>From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
>
><shrug> I used what paradigm I know: Canada; you seemed to be talking about
>a general topic of cultural diversity and assimilation, not the particulars
>of India and Russia.
Well, my original comment was about the inappropriateness of using notions of nation or nationalism obtained from the Western experience in non-Western countries. For one thing, Russia is not a nation-state, unlike Western European countries. For another, it is not a nation of immigrants, like the US or Canada. In fact, at one point the Tatars/Mongols, in the form of the Golden Horde, ruled Russia. If you read the old Russian sagas, you will see the hero usually battling evil personified in the form of the Tatars.
>
>Ok, I go along with making a larger group identity, but who gets to choose?
> Historically, "Russian" culture was "forced" on the smaller groups,
>wasn't it? It's not like they had some choice to opt out, or did they?
Russification came and went in waves. Some of it was forced; some of it was the natural process of cultural assimilation of smaller cultures by larger ones. There is more to this than just "russification," by the way; there were/are parallel processes of Tatarification and Avarification in which smaller groups became assimilated to the Tatars and Avars. In addition, there is the matter that the educational system was the Russian one, and so Chuvash parents for instance would send their children to study in Russian schools (I am talking the Tsarist era here), from which they would return as priests and schoolteachers. The Chuvash written language is only 300 years old. But for the most part the tsars didn't give a fuck about the peoples around the fringes of the empire as long as they paid tribute and didn't rile things up.
Sovietization under Stalin is another matter; the Chuckchi reindeer herds
were collectivized, for example. The Dargins escaped it almost entirely by
simply refusing to come out of the mountains.
>
>I just get the impression that integration/recognition/autonomy will just
>"happen" based largely on good will and intentions. I'm more interested in
>the "nuts and bolts" of doing it and wondering what you two think.
>
For Russia, in any case, I think Tatarstan is a model. Tatarstan has as wide an autonomy as possible without actually being a different country. Dagestan, as I mentioned in a previous post, has also been quite marvelously successful.
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