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Russia's “Ethnic Revival”: The Separatist Activism of Regional Leaders in a Postcommunist Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Daniel S. Treisman
Daniel S. Treisman
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Since 1990 Russia has experienced an unexpected “ethnic revival.” Varying widely in geography, culture, economic development, and institutional history, the country's thirty-two ethnic regions offer a chance to weigh the evidence for alternative theories of separatist activism. This paper examines statistically why some—such as Chechnya and Tatarstan—have come to epitomize demands for greater independence, while others—such as Mordovia or Chukotka—have remained largely quiescent. It finds that, while a Muslim religious tradition predisposed a region's leaders to press greater separatist demands, such primordial factors werefilteredthrough a rational calculus of the region's relative bargaining power in negotiations with the center and of the leader's own organizational interests. Contrary to some leading theories, the most developed, resource-rich, and high-income groups and regions were more separatist than more economically backward ones.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , January 1997 , pp. 212 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1997

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References

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17 For an example of the first type of argument, see Deutsch (fn. 1).

18 Douglass North has argued that increasing returns to scale and sunk capital lead to a retention of organizations even after their original purposes are superseded; North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. This seems to lie behind many discussions of “competitive” ethnonationalism in developing African states; see, e.g., Bates (fn. 1), who notes that, “in contemporary Africa, the levels of ethnic competition and modernization covary” (p. 152). See also Rothschild, Joseph, Ethnopolitics:A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

19 Ragin, Charles C., “Ethnic Political Mobilization: The Welsh Cast,” American Sociological Review 44 (August 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rogowski terms this “reactive” nationalism; see the helpful discussion in Ronald Rogowski, “Conclusion,” in Tiryakian and Rogowski (fn. 3).

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26 Horowitz (fn. 1). The use of the adjectives “advanced” and “backward” here is not intended to imply any favorable or pejorative evaluation; they are chosen simply to address a literature that uses these specific terms.

27 Donald L. Horowitz, “How to Begin Thinking Comparatively about Soviet Ethnic Problems,” in Motyl (fn. 8), 9–22, esp. 16–17.

28 Banton (fn. 2), 14.

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31 In Russia, for instance, the Muslim and Buddhist nationalities and those with higher rates of retention of the native language might be expected to mobilize more quickly for autonomy than Orthodox Christian and more linguistically assimilated nationalities.

32 Cf. Horowitz (fn. 1), 267: “The strength of a secessionist movement and the heterogeneity of its region are inversely related.” Emizet and Hesli find that this was true of Soviet republics in the late 1980s: the concentration of a nationality in its own republic was “a powerful indicator of the disposition to secede”; Emizet and Hesli (fn. 26), 530.

33 I do not mean to imply too sharp a division between consciousness of cultural identities and organization for collective action. Often the cultural markers around which organizations form are themselves created by those who seek to mobilize groups for collective action; see Brass, Paul, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 27Google Scholar; and Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. However, various scholars have drawn a similar distinction between markers and mobilization. Subrata Mitra, for instance, distinguishes between the “social anchors” necessary to define a cultural nationalist movement and the mobilization of such a movement around them; see , Mitra, “The Rational Politics of Cultural Nationalism: Subnational Movements of South Asia in Comparative Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 25 (January 1995), 64Google Scholar. And Rothschild argues that political entrepreneurs mobilize ethnicity from “a psychological or cultural or social datum” into “political leverage for the purpose of altering or reinforcing... systems of structured inequality between and among ethnic categories”; see Rothschild (fn. 18), 2.

34 Roeder (fn. 25), 228.

35 The center's “inside option” must be less attractive than that of the region; see Elster, Jon, The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 There is a temporal assymetry that enables regions which in fact do not wish to secede and who cannot therefore credibly threaten actually to implement such an action to force concessions from the center by merely making the announcement—since it is the announcement that, if unrepealed or unpunished, will lower the perceived risk for imitators.

37 Sakwa, Richard, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 See Meadwell, Hudson, “Transitions to Independence and Ethnic Nationalist Mobilization,” in Booth, William J., James, Patrick, and Meadwell, Hudson, eds., Politics and Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 191-92Google Scholar; Hechter, Michael, “The Dynamics of Secession,” Acta Sociologica 35 (Winter 1992), 267CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Horowitz suggests the example of the Iraqi Kurds, who pressed for autonomy rather than full independence in part so as not to antagonize the Iranian regime, from which they had received support in the 1970s; see Horowitz (fn. 1), 231–32.

40 Donald Rothchild, “Collective Demands for Improved Distributions,” in Rothchild and Olorunsola (fn. 1), 174.

41 Horowitz (fn. 1), 232.

42 Another study that classifies peripheral movements on a continuum of declared aims is Rokkan, Stein and Urwin, Derek, Economy, Territory, Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1983), 140–41Google Scholar.

43 Emizet and Hesli (fn. 25), 505–8; Mark Whitehouse, “Ethnic Competition and the Development of Autonomy: A Comparative Study of Three Russian Republics” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1995).

44 Either the region's supreme soviet, supreme soviet chairman, or president.

45 Included here are only those ethnic regions for which a report existed of a unilateral assertion of higher status by the ethnic region's authorities. In July 1991 the Russian supreme soviet ratified the increase in status of Adygeia, Gorno-Altai, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Khakassia from autonomous oblasts to republics. But each of these had already demanded such a change unilaterally. In June 1992 the supreme soviet also declared Ingushetia to be a republic; since I could find no record of a prior assertion of republic status by authorities in Ingushetia, it was coded zero.

