Saturday, April 27, 2019
Republic Officials Caught between Moscow and People on Circassian Flag Day, Beshto Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 25 – Many countries around the world celebrate their respective “flag days,” but for most, this is at best a secondary holiday, typically one that doesn’t involve a day off or have deep meaning for those who do mark it. For the Circassians, however, because of their situation and because of the flag, it is a vastly more important date. Read more
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Circassians Among Most Repressed Peoples of Soviet Peoples, Documents Show
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 21 – In a review of a new book on political repression of the Circassians in the first decades of Soviet power, M.N. Gubzhokov says that while Circassian elites shared the fate of many other peoples of the USSR, “they are largely absent from domestic historical studies that discuss political repression and ethnic cleansings.”
The book in question is Political Repressions of Circassians in the North Caucasus (1918-1940) Archival Materials and Memoirs, compiled by A.K. Sharapova (in Russian, Nalchik, 2017, 824 pp.) The review, originally in the Vestnik of the Adygey Republic Institute for Research in the Humanities, is available at natpressru.info/index.php?newsid=11617). Read more
Friday, April 19, 2019
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 17 – Moscow might have been able more or less indefinitely to continue its divide-and-rule strategy against the Circassian nation had it not been the Internet, a technology that allowed the members of a community Moscow had artificially divided up into various “nationalities” to come together as one, Andzor Kabard says.
The Kabard activist who lives in New York exile says that even with the upsurge of national feeling at the end of Soviet times, Moscow was keeping the Circassians divided. But it had not counted on the power of the Internet which the Circassians used to raise both their issue at the Sochi Olympics and their national consciousness (opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-calling-yourself-circassian-always-political). Read more
Scattered across the world, Circassians are increasingly active online. Now in Russia, activists are putting forward an initiative to unite under a single name.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Paul Goble
Staunton, Nikolay Leonov, a KGB lieutenant general who headed that organization’s analysis department from 1973 to 1991, says that he very much fears that Russia is at risk of losing not only Crimea, Kaliningrad and the Far East but even the Middle Volga as a result of ignorance, incautious actions and rapid demographic change.
In the course of a long interview in which he discusses the KGB’s role in the last two decades of Soviet power, the qualities of various Soviet leaders, and the failure of the country’s political leadership to take seriously the warnings his agency issued, Leonov also talks about the situation now (eadaily.com/ru/news/2019/03/29/nikolay-leonov-ya-opasayus-za-sudbu-kryma-kaliningrada-i-primorya). Read more
