
Signs of Coming Civil Strife in Trans-Baikal Region?
The debate over whether Russian national identity is an ethnic or civic category—the Russki/ Rossianie debate—has been in existence since the fall of the Soviet Union (Valery Tishkov, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict After the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame,” 1997). The Decembrists are a symbol of a liberal, civic, and inclusive sense of Russian national identity; the ROC’s attempt to impose control over sites of popular memory symbolizes a conservative, ethnic, and exclusive sense. Some analysts have claimed that this debate is behind the spate of race riots in Russian cities over the past several years, including the 2010 riots on Moscow’s Manezh Square (see EDM, March 5, 2014; Vera Tolz and Steven Hutchings, Nation, Race, and Ethnicity on Russian Television, 2015) as well as calls to establish a segregationist regime with the North Caucasus. Debates over Russian national identity—and the need to undermine the appeal of ethnic-Russian nationalists by assuming elements of their agenda—are also behind Russia’s annexation of Crimea as well as the Kremlin championing the interests of ethnic Russians in Donbas (see EDM, October 23, 2015). Therefore, if not handled tactfully by the authorities, the fate of a relatively minor museum in a remote Russian province could boil over into the kind of social conflict warned about by the Trans-Baikal public chamber.