Russia’s regions and republics now creating special staffs to ‘combat separatism’

Despite Kremlin hype about Russians under Vladimir Putin being more united than ever before, the heads of the federal subjects are creating special staffs to block “the emergence and spread of separatism, nationalism, mass unrest and the commission of extremist crimes,” Paul Goble writes.

The Tallinn-based regionalist portal, Region. Expert, reports that this process is taking place not based on a published Moscow order but rather federal subject by federal subject, with three of them, Buryatia, Voronezh, and Oryol, featuring stories about this trend in the past ten days.

The fact that these staffs are being created not just in non-Russian republics where there exist nationalist movements but also in predominantly ethnic Russian regions where no such movements are known to exist, although where unhappiness with Moscow’s policies is nonetheless present, is striking.

It suggests that the Kremlin, all its talk about unity notwithstanding, is aware that real fissures are opening up beyond the ring road around Moscow. And while some of this activity may be merely pro forma or designed to give governors new sinecures to distribute, the existence of such staffs is likely to bring new reports about separatism to the surface.

That last likelihood is undoubtedly one of the reasons this trend was not set in motion by a public act in Moscow.  But these staffs will certainly want to justify their existence by pointing to regionalist and nationalist movements, and their use of local media to do so makes the perusal of such outlets even more important than ever before.