[ the main topic page ] [ the main page ]

Nikolaj Gavrilov - PhD,
Alexander V. Maslikhin - PhD,
professors of Mari State University, Russia

Universal and special in the development of finno-ugric community

Alexander V. Maslikhin Nikolaj Gavrilov

The process of renewal in Russia covers practically all aspects of the society: social, political and moral. Russia is a multinational state, which unites more than a hundred nations; every nation is particular with its own features of the historical development, national culture, traditions and languages. Currently, a new stage in the development of peoples, their ties in all spheres of public and cultural life has been reached.
Over the past decade, there have been major qualitative changes in the formation of friendly relations of Mari with Finno-Ugric peoples. It should be noted that the following nations belong to the Finno-Ugric group of peoples of Russia: Mansi, Khanty, Komi (Komi Zyrians), Komi-Permyak, Udmurt, Mari, Finns, Karelians, Veps, Izhorians, Estonians, Mordovians, Hungarians, Vod, Sami, Seto. Identification of general and special features in the historical development of the Finno-Ugric peoples is the main aim of this article.
The ethnic development of Finno-Ugric peoples was multifarious since the ancient times, their current state has significant differences and common features simultaneously. This is due to a wide range of features of historical, political, social and economic, demographic, natural and geographical development.
In order to analyze the ethnic situation of Finno-Ugric peoples it is necessary to distinguish the north-west (Baltic), central (Volga-Urals), eastern (western Siberia) regions.It is known that they have much in common in their development, but they have certain ethnical and cultural differences, which have been reflected both in research, practical activities and different programmes.
In our opinion, the Finno-Ugric scientists should determine the ethnic and cultural potential of the people in order to predict trends and likely changes in the long view.
Let us consider some examples of the historical development of Finno-Ugric studies in the Republic of Mari El.  Since the late twentieth century, the history of the Mari region is considered from the standpoint of system knowledge. Revaluation of the complex of historical sources, and rethinking of historical events and the dynamics of progressive political, social, economic and cultural development has been distinguished. Holistic perception of the historical process in close connection with the global, European and Russian history, which is characteristic for modern research, allows us to re-evaluate the significance of each period in the development of the history of the certain region.
In recent years a range of research of historians of Mari El has expanded. As a result of realization of the state programme “History of the villages of Mari El” some major works were published. In 2011 scientists from Mari Scientific Institute and universities completed the encyclopedia “The Republic of Mari El”.
In connection with the 460th anniversary of the voluntary joining of the Mari region to the Russian state, which was widely celebrated in 2012, researchers were interested in the history of the late Middle Ages. The history of the twentieth century, the problems of agricultural development, a number of special issues devoted to the heroic pages of history are top-priority goals of scientists. One of the main research topics in scientific conferences is the problem of contemporary political, socio-economic and ethno-cultural development of Mari. Sociological study of the ongoing processes in modern society has been intensified. Problems of the history of education, social and cultural development are significant ones in scientific research. Friendship among Finno-Ugric scientists has steadily strengthened over the years: they are involved in the joint development of publishing scientific articles, new materials related with the history of Mari.
The period of unprecedented changes in Russian history is XX-XXI centuries. There is a change of style socio-political and economic life; there is an acute struggle of opposites, the struggle of the new with the old, the struggle of regression with progress, the struggle of the creation with the destruction. A lot of people and nations are involved in it because of the process of the globalization. Meanwhile not every Finno-Ugric nation has a critical mass of resistance to survive and protect themselves from the difficulties of public life.
The reason for the unique development of identity of the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia is that they have a number of specific ethno-political and ethno-cultural features existing in the course of a long historical process and resulting in their special place in Russian society today. These people belong to the same ethno-linguistic community; have common features of everyday life, culture, and similar social and economic relations. For a long period, they experienced the impact of political, military, social, economic and other factors from external forces as Russia. As there were no administrative, political and cultural centers in prerevolutionary Russia, Finno-Ugric people were totally alienated from the system of government, and they have not accumulated the experience of public administration. Finno-Ugric people in Russia were mainly engaged in agricultural activities until the beginning of 20 century. The common feature for them was the fact that they were not able to work out consolidating national ideology, to create an influential national intelligentsia. After the October Revolution, the process of self-determination and the establishment of the state of the Finno-Ugric peoples also had specific features. The national and state establishment of each of the nations was intended to create administrative and territorial entities in a form of autonomous regions and districts.
