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Vladimir Yegorov,
D. Sc. (Hist.), Moscow State Regional University
Olga Savina,
Research associate, Institute of the CIS Countries
COMMON CULTURAL-CIVILIZATORY FOUNDATION
AS A FACTOR OF REINTEGRATION OF POST-SOVIET
COMMUNITY
The economic, political and military cataclysms now experienced by mankind with frequent regularity show that the world is standing on the eve of systemic transformations. There are no grounds to believe that the coming metamorphoses will be painless, and hardly anyone doubts that the world community will have to revise many orientations and values which seemed immutable.
In these conditions Russia, which has lost orientations of social perspective during the past two decades, should hardly strive to implement a project of social development taken from abroad on its national soil. All the more futile are our country's attempts to introduce foreign "progressive values" in the community of the post-Soviet countries, which are closely connected with Russia historically and culturally.
The principles of rationalism laid in the foundation of Russian policy toward the Union republics of the former U.S.S.R. have not brought the desired integration effect. Moreover, along with the
establishment of western cultural values in the post-Soviet area, the social foundation of the centripetal tendencies is becoming weaker.
The data showing the growing destructive attitude of the population of Kazakhstan and Belarus to integration with Russia corroborate the above-said contention.
The views of the Kazakh population concerning the Customs union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia were divided as follows; 52 percent support this integration project, and 48 percent are against it or indifferent.
An additional poll carried out in April-May 2012 showed that 78.7 percent of Kazakh respondents deemed post-Soviet integration inexpedient. It is indicative that among them were representatives of big and medium-sized business, financial bodies, law-enforcement agencies, and government officials.
As to Belarus, the number of those who favored union with Russia dwindled from 58 percent in 2003 to 32 percent in 2011.
From a pragmatic point of view this state of affairs is quite logical. Orientation to western centers of the world force looks more attractive than prospects of unification with Russia, which has not yet acquired a stable tendency of economic growth. However, the foundation of Eurasian integration is based on something more important than pragmatism, it is cultural-civilizatory community which has evolved for centuries in integration of interethnic traditions, which created certain identity bordering on irrationality.
Indicative in this respect is a statement of the Kazakh expert on strategy M. Laumulin who said that "after the downfall of the iron curtain and establishment of contacts with foreign countries Kazakhstan's people have become convinced that they were unlike many neighbors from the Islamic world, despite certain Muslim renaissance in our republic. In the Soviet Union the inhabitants of
Central Asia were considered 'Asians,' but after closer acquaintance with Chinese and other Far Eastern nations it became clear that they were unlike real Asians. They had more in common with other citizens of the CIS countries, and this is why the term 'Eurasians' was more apt."
In his famous book "A Clash of Civilizations" Samuel Huntington justly noted that integration and disintegration borders of the modern world pass along the cultural lines. In his view, culture and various types of cultural identification (which are identification of civilization at the highest level) determine the models of cohesion, disintegration and conflict.
It is not "liberal values" or the attempt to eradicate once and for all the possibility of a war breaking out in this part of the world that is the main foundation of European integration, but cultural-civilizatory community, which is based on the historical tradition of the Old World.
Historically, Russia has been not only a state, but, above all, a cultural and civilizatory archetype forming and absorbing traditions and social values and orientations of many peoples.
Even when the people of near-to-border territories did not have integration urges and calls on the part of the Great Empire, they actively carried on cultural exchanges with Russian society. The modus of cultural interaction has become one of the determining qualities of the Russian world order, and each cultural component of it was a self value independently functioning as an inalienable part of the whole. In this sense it is difficult to imagine even in the conditions of state independence the cultural autarchy of Russians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Kyrgyz, etc.
Usually, when speaking of common destinies and common social perspectives it is customary to appeal to Slav unity. However, the threads of genetic "authentic being" of Russians with the peoples of the
Caucasus and Asia are no less important from the point of view of their cultural-civilizatory impact.
The preservation and development of the multifaced "Russian world" seems to be a problem no less, perhaps even more, important than the economic and political integration of the post-Soviet area. The loss of this "exclusive product" would mean, above all, the shrinkage of the national and cultural foundations, and for Russia itself, which preserves a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional matrix, the loss of the possibility of full-fledged consolidation of Russian identity and reintegration (as the bearer of cultural genotype), in the full-fledged development center of regional community.
For centuries Russia has been accumulating the cultural potential of the peoples united in one civilization area and playing the role of the generator of its own creative activity. By playing this role for a long historical period Russia could not but become the center of intellectual reflection of cultural-civilizatory identity, which has been formed as a result of active cultural exchanges between the peoples inhabiting it.
