I'm glad Paul Goble is back with his blog Windows on Eurasia.
They're always a cornucopia of stories you couldn't possibly discover yourself, and you can mine them for all kinds of Russian-language websites for a lot of insight about life outside Moscow in Russia, and its neighbours.
Land disputes in Daghestan and other parts of the North Caucasus not only arise because of disputes among the various nationalities but also increasingly spark new and intensified conflicts, as disagreements over who owns or can use what land become invested with ethno-national meaning, according to ethnographers and other observers.
At a meeting to discuss these issues last month, Akhmed Yarlykanov, a senior specialist at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, noted that “the ethnic factor really plays an important role in the development of land conflicts” in the region, with longtime residents angered by the demands of arrivals (vestikavkaza.ru/articles/politika/confl/48503.html).
Quoting Vadim Shteppa:
“The main distinguishing characteristic of the December meetings,” he suggests, was “the sharp contrast between the new ‘urban class’” which defines itself in terms of its commitment European values and the imperial tradition of Russian statehood which is based on lifetime power for the tsar or general secretary.”
And this insight:
(Moreover, Shteppa points out, many of the participants in the Moscow protests were not native Muscovites but rather precisely such active and educated citizens from regions outside of the capital.)
Had the Muscovites taken notice, they would have seen that among the demonstrators in other cities on December 10 and 24 were people carrying “regional flags, including those of Siberia, Ingermanland, Karelia and Kaliningrad (For pictures, see kaliningrad-eu-russian.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post_18.html).
And then while everybody's focused on the Zhanaozen tragedy -- separatism in Kazakhstan:
The wave of violence in Zhanaozen in Western Kazakhstan over the last few weeks that has cost at least 16 lives has also led to the intensification of separatist attitudes among the population there, although there is little chance that this region will be able to split away from Kazakhstan anytime soon, according to a specialist on the area.
Marat Shibutov, the Kazakhstan representative of the Association of Cross-Border Cooperation, says that separatist feelings have been sparked less by the authoritarian response of Astana than by the failure of the central Kazakhstan government to “consider the interests of regional elites” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1485788.html).