Until the mid of XX century the aim of state public entities was the alignment of the cultural and economic levels of development.
It is known that any small ethnic group in modern Russia can exist and develop only if it possesses a number of key conditions and factors which determine life-necessities: territory and environmental protection; self-determination, economic support, a set of regulations and legislation protecting the nation from external aggression and internal exposure and determine its legal status, ethnic or religious ideology, estate sufficiency of the people, which corresponds to given social and political formations.
Tsarist Russia, being the oppressor and colonizer of small nations, provided for the Finno-Ugric peoples some conditions of existence: living area has been preserved, the government allowed to function self-governing bodies.
For many centuries, Finnish and Ugric peoples were able to maintain themselves as ethnic groups, to preserve the language and culture in conditions of severe exploitation, economic, religious, political repression, total illiteracy. A natural right played one of the significant roles to improve conditions for Finno-Ugric peoples living in Tsarist Russia.
Socialism for Finno-Ugric peoples was a progressive historical stage in their development. The Soviet government created the state of these nations - in a form of autonomy, the right to self-determination, and a set of laws that protected their rights. As a result, Finno-Ugric peoples have demonstrated an amazing drive in a short period of time: implemented a cultural revolution, created a national intelligentsia, partly urbanized, the core of its peasant masses adapted to the conditions of the collective farms in the state and collective farms, maintaining functions of community governance. Three social class groups were formed - the peasantry, the working class and intelligentsia.
At the same time, due to the intensification of the military-industrial complex, the development of oil and gas deposits in the area, where Finno-Ugric people lived, other nations came, and as a result of theses processes, there was a decrease in the proportion of indigenous people within the public entities.
The ideological directions being formed alongside with a new historical community, the Soviet nation, reflected the priorities of the process of convergence among the peoples all over the Soviet Union accompanied by their growth. As a result, these peoples achieved great progress during the Soviet times. At the same time, they went through assimilatory processes and national nihilism. As the 1939 and 1979 censuses showed, the number of the Mari people in the republic increased over 40 years, though, their increase lagged behind that of other nations living there. The same process was to be observed within other Finno-Ugric state entities.
The launch of the so-called “perestroika” and afterwards implemented reforms aimed at all spheres of life of Russian society brought radical changes to social, political and economic situation of Finno-Ugric peoples. As the Constitution of the Russian Federation (1993) stipulates, these and other Russian peoples shall enjoy their statehood. However, now we can see successively reduced functions of a national and territorial statehood on the one hand and dismissal of native population from representational government bodies. Thus, only 21.2 per cent of Mari people have been elected deputies to the present-day State Assembly of the Republic of Mari El.
Russian perestroika affected most detrimentally the former agricultural peoples living in Russia. Not having any experience of struggle under capitalism, they were left on the sidelines of perestroika and the process of privatization whilst preserving the mental setup of ‘heathen children of Nature’. They failed to display themselves as ‘predators’ and ‘plunderers’ under barbarous criminal capitalism in Russia. There were very few Mordvinians, Mari and Komi and no Udmurts among the chiefs of plants and factories who got part of the value of joint-stock enterprises resulting in an outset for their further acquisition. The supervisory personnel for the facilities of military-industrial complex of union and Russian subordination in the Republic of Mari El was appointed in Moscow, being mainly inferior.
