Caucasian elders asked a Russian question

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

And they turned to the President with a request to fix in the Constitution the state-forming role of the Russian people.

The other day in Maikop (the capital of Adygea) an event of extreme importance took place: representatives of several republics of the North Caucasus at once came up with an initiative to legislatively enshrine the state-forming status of the Russian people in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Previously, such initiatives have already sounded from the lips of representatives of Russian patriotic organizations, but the authorities all the time brushed aside the solution of the "Russian question", hiding behind concern for the rights of small peoples. natives of the Caucasus.

The initiative to introduce into the Constitution a provision on the state-forming role of Russians was voiced at a joint meeting of the elders of Adygea and the local branch of the Izborsk club, with the participation of delegations from Kabarda, Azerbaijan, as well as representatives of Moscow patriotic organizations led by co-chairman of the OD People's Council Vladimir Khomyakov. By the way, back in 2013 he formulated the idea of legislative consolidation of the status of a state-forming people for Russians.

The reason for this idea, as well as for the current initiative of the Caucasian elders, was Vladimir Putin's 2012 policy article “Russia: the national question” - in which the President, for the first time in recent decades, stated that “The core that holds the fabric of this unique civilization [of Russia] is Russian people, Russian culture ".

Khomyakov developed the President's thought, stating that Russians, who have always been the civilizational core of the Russian Empire-USSR-RF, still constitute an absolute majority in Russia (78% of the population - and with Ukrainians and Belarusians - 80%), but at the same time they are not mentioned at all in Constitution of 1993 and in the legal sense are deprived of "legal personality". Khomyakov's project was to submit to the Duma, in the form of a legislative initiative, a proposal to consolidate the status of Russians in the Constitution, which required collecting 100,000 signatures. But then the matter did not work out - the pro-Russian organizations were not able to come to an agreement among themselves, and the bureaucratic apparatus did everything so that the initiators did not succeed.

Now the situation may change. Representatives of those very small peoples of the Caucasus, whose interests have covered up officials from specialized departments of the Presidential Administration for so many years, came out with a proposal to legitimize the right of the "elder brother". This is especially important and valuable now, when the anti-Russian forces want to tear the Caucasus away from Russia by the hands of both pseudo-Russian nationalists and all sorts of Caucasian separatists. The initiative of the elders of Adygea can not only make it possible to take the first steps towards solving the “Russian question” in Russia, but also become a starting point for building a new interethnic policy. On August 5, in the Moscow House of Journalists, a round table was held with experts from already Russian organizations, where the initiative turned from “Caucasian” to “Russian-Caucasian”.