GLOBAL BIRYULYOVO
The Russian media came up with another reason to laugh at Europe. In October 2013 in Paris there were mass demonstrations and strikes at the lycées in protest at the extradition from France of two migrant schoolchildren, a fifteen-year-old gypsy girl from Kosovo and a nineteen-year-old Armenian lad. The students demanded the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls. Once again, Russian propaganda talked about ‘the extremes of tolerance’ and ‘the dominance of migrants’. It would simply be impossible to imagine such a scenario in Russia.
Two vital factors are missing from any Russian discussion about migrants. The first is the human dimension (hardly surprising in a country where social Darwinism has triumphed). The migrant problem is examined from a variety of viewpoints: economics, corruption, the labour market, national security, street crime, society’s adaptability, Russia’s cultural immunity. It is looked at using biological terms such as ‘fresh blood’ and mechanical terms such as the ‘assimilative machine’, as the conservative economist and politician Maxim Sokolov describes it. But hardly anyone talks about the most basic fact: this is first and foremost about people who have lived side by side with us for years, decades even; people with their own joys, heartaches and rights. And not just the legal rights of entry, residence and work, but the standard human rights to life; freedom from slavery, hunger and oppression; the right to shelter and to justice.
This is very difficult to explain to Russians, who have become so hardened and neglected over the past twenty-five years that they are constantly creating their own outcasts: the elderly, the homeless, drug addicts, AIDS sufferers. You could even add to that list stray dogs, which in Russia are looked on as biological rubbish, not as living creatures with their own inalienable rights. Migrants (or ‘animals’ to use the slang of Russian neofascists) are effectively on a par with those stray dogs. Society can regulate their usefulness and their population at its own discretion. Some can be trapped and sterilized; others can be poisoned; a third group can be sent to shelters. Gastarbeiter (guest workers) are looked upon merely as biomass. All that needs to be agreed is how many there are, the correct way in which they can be used, and the regulation of their social and cultural hygiene.
Not surprisingly, over the last few years Russian society has adopted the most primitive form of racism. One can recall the pathetic posters of the nationalist ‘Russian March’ (which now takes place in the depressed Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo), with their slogan, ‘For the sake of the white children’s future’; against a background of a field of wheat there’s a dyed blonde woman holding a fair-haired child. Or the ultraliberal journalist Yulia Latynina, who writes in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta about the ‘slave subculture’, with its ‘traditional culture of despotism, oppression and Islam’. There’s even the respected opposition figure, Vladimir Ashurkov, a graduate of the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, who presented the classic civilizing argument in the business newspaper, Vedomosti:
What is closer to me is the theory of the progressive development of mankind, according to which – from the point of view of social evolution – society can be on different levels of civilization… The gradual transformation of non-Europeans into Europeans is a long, difficult and painful process; but from the point of view of the development of society and the country, there is no alternative to this.[27]
Progressive thinkers in the late nineteenth century could argue this way, as when Kipling wrote about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the Count de Gobineau spoke of racial superiority; when non-Europeans were touted around the world in cages and put on display in circuses; and when the English advertisement for Pears soap suggested that it could wash clean black skin. It is impossible to imagine such ideas being put forward now in Western newspapers or at Wharton; but in Russia in the second decade of the twenty-first century it is still considered a normal level of discussion.
The key misconception of Russian advocates of racial purity is the idea that there is a certain understanding of what is ‘our’ identity; ‘our’ city, in which ‘we’ are the ‘landlords’ and ‘they’ are simply ‘tenants’. This is an ideological statement, but does not represent social reality. Russia – and Moscow, what’s more – is a veritable cauldron of life, in which the process of ethnic integration has been operating for longer and more successfully than in the most tolerant of European countries; we simply stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this fact. As a Eurasian civilization, Russia stands at the junction of various cultures. Aliens who were conquerors (Tatars) or the conquered (from the Caucasus) were easily assimilated. Russia has never been a ‘pure’ nation, but an eternal colonial frontier, with its Slav-Ugric genes, its soul from the steppes, and its elite, made up of descendants of Tatar mirzas (royal princes), Baltic barons and Caucasian princes. And the main melting pot of this potpourri was Moscow, which for more than six hundred years has been mixing together these human tides, races and religions.
Even the names of streets in Moscow speak of this multicultural heritage: Ordynka was the road to the Golden Horde; on the Arbat stood the Tatars with their carts called arbas; then there are also Great Tatar Street and Little Tatar Street, with its mosque, within walking distance of the Kremlin; there’s Armenian (Armyansky) Lane near Lubyanka Square; Georgian (Gruzinsky) Streets, both Large and Small, just off Tverskaya; Maroseyka Street, a short form of Malorossiki, or ‘Little Russians’, where the ‘Little Russians’ – as the Ukrainians were known – settled.
It is true, though, that Russia was never a haven of tolerance. In our ethnopolitical history there are plenty of classic examples of colonialism, barbarism and violent russification: the Pale of Settlement and the Black Hundreds; pogroms and uprooting of whole peoples. But this was, after all, an empire. The empire could accommodate different peoples and they could serve the empire. And Moscow, unlike St Petersburg, was always a giant marketplace, a massive transit hub; and in the age of globalization the capital’s role as a giant valve for the transfer of resources – be they raw materials, finance or people – has only grown.
And here we have the second blunder of modern Russian nationalism: in their search for ‘blood and soil’, the nationalists are turning away from Russia’s massive imperial heritage, from the breadth of a great power and its ability to live with Others. It is surprising that the nationalists cannot see this as they march under their black and yellow banners of the Russian Empire in the ‘Russian March’ in Biryulyovo. They are unaware that Russia has an imperial, not a Russian, ethnos; that it was the empire which gave Russia its great history, but at the same time replaced the Russian nation. By demanding that the city should be cleansed of migrants, that the Caucasus should be cut off from Russia or that visa regimes should be established for the Central Asian states, the nationalists want to turn the Russian Federation once and for all from the successor state of the empire into just another provincial country.
27
https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2013/10/29/obschestvo-ne-spravlyaetsya-s-pritokom-migrantov. ‘Integration: Society Can’t Cope with the Flow of Immigrants’ (in Russian), 29 October 2013.