Finno-Ugric creative and liberal intellectuals were deceived and plundered by various voucher funds and financial pyramids patronized by officials. As a result, they have no share of corporate stock. Workers and subprofessionals at plants and factories had to sell their shares at a fabulously cheap prices, since new owners of plants, who seized the opportunity of eliminated restrictions on wage rates, set huge rates of pay and bonuses for themselves withholding the payment of wages and salaries for years while plundering workers and employees twice by acquire their shares. These new owners aimed not at developing production but acquiring control packet of shares and transferring the booty into foreign banks.
Tearing the native population of Finno-Ugric republics and districts away from communal property was one of the main antisocial and antinational processes in the present-day Russia and the principal condition of bourgeoisie formation. Almost all current oligarchs who had filled a firm place in the political life and public administration, accumulated their capital not through the production of material values but with making a quick gain on huge state loans at low interest rates and making astronomical benefits of up to at least one thousand per cent a year. All the efforts of peoples to levelling their cultural and economic progress were brought to nought. The territory of Finno-Ugric peoples’ inhabitance was very rich in minerals, timber and other natural resources. But the main owners of these resources, especially oil and gas and other energy sources are now transnational and foreign companies: Lukoil, Sidanko (Siberian Far-Eastern Oil Co.), British Petroleum et al. Finno-Ugric village people (about 65 per cent of Mordvins, Mari, Komi, Udmurts and about 80 per cent of Komi-Permyaks) endured a real tragedy during privatization. With the beginning of privatization almost all logging enterprises were closed in the Komi-Permyak Territory which was given a purely raw-exports role in the economy of the Perm Region where there was only 60 per cent of processing industry and the majority of the population was employed in logging enterprises as timber dealers started to exploit neighbouring woodland in pursuit of fast money. A real ecological degradation began in the Territory.
In the 1990s Russian President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree concerning land relations in the country resulting in the privatization of land. Meanwhile, it could be sold to everyone including foreigners. The propagation of farming accompanied by granting interest-free loans to newly-made landlords and full lending stop of collective farms was virtually aimed at the destruction of co-operative and state farms, complexes of industrial livestock farming and poultry keeping and creating a class of newly-made landlords. Co-operative and state farms, industrial enterprises producing and processing agricultural products were deprived of any loans, whereas farmers bought their machinery and even livestock at residual value under galloping inflation. It was one more example of plunder.
Land as an object of free market is in private ownership of rich landlords and profiteers. This process can run into a real trouble for Finno-Ugric and other agricultural peoples. When being deprived of means of production and thus the whole economic basis of their subsistence, they can well lose their historical homeland. After losing their land (forests, meadows, water bodies) the way as workers and intellectuals had lost their shares, peasants would have to serve as wage earners or live by begging for their livelihood.
That economic and social impoverishment at the end of the 20th century can be compared to only the period of crisis in the early 1920s when Russia was exposed to a natural disaster – an unprecedented drought and epizooties after having suffered 7 years of the war. Industrial and agricultural production in the Republic of Mari El declined twice by 1999 compared to 1990. For the first time unemployment marked the centuries-old history of the countryside. Many country people lived off the subsistence production of their farmland getting no wages in social production for years. The rate of pay in agriculture in the Republic of Mari El was 36 per cent under average level in the republic in 1999. Nowadays the situation started to change for better.
Nevertheless, this stringency led to the fact that country people were unable to go to the city in order to get high-skilled medical assistance and died of diseases they could have been cured. All these difficulties were accompanied by spiritual tensions. Due to the lack of funding, people in the countryside are unable to educate their children. Providing the introduction of for-profit education, in the foreseeable future the children of Finno-Ugric peasants will find it difficult to study and get science intensive knowledge, it would be impossible to recognize talented and gifted youngsters.
Overall crisis leading to people’s malnutrition, diseases, psychological instability and tension resulted in shortened lifetime and increased mortality. There were 10,000 births and 16,000 deaths in 2002 in the Republic of Mari El. In the Republic of Udmurtia the number of people born reduced from 18 to 11 and the number of people died increased from 12 to 15 for every 1,000 of population during the period between 1985 and 2002. In the Komi Republic natality was 18 and mortality amounted to 12 in 1985 (11 and 15 in 2000 respectively). Thus, this republic is losing 4 people for every 1,000 of its population every year. The process of reforms has brought annually increasing suicide rates to Finno-Ugric peoples.
