Russia is preparing for the “main autumn holiday” (as it is called on official websites and in the media), which has been held already for 20 years under the name of the Day of National Unity, November 4. Few people remember that this “autumn holiday” replaced the “day of consent and reconciliation”, – this was a new name for November, 7 after the dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of communist ideas, celebrations and symbols.
The Day of Consent (definitely, it’s strange to talk about reconciliation nowadays) and the Day of Unity seem to have quite similar names, but the meaning is different. November, 4 is not about accepting diversity and searching for mutual understanding, this “holiday” is about militant unity; as newspapers now write about the events of the early 17th century, so called Dark Times, that time “we managed to assemble an army of unprecedented size, which included representatives of all classes and nationalities living on the territory of Russia (the very national unity that we celebrate on November, 4)”
This autumn, “that unity” doesn’t look convincing at all. On the eve of the holiday, on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk, crowds of angry people smash up the houses of Roma residents, demand to “deport” their Roma neighbors (citizens of the Russian Federation who have nowhere to be deported), burn cars and attack anyone who seems ethnically alien to them. The lynching of local residents is directed at the Roma community because of the information that appeared (apparently, it was distributed by the nationalist channels of the “Russian Community” and “Northern Man”) about the death of a taxi driver due to the fault of one of the Roma residents of the village Korkino. Hundreds of police officers who arrived to put an end of the pogrom were unable to stop the violence, and houses were burnt on the second night of the riots. The authorities were afraid even to speak out decisively against the brutal crowd; the governor of the Chelyabinsk region calms the rioters with promises of “raids” in order to “deal with the criminalization of places where Gypsies live,” noting that “people are talking about such a problem.” According to the video of their meetings with representatives of the authorities and the prosecutor’s office, people say a lot of amazing things, for example, shouting that if “Gypsies cannot be deported, then deport us all!”
The police tried to detain the rioters, but soon, according to reports from the ground, they were released after issuing protocols on “small hooliganism”, without accusing them of mass riots, threatening the lives of residents with setting houses on fire, destruction of property. Only a teenager suspected of murdering the taxi driver was arrested (his call was reportedly the last before her death – which may arouse suspicion, but should not be considered exhaustive proof of guilt in any way), as well as an elderly Roma man accused of “attempted murder”, while, defending his house and family besieged by an angry crowd, he wounded two of the attackers.
The Investigative Committee and its head Mr Bastrykin also were concerned with the case “of the murder and the attempted murder of residents of the Chelyabinsk region by representatives of the Roma diaspora”. Thus, investigators from Moscow directly contrast “residents” and “diaspora”, although Roma families have also been living in the Chelyabinsk region for several decades.
With this understanding of the “unity of all classes and nationalities”, Russia approaches the events of the festive week, including the ethnographic dictation, which takes place under the slogan (dictation under the slogan sounds strange, but these are official messages): “Many peoples – one country!” Indeed, there are many peoples living in Russia – but there is no harmony among them, and the unity is manifested only in the oppression of all peoples by one. The Indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East, who have suffered from discrimination, oppression and destruction of their habitat for centuries, often call Russia the “prison of peoples”.
Defenders of the rights of Indigenous peoples are raising the alarm about the escalation of nationalism, anti-migrant and anti-Asian sentiments, expressing concern that the branches of the ultra-nationalist “Russian Community” in Siberia are dangerous for the Indigenous inhabitants of the region.
Enslavement, exploitation, coercion to participate in the criminal war against Ukraine – all this concerns the peoples inhabiting the Russian Federation or temporarily living in it, migrant workers and even refugees. Racism, discrimination, violation of cultural and linguistic rights, violation of Russian laws, such as the law on the protection of the rights of small Indigenous peoples – this is exactly such cynical “unity”.
This dark reality has a background of the program of celebrations, proposing millions of people to “evaluate their general level of ethnocultural literacy” by answering questions from a Large ethnographic dictation in Sokolniki Park in Moscow or at the International Friendship Club in the State University of Management, as well as visit the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (“among them are expositions dedicated to national culture, including Russian and Tatar projects”).
But at the same time, in the Urals, a Russian riot is already burning – cruel and merciless.
Stefania KULAEVA,
first published on the blog of Radio Liberty