Russia finds outside support for its ethnic minorities threatening

>>From THE ECONOMIST - for educational porpoises

IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, andinfuriate a Russian, raise your
vodka glass to "Suuri Suomi-Uraliin asti!". That means "Greater
Finland-to fue Urals and beyond". It sounds fandful, even potty. But it
used to be real geopolitics. In the dying days of the Tsar's empire,
a swathe of Russia bubbled with nationalist agitation arnong
minorities, many with ethnic ties to Finland.

The Finns themselves got away for good. Their ethnic kinsfolk - the
Komi, Mari, Udmurts and the like - managed it only briefly. In 1917-18
there was a big country in the middle of Russia called Idel-Ural
(literally, "Volga-Ural") which united fue FinnoUgric (the "Ugric"
because of distant cousinship with Hungary) and Turkic peoples in those
areas. When itwas crushed by the Bolsheviks in late 1918, its refugee
foreign minister, Sadrí Maqsudí Arsal, got a warm welcome first in
Finland and then Estonia.

In Russian nightmares at least, that spectre now looms again. According
to Vladislav Surkov, an adviser to Vladimir Putin, there is a
"premeditated system of operations" by Finland, Estonia and the
European Union to fan discontent. The more nationalist papers have
steamy stories of westerners plotting Russia's destruction. After Mr
Putin said recently that foreign-financed groups should be subject to
strict scrutiny by the Russian security agencies, a website with close
ties to officialdom, news12.ru, said that pro-Mari pressure groups
would now be investigated further (the site also accused "Estonian
nationalists" of stoking riots in París). Yet the Finno-Ugric axis in
world politics seems more like a curiosity than a conspiracy. Although
the Finns and Estonians are close (their languages are as similar as
ltalian and Spanish), ties with Hungary are mainly sentimental. Common
linguistic roots
are extremely distant. Migrating tribal forebears from the steppes who
went northwest became Finns and Estonians. Those that went to central
Europe and became Hungarians.

Philologists' labours have identified some 200 words with cornmon roots
in all three major
Finno-Ugric tongues. Fully 55 of these centre on fishing, and a further
15 are about animals; only three are about commerce. An Estonian
philologist, Mall Hellam, came up with just one mutually comprehensible
sentence: "The living fish swims in water'. ('Elav kala ujub vee
all.' in Estonian; 'Elävä kala ui veden alla.' in Finnish;
'Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.' in Hungarian.)

Hungary's involvement in the Finno-Ugric movement is the most low-key.
The country's left-of-centre government has good relations with Russia,
and no desire to get involved in what it sees as the squabbles of its
northem cousins. But the hard-pressed Finno-Ugric minorities in central
Russian regions like Mari-El, Komi and Udmurtia are more concerned. To
them, Estonia, with its regained statehood, is a miracle, and Finland
an enviable superpower. For the minority Finno-Ugric languages of
Russia are dying, spoken mainly by old people in the countryside and a
handful of intellectuals. There are few books, newspapers, radio or TV
programmes and little mother-tongue education.

That would have been Estonia's fate too, had the Soviet Union not
collapsed in 1991. Estonians were well on the way to becoming a
minority in their own country thanks to the migration of
Russian-speakers from elsewhere in the empire; the use of Russian in
education was growing fast.
For ardent Finno-Ugric activists, Russian linguistic chauvinism is part
of something worse. An appeal from the Foundation for the Salvation of
the Erzya Language described the position of its people, who mainly
live in the central Russian republic of Mordovia, as "critical and even
hopeless" because of the Russocentrism of the education system and
public broadcasting. "Imperial aggression" had led to a sharp drop in
the ethnic population, it said, accusing the local and federal
authorities of "genocide".

It is true that many of Russia's loo-odd minority tongues are dying
out. Shor, for example, a language in southern Russia with Turkic and
Finnic roots, is spoken by only 10,000 people, mainly elderly. A book
of poems by Gennady Kostochakov, one of a handful of Shor academic
specialists, is entitled "I am the last Shor poet". Even that is
enviable by some standards. The Votian language, a close relative of
Estonian, is spoken by just 20 people in a couple of villages in
north-western Russia.

Sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in bustling Tallinn, Andres Heinapuu,
a top Estonian Finno-Ugrist (who learnt Votian in five days), gives a
depressing description of apathetic, hostile or ignorant officialdom in
the Russian provinces. Only in Mari-El did the authorities make an
effort to create bilingualism in the early post-Soviet years, and now
even that has gone into reverse. The republic's rulers have purged
ethnic Mari officials and sharply cut Mari-language media and
education. Mari activists have suffered beatings, and one suspicious
death.
Worse, the Finno-Ugric minorities are not as robust as their Turkic
counterparts, Mr Heinapuu says. "The Finno-Ugric character is different
- we are used to running away". Whereas the Turkic minorities'
identity in places such as Tatarstan is bolstered by Islam, the
Finno-Ugrics' tradition-and sometimes current practice - is pagan.
Mari-El and Udmurtia are probably the only places in Europe where
shamanism (nature-worship) is still an authentic, organised religion,
with weddings celebrated in sacred groves.

So what to do? Barring a collapse of the Russian state, any idea of
Estonian-style independence seems hopeless: in every one of the
Finno-Ugric bits of Russia, the Indo-Europeans are a majority. In
Mordovia, for example, the Erzyas and their ethnic cousins, the
Mokshas, together make up less than a third of the population.

So the main task is survival. Mr Heinapuu and his colleagues try to
bolster their kinsfolk's language and culture and highlight Russian
chauvinism. The first is difficult. In the headquarters of the
Finno-Ugric movement in Tallinn, Mr Heinapuu proudly shows a shelf of
newly published poetry in Mari and other languages. It is a drop in the
ocean. "What we really need, a colleague says, is to bring students
from the Finno-Ugric bits of Russia to study in Estonia. That
initiative, the Kindred Peoples' Programme, began in 1999. It was meant
to create expertise, expose students to western society, and boost
morale.

It hasn't worked out like that, though. Half the loo-odd students
decided to stay. "These were the first towns they had ever lived in.
They adapted too well, and those that went back had problems with
Russian life," says Mr Heinapuu. Now the focus has shifted to graduate
education. And the money involved in the student programme is tiny:
just 3m Estonian kroons ($230,000). Rich Finland gives only a bit more,
Hungary almost nothing.

That leaves the one area where the Finno-Ugric movement can claim some
success: propaganda initiatives by politicians and activists. In May
this year the European Parliament voted to condemn the pro-Russian
authorities in Mari-El.
That got the Kremlin riled. So did an academic conference in August
held in the Mari capital, Yoshkar-Ola. The president of Mari-El, a
bombastic Kremlin loyalist, Leonid Markelov, was confronted, seemingly
for the first time, with the fact that some outsiders - including
ambassadors and politicians from the Finno-Ugric countries, plus a
bunch of academics -were interested in his subjects' speech and
customs.

The conference also highlighted the launch of a new Mari-lan-guage
radio station, which will include not just the folk-music and poetry
beloved by cultural conservationists, but also modern idioms such as
rap music in Mari.

It is possible to reverse language decline. Norway, for example, has
poured money into supporting the culture and language of its northern
Sami peoples. There is no sign of that in Russia, where the authorities
approach minority languages with neglect and suspicion. When Tatarstan,
the core of the old Idel-Ural, tried to re-introduce the Latin alphabet
in which the local Turkic language is most logically written, this was
banned by the Kremlin.

It is hard to match the modest protests by a loose movement consisting
mainly of concerned philologists and ethnographers with the allergic
reaction they prompt. The Finno-Ugrists' aim is to halt their
kinsfolk's extinction, not to break up Russia. Yet viewed through the
lens of Russia's uneasy relationship with its imperial history, the
hostile reaction is predicatble. The collapse of the Soviet Union -
called a "catastrophe" by Mr Putin - is still echoing today. In most
of the former empire, Russian language and culture are still in
headlong retreat. In the Caucasus, Azerbaijan has succeeded where
Tatarstan failed, in dropping the Cyrillic alphabet. In Georgia,
English is overtaking Russian as the second language of the élite.

The involvement of Estonia adds extra aggravation. It is much disliked
by Russians for its economic success and strongly anti-Soviet take on
history, and for encouraging local
Russians stranded by the Soviet collapse to learn Estonian and apply
for citizenship. To Mr
Heinapuu and his pals, the Russian ire they arouse is a backhanded
compliment. But it is
yet more bad news for the people they are trying to help.

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