By Vestnik Kavkaza
Igor Barinov, who has been appointed to head the recently created Agency for Nationalities, intends to build on Russia's centuries-old experience of ethnic policy. "Everything is interconnected in ethnic policy: migration processes, extremism, and the questions of identity of Russia’s multinational population. All of these issues must be addressed comprehensively,” Barinov told TASS. “First and foremost I need to create an agency that does not yet exist today and to bring everything that is now scattered between various ministries and departments to a common denominator in terms of functions, ideology and personnel."
Some experts have decided that Russia’s ethnic policy will change in the direction of tighter regulation, noting, however, that ethnic policy is an area in which it is important to smooth out conflicts and negotiate.
The director of the Institute of Regional Problems, Dmitry Zhuravlev, believes that the problems exist not in international relations, but in politics and economics. "There are areas of the Caucasus which are much quieter than, for example, some areas of the Volga region. By the way, when the Americans entered Afghanistan, there was not a single representative of the Caucasus, but there were several representatives of the Volga region. Therefore we cannot talk about the problems in isolated regions: problems can appear in the most unexpected places. Six to eight years ago excesses didn't occur in ethnic regions. They appeared in Russia’s Russian-speaking regions. Their cause was not ethnicity."
According to Zhuravlev, "the problem is that people are unhappy with some aspects of their existence, and some of them turn this into ethnic conflicts. Speaking about really difficult regions, for Russia these are probably the national republics of the Volga region, though they cannot be discussed in terms of conflicts. Conflicts arise where the authorities do not work properly. But people from the Volga region should be sympathized with. They do not have enough money, and nobody has taught them to work in this sphere."