Russian scholars P. Savitsky, N. Trubetskoi and L. Gumilyov were the first to declare the Russian cultural-civilizatory type as Eurasian. The Eurasian concept absorbed the notion of mobility and insufficiency of Russian identity, the intrinsic mastering of multicultural values and rejection of "Eurocentrism" and universality of progress, and militant economic reductionism of the West.
The post-Soviet political reality has confirmed the true nature of and loyalty to the Eurasian concept. Right after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. the states and ethnic groups, which were not integrated in the cultural-civilizatory community (the European countries of the so-called socialist camp and the Baltic republics) immediately oriented themselves to unification with the European Union. Having suffered from a destructive influence of the centripetal factors during the post-
Soviet period, Eurasian identity has for a long time been in a deprived state, yet it remains a reality influencing the integration process.
The Eurasian ideas become the methodological foundation of the processes going on lately in the post-Soviet area.
For one, the important concept of cultural pluralism and the "inherent worth" of each component of the cultural-civilizatory community has been realized in the organizational principle of "movable geometry" of the CIS, which has been consolidated after the adoption of the Concept of the further development of the CIS in 2007.
This concept contains the notion of the future of the Community initiated by the Russian side as a multifaceted regional organization ensuring a maximal integration potential, and at the same time giving each participating country the possibility to determine the format and sphere of cooperation. The Russian language remains a means of communication, cultural exchanges, and the functioning of supranational structures in the process of preserving Eurasian cultural-civilizatory values.
However, the main significance of the Russian language lies not in this important sphere of the integration process. The Russian language remains the only instrument of moving identification symbols and practical actions to existential depths when each individual becomes a subject of unification tendencies.
In 2006 associates of the Center for the Study of Interethnic Relations at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences carried out a poll in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, which contained several linguistic questions. The poll's results have confirmed the fact of very wide distribution and popularity of the Russian language among the residents of the capital, including Kyrgyz and Tatars.
The Russian language is used by representatives of the titular ethnos independently, and along with the Kyrgyz language, in from 56 to 81 percent of cases.
A relatively high orientation of Kyrgyz young people to the Russian language is a positive factor determining the prospects of the Russian language in Kyrgyzstan.
In the view of almost 60 percent of Kyrgyz residents of Bishkek, who took part in a sociological poll, non-Russians in Kyrgyzstan need to know the Russian language.
Among young people aged 19 to 29, 35 percent said that they definitely need the Russian language, and only 19 percent gave a negative answer.
All this goes to show that there are comparatively favorable conditions in Kyrgyzstan for the use and development of the Russian language.
Despite an intensive policy of derussification pursued by the western-oriented administrations, the position of the Russian language remains quite firm and stable in Ukraine. According to the data of IS NANU monitoring (2007), there were many people in that country who think exclusively in Russian. Among those older than 55 the percentage was 30, 30 to 35-36, and up to 30-40, and the number of Russian-speaking young people is growing.
Thus, the stepping up of integration initiatives in the post-Soviet area is conditioned not only by the up-to-the-minute political situation, but by the existence of a deep historical-cultural basis of the interrelations of the nations united by Eurasian identity.
As has already been said, the formation of a full-fledged regional association is a nonlinear process and can be influenced by all and sundry factors, including foreign ones.
However, the working out of the strategy of long-term policy in this direction should take into account the realities of the cultural-civilizatory factor of reintegration.
"Obozrevatel - Observer," Moscow, 2012, No 12, pp. 42-50.
Abdulbari Muslimov,
Deputy Head of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Nizhny Novgorod Region SOCIALIZATION OF THE UMMA. DIRECT AND INDIRECT MECHANISMS
At present, as we see, Muslims here are not in the best situation, both socially and culturally. We have to traverse a long path, despite the fact that we have already done much.
I will not touch the political problems of the development of the umma, inasmuch as they are foreign, in my view, as related to its other problems, but I will concentrate on some of the problems facing Russian Muslims.
First, the Muslim community of Russia is practically in an atomized state. Except organizational pluralism, the believers more often than not find themselves divided in many respects - from ethnic to age-related.
The migration flows from the Central Asian countries and the Caucasus have made our communities in big cities poly-ethnic, and this is why our imams should take this into account in their Friday sermons, switching from the Tatar or Bashkir language to Russian.
Each imam should realize that he is the first person to begin socialization of a Muslim-immigrant, he initiates the integration process in Russian society and the Russian umma, and the formation process of
