Dankhaiaa Khovalyg: Russia’s Asian Republics Speak

***Dankhaiaa Khovalyg. Photo: Rinchinaaa/Baikal People***

‘I was made from Russian anyway,’ 28-year-old Dankhaiaa Khovalyg writes in her story ‘Ayalga,’ published in early 2022. Its female protagonist tells a psychologist how she feels like a stranger in her own country. When Dankhaiaa was a teenager, she deliberately detached herself from her native culture. She was proud to speak Russian without an accent, and dreamt of leaving Kyzyl ‘to be with her own people’ in Moscow.

During her eight years in Moscow, Dankhaiaa was involved in decolonial activism, researched her own painful background, and launched a project about indigenous people from Russia’s six ethnic Asian regions —the podcast re.public_speaking.

Alina Golovina, a Baikal People correspondent based in Buryatia, spoke with Khovalyg about why it is important to talk about trauma, where decolonization begins, and whether Russia’s ethnic republics can unite for their own benefit. At Danhkaiaa’s suggestion, they spoke to each other using the informal second-person pronoun ty.

‘As soon as I would lеave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia‘

— Tell me about yourself, Dankhaiaa.

— I was born and raised in Kyzyl. After graduating from school, I went to study in Moscow and lived there for eight years. I worked as a client manager in an IT company and was involved in feminist activism. In 2021, I quit my job and realized my childhood dream: I enrolled in literature classes and took up writing. Since March 2022, I have been living in Berlin and doing podcasts and anti-war activism.

— You told me that up to ninety percent of the indigenous people in Tuva speak Tuvan and consider it their native tongue. Why have you prioritized Russian? Is it a problem?

— I’m a city girl: I grew up in Kyzyl. I was sent to a Russian-language kindergarten and, later, to a Russian-language class at school. That was how my mother showed that she cared about me: Russian-speaking classes were considered tonier. I was a bookworm and was engrossed in Russian literature. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to a large amount of foreign literature at school, and at that moment, eighty percent of me certainly consisted of this great and beautiful Russian literature by the so-called Tolstoyevskys. I read all of that stuff and would dream of going to Moscow. I was a little proud that I spoke such beautiful Russian. Basically, I went through all that internalized colonial chauvinist crap that life was better there, that I was going to get out because I was more like them.

— Did it save you from ethnic discrimination? If not, when did you first encounter it?

— My experience of discrimination actually began long before I moved to Moscow. My mother found opportunities using travel vouchers to send me to summer camps in Krasnodar Territory, Khakassia, and other regions. I was eleven and twelve years old at the time. It didn’t matter whether I traveled five hundred kilometers from home or several thousand, because everywhere I went I encountered phenomenal bullying. I was labeled ‘China girl’ and ‘black.’ No one asked me to dance at dance parties. I was either totally ignored or talked to condescendingly and peppered with passive-aggressive insults. I had lived in my native Tuva in a groovy, comfortable bubble: most people spoke Tuvan, and we didn’t encounter any racism there. But as soon as I would leave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia. Whereas in Tuva I was considered pretty, smart, and cool, everything and everyone at those camps made it clear to me that I was second-rate.

— How did this affect you?

— These contrasts generated very unhealthy takeaways in my head: that Tuva’s overall level [of development] was much lower than the rest of Russia’s. This absolutely perverted assumption made me, as a teenager, condescend to Tuvan culture and my Tuvan side. It is quite painful for me to remember the instances when relatives addressed me in Tuvan, but I would reply in Russian, saying that I didn’t understand them, although that was a lie. Those memories now make me feel bitter. I feel sorry for that teenage girl.

— What happened later in life? How did Moscow welcome you?

