicans in America’s Southwest saw the border cross over them rather the other way around. Curiously, both the Mexicans and the Russians are consigned to a particular role in their host societies, i.e., immigrant rather than native, regardless of the history which put them there. Russians who migrated to northern Kazakhstan, Belarus, and the Ukraine fit especially well into this analogy since they never crossed anything that could be considered a formal political boundary. Likewise, many of my respondents in Latvia proudly declare their descent from Old Believer[7] families, which have been resident in the territory of modern-day Latvia for centuries, thus easily predating the emergence of Latvian national consciousness in its current form (see Saunders 2005).
While Russians in the new abroad are often described as a diaspora, they share little in common with either historic diasporas (Jews, Armenians, and Greeks) or modern-day immigrant communities (e.g., British South Asians, American Filipinos, or Germany’s Turks and Kurds). When they or their ancestors were relocated or made the decision to reside in the periphery, there was neither requirement nor preparation for the privations of migrancy. The Romanov and Bolshevik regimes both enabled a form of Russian universalism which made it rather easy for Russians to settle anywhere in the empire without concerning themselves with adapting to adverse social conditions. According to Matjunin:
The majority of the members of ‘Russian-speaking minorities’ are the descendants of ordinary ‘soldiers’ of the Communist Party: people with no roots, tradition or faith. Most of them are Russians. They still look down on the members of the indigenous populations, and call them their ‘younger brothers’. The USSR was their homeland. It guaranteed safety and the status of the privileged. When it suddenly broke down 25 million of the Soviet Russians found themselves in extremely adverse conditions. Instead of being the rulers, they became national minority. Their superiority turned into the subordination to the legal rule of the despised ‘younger brothers’. And so they had to choose whether to learn the native language and conform to the new circumstances, or leave for Russia (Matjunin 1998).
Prior to the dissolution, the development of tight ethnic ghettos, civic society, cultural resources, and language protection schemes were unnecessary due to the state’s support of ‘Russianness’ in nearly all quarters. This, of course, was a mixed blessing. While such a milieu required little of the Russians under ancien régime, it failed to prepare them for the immigrant experience. Such conditions also set them up as scapegoats after independence when they would come to be variously labeled ‘aliens’, ‘occupiers’, ‘immigrants’, and ‘foreigners’.
Most of the Soviet Union’s successor states have tended to work assiduously to deconstruct the firmaments of Russianization since independence. This aggressive promotion of their respective titular nationalities’ rights has often impacted minorities quite negatively (especially the Russian minority). This situation has been most acute in Latvia and Estonia, primarily due to the strength and depth of historical memory associated with the loss of independence in the 1940s. The USSR’s annexation of the Baltic States in the context of World War II-era invasions—an event which was accompanied by the deportation of local elites and subsequent settlement policies favoring Slavs—continues to serve as the guiding force of Baltic nationality policy. Fear of language extinction, demographic dilution, and revanchist Russian policies conducted through an imagined ‘fifth column’ of ethnic Russians has promoted an environment of mistrust and nationalist vitriol even as the Baltic States’ realize greater levels of democratic pluralism and economic prosperity.
In those areas which failed to gain interwar independence from Moscow, the reactions to ethnic Russians after independence have been less problematic, though not without controversy.[8] In the Central Asian republics where Russians represent a sizeable minority (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), they have been woven into the multi-ethnic fabric of the new societies, though only after having been on the losing end of state-supported affirmative actions schemes which elevated the status of the titulars in the government, professional fields, and education. In Turkmenistan, Russians were actually allowed to maintain dual citizenship with the Russian Federation for the much of the past 15 years. Recently, however, this perk has been revoked by the country’s dictatorial leader Saparmurat Niyazov, causing many Russians to hastily sell their assets and flee over the border (Economist 2003). Today, Russians in are in poor state in this gas-rich nation, though the same can be said of most of their Turkmen counterparts. Uzbekistan, a country where Russians represent a modest percentage of the overall population, has seen a good deal of out-migration due to economic rather than ethnic issues, although Uzbekification is rather robust. In Tajikistan, most Russians who had the means fled the country during the Tajik Civil War (1992-1997) between the Moscow-backed government and Islamist rebels. Only a tiny—and predominately elderly—minority still remains. In the Caucasus, which like Tajikistan has seen Russian flight due to economic instability and political strife, the rather small Russian minority has tended to benefit or suffer as part of a larger geopolitical schema. In Georgian and Azerbaijan, they are at best tolerated, whereas in Armenia—a stalwart ally of the Russian Federation—they are treated relatively benignly.
In the Western Republics, the position of the Russians is an especially sensitive and complicated issue. In Moldova, a Slavic (predominately Russian) separatist movement precipitated a civil war in the early 1990s. While hostilities ended some years ago, the country is still riven by ethnic problems. Transdnistria, a self declared republic populated principally by Russians and Ukrainians, sits along the eastern shore of the Dnestr, while the ethnic Romania population remains concentrated in the western part of Moldova. The political orientation of the large (8.2 million) Russian population in Ukraine became a major electoral issue in the lead up to the 2004 presidential elections which spawned the Orange Revolution. Many—though not all—Russians supported the pro-Russian candidate and outgoing President Leonid Kuchma’s heir-designate, Viktor Yanukovich. Once it was clear that the pro-European challenger Viktor Yushchenko was going to force a rerun of the disputed election, the Russians (who tend to be concentrated in the east of Ukraine) began pushing for a sweeping devolution of power to the regions. Hoping to gain similar levels of self-government as the Crimeans (60 percent of who are ethnic Russian and 95 percent Russian-speaking), the new abroad Russians signaled for the first time that they were willing to assume the mantle of a political rather than just a cultural bloc. The rather underwhelming aftereffects of the Orange Revolution have, however, taken the steam out popular support for such proposals. The fluidity of national identity in Ukraine might also explain the rather limited allure of ethno-nationalism in the country. According to Ukrainian census data from 2001, roughly 3 million ethnic Russians ‘converted’ to Ukrainianness over the previous decade—a phenomenon which reflected the power shift from Moscow to Kiev (Varfolomeyev 2003).