MOSCOW/KISLOVODSK, Russia (Reuters) – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, warning ethnic tensions could tear Russia apart, said yesterday he would toughen migration rules and keep a tight rein on Russia’s regions to prevent it following the Soviet Union into oblivion.
In a newspaper article and an address in southern Russia, Putin used the danger of ethnic discord to call for limits on electoral reforms.
“With the collapse of the country (the Soviet Union), we were on the edge — and in some regions over the edge – of civil war,” Putin wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
“With great effort, with great sacrifice we were able to douse these fires. But that doesn’t mean that the problem is gone,” he wrote in the second of a series of articles promoting his leadership goals ahead of a March 4 presidential election.
Putin, in power since 2000 and favoured to win a six-year presidential term in March, described a Soviet-style vision of a country in which the rights of ethnic minorities would be respected but Russian language and culture would dominate.
“The Russian people, the Russian culture is the glue holding together the unique fabric of this civilization,” Putin wrote.
Putin is steering a fine line between Orthodox Christian ethnic Russians, some of whom fear labour migration and higher birth rates among Russia’s Muslims, and ethnic tensions which could challenge his vision of a centralised, united, Russia.
Thousands of nationalists have protested in Moscow over migration and state subsidies to the mostly Muslim North Caucasus, where an Islamist insurgency rooted in the Chechen wars persists.
Comparing nationalism to a disease, Putin took aim at ethnic Russian nationalists, who have been among the 59-year-old prime minister’s most vociferous critics.
“If a multiethnic society is infected by nationalism, it loses its strength and durability,” Putin wrote. “We need to understand what far-reaching effects can be caused by attempts to inflame national enmity and hatred.”
