FISH SWIMS IN WATER
Dec 20th 2005

Russia finds outside support for its ethnic minorities threatening

IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate a Russian, raise your
vodka glass to "Suuri Suomi--Uraliin asti!". That means "Greater
Finland--to the Urals and beyond". It sounds fanciful, even potty. But
it used to be real geopolitics. In the dying days of the Tsarist
empire, a swathe of Russia bubbled with nationalist agitation among
minorities, many with ethnic ties to Finland.

The Finns themselves got away for good. Their ethnic kinsfolk--the
Komi, Mari, Udmurts and the like--managed it only briefly. In 1917-18
there was a big country in the middle of Russia called Idel-Ural
(literally, "Volga-Ural") which united the Finno-Ugric (the "Ugric"
because of distant cousinship with Hungary) and Turkic peoples in those
areas. When it was crushed by the Bolsheviks in late 1918, its refugee
foreign minister, Sadri Maqsudi Arsal, got a warm welcome first in
Finland and then Estonia.

In Russian nightmares at least, that spectre now looms again.
According to Vladislav Surkov, an adviser to Vladimir Putin, there is a
"premeditated system of operations" by Finland, Estonia and the
European Union to fan discontent. The more nationalist papers have
steamy stories of westerners plotting Russia's destruction. After Mr
Putin said recently that foreign-financed groups should be subject to
strict scrutiny by the Russian security agencies, a website with close
ties to officialdom, news12.ru[1], said that pro-Mari pressure groups
would now be investigated further (the site also accused "Estonian
nationalists" of stoking riots in Paris).

Yet the Finno-Ugric axis in world politics seems more like a curiosity
than a conspiracy. Although the Finns and Estonians are close (their
languages are as similar as Italian and Spanish), ties with Hungary are
mainly sentimental. Common linguistic roots are extremely distant. A
Finno-Ugric joke tells of migrating tribal forebears finding a signpost
on the steppe reading: "To civilisation". Those that could not read it
went north and became Finns. Those that could went to central Europe
and became Hungarians. (Finns tell the story the other way round.)

Today the connection looks flimsy. Philologists' labours have
identified some 200 words with common roots in all three main
Finno-Ugric tongues. Fully 55 of these concern fishing, and a further
15 are about reindeer; only three are about commerce. An Estonian
philologist, Mall Hellam, came up with just one mutually comprehensible
sentence: "the living fish swims in water."*[2]

Hungary's involvement in the Finno-Ugric movement is the most low-key.
The country's left-of-centre government has good relations with Russia,
and no desire to get involved in what it sees as the squabbles of its
Russophobic northern cousins. But the hard-pressed Finno-Ugric
minorities in central Russian regions like Mari-El, Komi and Udmurtia
are more concerned. To them, Estonia, with its regained statehood, is a
miracle, and Finland an enviable superpower. For the minority
Finno-Ugric languages of Russia are dying, spoken mainly by old people
in the countryside and a handful of intellectuals. There are few books,
newspapers, radio or TV programmes and little mother-tongue education.
It is Russian that signifies culture and civilisation; the local lingo,
for many, is useless peasant gobbledegook.

That would have been Estonia's fate too, had the Soviet Union not
collapsed in 1991. Estonians were well on the way to becoming a
minority in their own country thanks to the migration of
Russian-speakers from elsewhere in the empire; the use of Russian in
education was growing fast.

For ardent Finno-Ugric activists, Russian linguistic chauvinism is
part of something worse. An appeal from the Foundation for the
Salvation of the Erzya Language described the position of its people,
who mainly live in the central Russian republic of Mordovia, as
"critical and even hopeless" because of the Russocentrism of the
education system and public broadcasting. "Imperial aggression" had led
to a sharp drop in the ethnic population, it said, accusing the local
and federal authorities of "genocide".

Strong stuff--but it is true that many of Russia's 100-odd minority
tongues are dying out. Shor, for example, a language in southern Russia
with Turkic and Finnic roots, is spoken by only 10,000 people, mainly
elderly. A book of poems by Gennady Kostochakov, one of a handful of
Shor academic specialists, is entitled "I am the last Shor poet". Even
that is enviable by some standards. The Votian language, a close
relative of Estonian, is spoken by just 20 people in a couple of
villages in north-western Russia.

