Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Because your editor has just completed a three-month sabbatical in Vladimir, Russia, the following comments in some measure reflect that recent experience, but the articles by themselves do not. Christoph Zuercher from the Free University of Berlin leads off the issue with a theoretical treatment of the single most pressing political issue in Russian life: ethnic relations ("Multiculturalism and the Ethnopolitical Order in Post-Soviet Russia"). Not that, aside from Chechnya, things are as bad as they might seem. Indeed, Zuercher's point is that we need to spend a lot more time thinking about the causes not of ethnic conflict in hot spots such as Chechnya but of ethnic harmony in the rest of the Russian Federation. Why have things gone right outside of Chechnya? How do you institutionalize ethnicity in a multiethnic state? Sprinkled among his postmodernisms are a number of intriguing specifics. For instance, he notes that the Muslim clergy in Dagestan has been instrumental in bridging the ethnic divides in that region. Also in Dagestan authorities were extremely cautious about privatizing land, in order to avoid stimulating conflicts among ethnic groups for the scarce land that would have become available. On this point, Zuercher warns against the rapid economic reforms pushed by the West that could threaten interethnic harmony. Elsewhere, in Balkaria the ancient institution of the "council of elders" put an end to the plans of "a few young hotheads" to secede from Kabardino-Balkaria. And in a great number of places these crucial institutions of ethnic harmonization include transnational networks of players in the shadow economy and outright criminal gangs. There is something for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to think about! If you were running for Congress, or president, how would you like to explain to voters that U.S. tax dollars diverted to the mafias of the Russian Federation are making an essential contribution to the cause of peace and the prevention of ethnic slaughter and genocide?