As recently published researches show, the process of reforms in the 1990s af-fected negatively Finno-Ugric peoples living in Russia. If no measures aimed at social focus of policy and economy in the country are taken in the nearest future, the regions which are densely inhabited by Finno-Ugric communities will see crisis outbreaks.
The researchers also note that demands and suggestions raised by worried Finno-Ugric élite in Russia who fail to struggle for ‘ethnic consolidation’, revival and development arise from standards of case law in compliance with international ones. The main demand focuses on exercising their rights to carry out social and economic activity in the territory of their traditional inhabitance. However, no Finno-Ugric republic in Russia has legislative framework with detailed propositions regulating individual and group rights of indigenous peoples.
Mass media in some Russia’s subjects raised concerns on developing an ideology including denationalization of some regions. Meanwhile, proponents of ‘globalization americanly’ disregard peculiarities of Chechens, Chukchi and Finno-Ugric peoples.
Meantime, the role of government in the implementation of national policy in a polyethnic community, which Russia traditionally is, should now be strengthened ever more. The state should cement its role in keeping national property away from plundering and handing it over to foreign oligarchs. The state should also preserve the whole social sphere of the society fully neglected by newly-made capitalists. Without even owning controlling stock of enterprises and whole industries (especially in energy supplies) they ensure total control and virtual omnipotence in the sphere of material production and trade through a tangled system of funding. Quite often they disregard people living in the territory where they earn their capital. Moreover, they take advantage of not having any indigenous population with historical memory and nationality who claim their grandfather rights. That is why private oil producing companies give urban accommodation to Khanty and Mansi in return for their ancestral estates.
According to some authors, Russia is at the crossroads now. It is merely an enquiry of time whether it will choose the way of modernized statehood for indigenous peoples based on principles of genuine federalism ensuring a necessary combination of regional independence with Russian integrity favouring national development and interethnic cooperation among peoples all over Russia leading to the prosperity of the country, or it will again become a unitary state with authoritarian governance and depress everything national to please exultant oligarch comprador capitalism.
One can agree that with all their unique identity Finno-Ugric peoples are Russian citizens and share historical destiny with all other peoples. In order to deal with their life, they have to unite with them and organize themselves in the framework of democratic processes in Russia. The process of ethnic development is most favourable in the Komi Republic where a number of laws were adopted granting legal guarantees to indigenous population. There is a law on the status of a Komi congress here. Its decisions are considered at government level, with government plans being developed and measures being implemented.
One of program targets for Finno-Ugric peoples is undoubtedly the exercise of international legal provisions, especially UN declarations signed by our country. The International Labour Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples is an urgently important document. In a word, it is necessary to work out new plans and policies for the struggle for life in the course of ethnic self-organization of Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia.
It is widely recognized that regional development of our republics is identical to that of Russia. The peoples of Komi, Karelia, Mordovia, Udmurtia, Mari El have proved through the course of their historical development that they promote Russian domestic consolidation and strengthening of Russian statehood by cementing and developing diverse cooperation and friendly ties among Finno-Ugric regions and all peoples.
The population of ethnic Finno-Ugric regions is interested in strengthening the country as a whole and cementing integrity of territorial communities, for only that way their social, cultural and ethnic interests can be realized most fully and effectively. The conversion of a Finno-Ugric matter into an integral part of public policy is an important tendency of recent times. It was caused by a heated outbreak of ethnic activity including the one of Finno-Ugric peoples, accompanied by social and economic changes marked the beginning of the 21st century in the country. There is no heat of any political confrontation now, the trend of Finno-Ugric development course which started 15-20 years ago is readily apparent. The cooperation among our peoples, nations and regions should be humanitarian and within the bounds of social, scientific and cultural spheres.

[ the main topic page ] [ the main page ]