SPEAKING OF TONGUES
Sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in bustling Tallinn, Andres
Heinapuu, a top Estonian Finno-Ugrist (who learnt Votian in five days),
gives a depressing description of apathetic, hostile or ignorant
officialdom in the Russian provinces. Only in Mari-El did the
authorities make an effort to create bilingualism in the early
post-Soviet years, and now even that has gone into reverse. The
republic's rulers have purged ethnic Mari officials and sharply cut
Mari-language media and education. Mari activists have suffered
beatings, and one suspicious death.

Worse, the Finno-Ugric minorities are not as robust as their Turkic
counterparts, Mr Heinapuu says. "The Finno-Ugric character is
different--we are used to running away". Whereas the Turkic minorities'
identity in places such as Tatarstan is bolstered by Islam, the
Finno-Ugrics' tradition--and sometimes current practice--is pagan.
Mari-El and Udmurtia are probably the only places in Europe where
shamanism (nature-worship) is still an authentic, organised religion,
with weddings celebrated in sacred groves.

So what to do? Barring a collapse of the Russian state, any idea of
Estonian-style independence seems hopeless: in every one of the
Finno-Ugric bits of Russia, the Indo-Europeans are a majority. In
Mordovia, for example, the Erzyas and their ethnic cousins, the
Mokshas, together make up less than a third of the population.

So the main task is survival. Mr Heinapuu and his colleagues try to
bolster their kinsfolk's language and culture and highlight Russian
chauvinism. The first is difficult. In the two-room world headquarters
of the Finno-Ugric movement in Tallinn, Mr Heinapuu proudly shows a
shelf of newly published poetry in Mari and other languages. It is a
drop in the ocean. "What we really need is the 'Da Vinci Code' in
Udmurt," a colleague ruefully complains.

A more promising idea is to bring students from the Finno-Ugric bits
of Russia to study in Estonia. That initiative, the Kindred Peoples'
Programme, began in 1999. It was meant to create expertise, expose
students to western society, and boost morale.

It hasn't worked out like that, though. Half the 100-odd students
decided to stay. "These were the first towns they had ever lived in.
They adapted too well, and those that went back had problems with
Russian life," says Mr Heinapuu. Now the focus has shifted to graduate
education. And the money involved in the student programme is tiny:
just 3m Estonian kroons ($230,000). Rich Finland gives only a bit more,
Hungary almost nothing.

That leaves the one area where the Finno-Ugric movement can claim some
success: propaganda initiatives by politicians and activists. In May
this year the European Parliament voted to condemn the authorities in
Mari-El.

That got the Russian authorities riled. So did an academic conference
in August held in the Mari capital, Yoshkar-Ola. The president of
Mari-El, a bombastic Kremlin loyalist, Leonid Markelov, was confronted,
seemingly for the first time, with the fact that some
outsiders--including ambassadors and politicians from the Finno-Ugric
countries, plus a bunch of academics--found his rural subjects' odd
customs and strange speech rather interesting.

The conference also highlighted the launch of a new Mari-language
radio station, which--crucially--will include not just the folk-music
and poetry beloved by cultural conservationists, but also modern idioms
such as rap music in Mari.

It is possible to reverse language decline. Norway, for example, has
poured money into supporting the culture and language of its northern
Sami peoples. There is no sign of that in Russia, where the authorities
approach minority languages with neglect and suspicion. When Tatarstan,
the core of the old Idel-Ural, tried to reintroduce the Latin alphabet
in which the local Turkic language is most logically written, this was
banned by the Kremlin.

It is hard to match the modest protests by a loose movement consisting
mainly of concerned philologists and ethnographers with the allergic
reaction they prompt. The Finno-Ugrists' aim is to halt their
kinsfolk's extinction, not to break up Russia. Yet viewed through the
lens of Russia's uneasy relationship with its imperial history, the
hostile reaction is logical. The collapse of the Soviet Union--called a
"catastrophe" by Mr Putin--is still echoing today. In most of the
former empire, Russian language and culture are still in headlong
retreat. In the Caucasus, Azerbaijan has succeeded where Tatarstan
failed, in dropping the cyrillic alphabet. In Georgia, English is
overtaking Russian as the second language of the elite.

The involvement of Estonia adds extra aggravation. It is much disliked
by Russians for its economic success and strongly anti-Soviet take on
history, and for encouraging local Russians stranded by the Soviet
collapse to learn Estonian and apply for citizenship. To Mr Heinapuu
and his pals, the Russian ire they arouse is a backhanded compliment.
But it is yet more bad news for the people they are trying to help.

*Elav kala ujub vee all (Estonian). Elava kala ui veden alla (Finnish).
Eleven hal uszkal a viz alatt (Hungarian).