Window on Eurasia

St. Petersburg Focuses on Ethnic, Not Religious Intolerance

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 26, 2006 – Officials in St. Petersburg have announced the first ever city-level program in the Russian Federation to combat xenophobia and intolerance, but the program, slated to run until 2010, devotes almost all its attention to relations among ethnic and national groups rather than to those among the city’s religious communities.

Last Friday, city officials announced a four-year, 314 million ruble
(12 million U.S. dollar) program to reduce tensions among the city’s
numerous ethnic and religious groups. But they apparently plan to spend
only three percent of that total on promoting inter-faith understanding
[http://www.dpni.org/index.php?0++6486].

In recent months, Russia’s northern capital has gained an unwelcome
reputation as one of the most xenophobic cities in the country as a
result of mounting attacks on foreign students and migrants from the
Caucasus and Central Asia and broadsides and actions directed against
Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities.

Consequently, the new program intended to provide education in
tolerance in the schools, to develop media campaigns in this area, and to improve relations between the militia and various communities is something that everyone concerned about human rights in the Russian Federation can
welcome.

But it is striking that this effort appears to be directed almost
exclusively at ethnic rather than religious problems, especially since
non-Russians and non-Orthodox Christians, particularly Muslims, form an
increasingly large proportion of the population there.

And many of the latter are likely to be concerned by the comments
officials and scholars made when this program was announced. City head
Valentina Matvienko, for example, said “besides separate
nationalities, all of us have a common nationality – that of
Petersburgers” – a view many minorities may find disturbing.

Far more troubling, however, were the remarks of Valeriy Tishkov, the
chairman of the Social Chamber’s Commission on Tolerance and Freedom
of Conscience, about the causes of xenophobia, the nature of Islam, and
what the Russian authorities should be doing to enforce tolerance
[http://dpni.org/index.php?0++6465].

Tishkov said that xenophobia in Russia represented “an entry fee for
democracy” rather than a dangerous “survival of the past” and
urged that the Russian state use all the powers at its disposal to
combat it. In particular, he said, the state must impose tightly
control over “the spreaders of hatred on the Internet.”

Otherwise, the former nationalities minister and influential director
of the Russian Federation Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology
continued, their activities “will destroy society” – a formulation
that even those who want to combat hatred are likely to find chilling
in its implications for media freedom.

But it was Tishkov’s comments about Islam that may be the most
worrisome. He insisted that “Islam does not recognise the right of an
individual to change to another religion, another culture, and
therefore it must be reformed in the directorion of observing the rights and
freedoms of the individual.”

That there are provisions within Islam that can and have been cited in
support of that view is certainly the case, but for an influential
ethnographer to make such sweeping conclusions about an entire religion
on the basis of texts rather than practice reflects a dangerous trend
in Russian official thinking.

As a result, Tishkov’s comments combined with the failure of the St.
Petersburg government to devote more attention to religious tensions
will do little to calm the fears of the estimated one million Muslims
who live in Russia’s northern capital – and indeed, the worries of
the millions more who live elsewhere in the Russian Federation.

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