— I often encountered micro-aggressions in public places. For example, I would be standing in the queue at a store, and a huge Russian guy would push me aside and go in front of me. There was no explicit verbal indication that this was because I was non-Russian, but I think this wouldn’t hae happened if I had been of Slavic appearance. I repeatedly had big problems finding a place to live because of my name and my appearance. Or, for example, I would be climbing the stairs to my floor, and neighbors descending the stairs would say, ‘The churkas have come and taken over the place’ when they would see me. They would not say it to my face, but under their breath as it were, and when they were already a flight below me, so I couldn’t even shout back at them as it happened. I would just stand there for a while, frozen on the steps. You always deal with this alone because when you are with your husband or a group of people, those very same neighbors keep their mouths shut. Every such episode of chauvinism really demoralized me, although I didn’t express it outwardly. Because no matter who I would tell, they would say, ‘Oh, don’t pay attention! Rise above it! We don’t stoop to their level.’ I swear that there has never been an instance when someone just shared my indignation for a second.

— Have you experienced physical violence? Have you been attacked?

— I didn’t encounter any actual boneheads (far-right skinheads): I moved to Moscow in 2013, by which time the most ardent supporters of that ideology had been jailed. The cases of physical violence that happened to me are difficult to categorize. The first time it happened was when I was in my first year at university. I was traveling from my part-time job in an empty train carriage to my dormitory. I had leaned my head against the window and fallen asleep with my legs stretched out. I woke up to an old man kicking me and saying, ‘Move your damn feet.’ I did and asked him what was the matter, and he said he wanted to sit down. I suggested he sit down in one of the other free seats, upon which he started kicking me again, saying that I was a churka and if I gave him any guff, he would beat the shit out of me. It was so horrible, because the old man spoke softly and looked like a harmless creature. I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to look weak. He stared at me point-blank the whole way and commented that I behaved very freely in Russia. It was forty minutes of violence.

The second incident happened on Leninsky Prospekt near the Oktyabrskaya subway station. It was summer, I was walking with headphones on in a crowd of people, listening to music. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a man was walking in my direction and looking at me intently. Over the years, you develop something like a muscle that reacts to unwanted attention and makes you tense up and pull yourself together as if you’re getting ready to react. When the man walked by, he hit me over the head with a bottle. I fell down. He walked on. So there I was, lying propped up on my elbows, looking at the man walking away, and all the other people just passed me by. I thought at the time that it could have been a scene from a film, because only in a film can you get hit and nobody comes up and asks how you’re doing or tries to help you. And there were a lot of little situations — elbowing, pushing, kicking. Several times when I was putting away my dirty tray at a food court, I was told, ‘Hey, clean this up.’

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Empire

Today, on Razyezhaya, I came across a simply perfect illustration of what we’re living through.

Source: Marina Varchenko, Facebook, 25 December 2022. Razyezhaya is a street in central Petersburg that I know like the back of my hand since I lived nearby for many years. ||| TRR

These comments by Mira Tai were published by Doxa, the Russian online student magazine that has become a prominent voice against the war.

Hello! It’s Mira.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has compelled many people, who live in Russia but are not ethnic Russians [russkie], to think about how we actually became the “small peoples of Russia” [a widely used term for the non-Russian nationalities that make up about one fifth of Russia’s population]. We saw many parallels between the way that the “Russian world” is trying to swallow up independent Ukraine, and the way that the ethnic republics “voluntarily became part of Russia” previously.

We have seen how the state, in which openly-declared nationalists hold leading posts in government bodies, justifies the massacre of citizens of a neighbouring country as “denazification”. We have seen how the propaganda machine is speaking openly about the renaissance of a gigantic centralised empire, in which there is no identity except Russian, and no other language than Russian.

These months have made all of us pose a mass of difficult questions, to ourselves and to each other. And no matter how hard the Russian propaganda machine tries to ridicule or denigrate this process, it will not be stopped and not be turned back – because we have changed. The surge of anger among non-Russian people has gone too far. The genie will not be put back in the bottle.