46 This conclusion might be weakened if an ethnic region's administrative status were itself determined by primordial ethnic factors. Available secondary sources reveal few specifics about how such administrative status distinctions emerged. But it is known that most of the distinctions that existed in 1990, at the onset of the “ethnic revival,” were essentially fixed in the early postrevolutionary years of the 1920s and the early 1930s. As of 1936 fifteen ethnic regions were ASSRs, five were autonomous oblasts, and others were autonomous okrugs; see Kozlov, Viktor, The Peoples of the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 33Google Scholar. In 1990 the same fifteen were republics and the same five autonomus oblasts. The only change among these categories was that Tyva, which had been an independent state under Moscow's tutelage until 1944, had been incorporated into Russia as an ASSR (after a period as an autonomous oblast). Thus, whether it was primordial or other factors that accounted for administrative status, it was primordial factors as ofthe 1920s or 1930s.

Many primordial factors had, however, changed in the intervening years. For instance, while the number of Ossetians in the RSFSR more than doubled between 1937 and 1989, the number of Kare-lians dropped by 46 percent; see Harris, Chauncy D., “A Geographic Analysis of Non-Russian Minorities in Russia and Its Ethnic Homelands,” Post-Soviet Geography 34, no. 9 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In-migration has drastically changed the concentration of various nationalities in their homelands. While some ethnic populations have in large part retained their national language (98 or 99 percent of Tyvans, Karachai, Kabards, Chechens, Ingush, and many of the nationalities of Dagestan reported the ethnic language to be their mother tongue in 1989), others have assimilated linguistically to Russian (only 49 percent of Karels in 1989 considered Karelian their mother tongue, less than the percentage among many nationalities of the autonomous okrugs).

Decisions on administrative status in the early postrevolution years were highly centralized. Thus, “Autonomy was granted in each case by a unilateral decision of the central authority”; see Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 329Google Scholar. Some of the new ASSRs appeared to have strong primordial claims to such status; but others did not. About Siberia, Carr writes of “primitive native tribes... scattered over vast, thinly populated areas” with “no effective nationalist or separatist movements” (p. 350). Still, Buryat-Mongolia became an autonomous republic in 1923, and the vast Yakut territory was recognized as an autonomous republic in 1922.

Second, statistical attempts to isolate the influence of administrative status from the possible influence of other factors correlated with such status suggest that it is administrative status per se that best explains the variation in activism. Republics might in theory be more prone to separatism because they have larger or more dense populations, higher concentrations of the titular—or more broadly of non-Russian—nationalities, more extensive schooling in native languages, more industrialized economies, or more organized separatist movements. One way to test whether the administrative status variable is picking up such spurious correlations is to run regressions of the separatist activism index on administrative status, adding these other potential explanatory factors and observing whether the estimated coefficient on the administrative status variable changes. When I did this, the administrative status variable remained significant in all cases, and the estimated coefficient (3.9 when no control variables are included) changed little in most cases, and in the most extreme case (controlling for regional population) fell only to 2.4. Viewing the evidence in light of these considerations, the most plausible conclusion is that administrative status itself, independent of primordial or other factors, played a significant role in determining the separatist activism of an ethnic region's leadership.

47 The difference was significant at the.01 level.

48 This difference was, however, only significant at the.06 level.

49 Because of data limitations, figures used here were for the 1989 urbanization rate of the particular nationality within the USSR, not just Russia.

50 For instance, despite a population more than twice as rural as the Russians, Buryats had a 50 percent higher rate of completion of higher education, according to the 1989 census.

51 The mean score for “advanced” populations in “backward” regions was also significantly higher than that for “backward” nationalities in “advanced” regions.

52 This was the case whether all ethnic regions or just 1990 republics were included. Note, however, the multivariate results presented in Table 10.

53 The mean separatism score for ethnic regions with a nationalist militia was significantly higher than for others in both cases.

54 A region's leader is taken to be the president or head of executive in republics and the head of administration in the AOs. This, of course, simplifies the more complicated balance of power in most regions.

55 The one exception is Ingushetia's General Aushev, who was first appointed by Yeltsin and then elected president.

56 This was true whether one considered all thirty-two ethnic regions or only the sixteen 1990 republics.

57 This was not significant, though, when the 1990 republics were considered separately.

58 This may, of course, be due to the sharp drop in available cases when these factors are added.

59 One interesting explanation suggested by an anonymous referee was that regional leaders might have felt more secure playing chicken with the center if they had a sizable Russian population that could be held hostage.

60 Alatalu, Toomas, “Tuva—a State Reawakens,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 5 (1992), 890CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 Alatalu (fn. 60), 892.

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65 For a more detailed analysis of Russian center-region relations, in which strategies of both ethnic and nonethnic regions are considered in parallel, see Daniel Treisman, “After the Deluge: The Politics of Regional Crisis in Post-Soviet Russia” (Manuscript, Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 1996).

66 Author's interview with Yuri N. Blokhin, first deputy head of administration, Tambov Oblast Tambov, June 16,1996.

67 See, in particular, Bates (fn. 1); also Rothschild (fn. 18).

68 On the role of such protests in India, see Mitra, Subrata K., Power, Protest and Participation: Local Elites and the Politics of Development in India (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Treisman found that, in 1992, Russian regions which had declared sovereignty early on were on average rewarded with nearly 19,000 rubles per inhabitant in central fiscal transfers and tax breaks. See Daniel Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia,” British Journal of Political Science (July 1996). Treisman has also modeled why it might often be rational for a central government to appease such separatist regional leaders; see Treisman, “Crises and Stability in Federal States: A Game Theoretic Analysis” (Manuscript, Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 1995).

70 The contrasting cases of “highway crashes” in ethnic relations, such as Chechnya, merely highlight the general trend of negotiated compromise between center and ethnic regions.

71 Emizet and Hesli (fn. 25); Roeder (fn. 25).