Chuvash language revival threatened

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,
October 4, 2004
In Russia, Dissent Grows Over Moves to Curb Autonomy
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

CHEBOKSARY, Russia, Sept. 30 - President Vladimir V. Putin may have cowed
Russia's national political leadership with his plan to concentrate still
more power in the Kremlin, but in regions of the country that stand to
lose the most, he has inflamed fierce popular discontent.  People in this
region along the Volga denounced Mr. Putin's proposal to end direct
elections of governors and other regional leaders as unconstitutional and
potentially destabilizing. They fear that the Kremlin is planning further
steps to recreate a Soviet-like power over the people.

"We had such a long period of restrictions," said Vladislav V. Yefimov, a
bookkeeper, referring to the Soviet era. "We were fed up with them. Now we
are going to have them again, and I do not understand what for."  The
reaction among those interviewed here underscored what polls suggested was
seething dissent in this and the other 20 ethnic republics that had
achieved a measure of autonomy since the Soviet Union disbanded. In one
poll across Russia, nearly half of those surveyed opposed Mr. Putin's
proposal. But here, at least anecdotally, the opposition appeared to be
stronger.

Mr. Putin has defended his plan, issued days after at least 339 hostages,
half of them children, died in a terror siege at a school in Beslan,
Russia, by saying he wanted to unify Russia against the threat of terror.
But many warn that it could have the opposite effect, stoking ethnic
divisions that in an extreme case dragged Chechnya, another of the
republics, into more than a decade of bloodshed.

"Inside this monolithic structure there will be certain movements," said
Atner P. Khuzagay, a leader in this republic of Chuvashia as it won some
autonomy in the early 1990's. "There will be tension. I would not call it
resistance, but tensions will appear." It remains to be seen whether
public opposition will have any effect on Mr. Putin's proposal, which his
aides submitted to a pliant Parliament in late September. Its leaders, all
Putin loyalists, promise to adopt the changes quickly, but already there
are signs of political challenges.

A regional legislator in Kaliningrad has asked Russia's Constitutional
Court to clarify the legality of the proposal. The Chuvash National
Congress, a private organization here, plans to meet on Oct. 8 to draft a
statement of opposition. Its president, Gennadi N. Arkhilov, called the
proposal "doomed," and added, "if not now, then eventually."

Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said regional
parliaments, which under Mr. Putin's proposal would ratify Kremlin
appointees, could still balk, especially when regional laws conflicted
with federal law or practice. Chuvashia, for example, requires that its
president be a speaker of Chuvash, a Turkic language spoken by two-thirds
of the region's 1.4 million residents. The new legislation, though, would
give Mr. Putin the authority to disregard such requirements and to disband
regional parliaments if they rejected his appointees twice.

"It will be very complicated to do this without risking an explosion," he
said in a telephone interview. "There will be real opposition, but it
will, perhaps, not be very public."

Indeed, few senior political leaders have openly defied Mr. Putin on the
issue. Even the governors and other regional leaders, who will lose their
independence and electoral legitimacy when the plan takes effect, have
lined up behind Mr. Putin - at least publicly.

One exception is the elected leader of Chuvashia, President Nikolai V.
Fyodorov. He has responded with silence, even when local journalists have
pressed him to comment. He declined repeated requests to be interviewed
for this article, with his office citing scheduling conflicts. Other
elected officials here said he opposed Mr. Putin's proposal, but dared not
say so publicly.

Mr. Fyodorov's position is delicate in part because of the nature of the
autonomy that Chuvashia, like the other republics, received after Russia's
first president, Boris N. Yeltsin, famously told regional leaders to "take
as much sovereignty as you can swallow."

Chuvashia, a central region of forest and fertile steppe slightly smaller
than New Jersey, wrote its own constitution and drafted its own laws. The
Chuvash language, once consigned to private conversations, experienced a
revival in schools, theaters and, most important, in the corridors of
government. Mr. Fyodorov, an ethnic Chuvash who was first elected
president in 1993, was generally, though not universally, considered a
democrat and a nationalist willing to defy Moscow.

When war broke out in Chechnya in 1994, he issued a decree allowing
soldiers from Chuvashia to refuse to fight there - an effort he ultimately
lost. In 2000, when Mr. Putin stripped regional leaders of their seats in
the upper house of Parliament, the Federation Council, Mr. Fyodorov was
among the most vocal critics.

Unlike Chechnya, Chuvashia never had a separatist movement. One reason is
that the Chuvash, descendents of Bulgar tribes that settled the Volga
region in the seventh and eighth centuries, adopted Russian Orthodoxy,
while other Turkic regions, including neighboring Tatarstan, adopted
Islam. Another reason, people here said, was the autonomy Mr. Yeltsin
granted.

Even under the Soviet system, Chuvashia had received special autonomous
status on June 24, 1924 - a date still celebrated as the republic's
independence day. That autonomy, though, existed only in theory; the
Central Committee in Moscow controlled everything. To the Chuvash, Mr.
Putin's proposal amounts to the end of Russia's short experiment with
federalism.

"Putin needs a fully controlled system, a system where a command from the
top is carried out just like in the barracks," said Yevgeny L. Lin, the
leader of the liberal Yabloko Party here. "Federalism includes elements of
independence, which he does not want, because there is no room for them in
the barracks."

Like others here and in Moscow, Mr. Lin expressed concern that the Kremlin
might also be considering plans to do away with the republics altogether,
merging them into larger regions more easily controlled from the federal
center.

Some here are resigned to the erosion of the region's autonomy. They call
it an inevitable characteristic of Russia, where democratic traditions
never really took root. "There's a saying in Russia," said Oleg A. Delman,
an independent member of the local parliament, or State Council, who
opposes the Putin proposal. "A country without its czar is like a village
without an idiot."

Mikhail N. Yukhma, another of Chuvashia's nationalist leaders in the
1990's, has grown embittered with Chuvashia's course. He is a fierce
critic of Mr. Fyodorov, whom he accuses of building his own autocratic
power. He said he would prefer a leader sent from Moscow.

"I should admit this idea failed here," he said of Chuvashia's period of
autonomy. "The electoral system can yield fruit only in some place like
the United States - not here."

Viktor A. Ilyin, a Communist member of the State Council, said Chuvashia
had been steadily losing autonomy ever since Mr. Putin came to office and
began to strengthen his political hold over all of Russia. The region's
budget increasingly relies on federal resources, doled out, he said, based
on loyalty to the Kremlin.

But he said Mr. Putin's proposal - in its starkness - could prove too much
for people to accept quietly.

"We should take into account the psychology of our people," he added.
"They are like a young birch tree. If you bend it and bend it, sometimes
it breaks. Sometimes, it snaps back."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/international/europe/04russia.html