And the further it goes, the more astonishing it becomes that the majority of prominent Russian liberals and representatives of the “anti-Putin resistance”, continue to ignore what is happening. A great example is the new educational project, “Renaissance” [“Vozrozhdenie”], which opened today [23 December] and which has been loudly advertised on Ekaterina Schulmann’s Youtube channel over the last few months.

For the project, nine men and Ekaterina Schulmann invite people to take courses on the theory of democracy, capitalism and protest, the history of Christianity, and so on. They promise that in future this knowledge will facilitate the working-out of “a strategy for the Russian state, rebuilt and reborn as the inheritor of Russian, European and world culture”. Judging by the visual images chosen – golden-haired young women in Monomakh caps [the crown symbol of the pre-1917 Russian autocracy], gold leaf and portraits of monarchs – the school’s founders are especially inspired by the aesthetics of the Russian empire.

In a video in the section “About Us”, the word “civilisation” appears together with a picture of a young, rouged Ekaterina the Second [usually Catherine the Great in English-language history books] – the empress who first seized Crimea and began the process of genocide against the Crimean Tatars. That same Ekaterina, whose army slaughtered the population of whole towns in the name of the country’s “growth”.

And so in the tenth month of the full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine, we continue to witness how Russian liberals ignore any consideration of decolonisation. They do not even pose questions about the ideas and interests of those who have not been, and do not want to be, “inheritors of Russian culture”. They have not been troubled by doubts about the abstract liberal ideals of “democracy, freedom and peace”; they have no hesitation in proposing “Europe” as the source of progress, as opposed to the east. One of the courses offered by “Renaissance” is titled, in the best traditions of orientalism: “The East: a delicate matter”. …

People who can today link the word “civilisation” with portraits of Ekaterina the Second and festive, gold-trimmed panoramas of Moscow and St Petersburg, and who can promise the “renaissance of Russia”, must be blind and deaf to the suffering, and the hatred, of the Chechen people, who were subjected to genocide by the nearly-democratic Moscow of the 1990s. Blind and deaf to the hatred, and suffering, of the Ukrainian people, subjected to genocide by the authoritarian Moscow of 2022. Blind and deaf to the hatred, and suffering, of everyone whose first language definitely should not have to be Russian. And this lack of feeling is monstrous.

□ These comments appeared in Doxa’s Anti-War Digest on 23 December. I have translated them, because I think they offer useful starting-points for discussion about “decolonisation” of Russia that has begun not only among anti-war Russians, but also among those elsewhere who take the side of Ukrainian resistance. With Mira Tai, we witness “how Russian liberals ignore any consideration of decolonisation” – and, I would add, some self-proclaimed socialists do the same. One such is the writer and publicist Boris Kagarlitsky, who is to teach courses for “Renaissance,” and appears in its introduction video. He expressed opposition to this year’s invasion, but only after years of support for Russia’s imperial adventure in Ukraine since 2014 (for which he was criticised on this blog and elsewhere). SP.

□ To read more about Doxa in English, see an interview with Doxa activists just published by the Ukrainian socialist journal Spil’ne (Commons), and these speeches from the dock by Doxa editors Armen Aramyan, Volodya Metelkin, and Natasha Tyshkevich. They were tried on criminal charges last year, after publishing a video that discussed whether teachers should discourage students from attending demonstrations to support Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner. (Doxa’s new website is in Russian.)

□ You can also read in English about anti-war activism in Russia on the Feminist Anti-War Resistance Facebook page. The Russian Reader is an essential source, as is OpenDemocracy; Posle reflects the view of Russian socialist activists.

Source: “Russia. Renaissance is not going to happen,” People and Nature, 28 December 2022. Thanks to Simon Pirani for his kind permission to reprint this here.

Decolonization

There are fewer than 2,000 Tubalars, a Turkic nation in the Altai, but they have effectively been collectively declared a foreign agent with the banning of their national cultural public organization, the latest abuse of a little-notice people far from the center of Russia.

As Ilya Azar of Novaya gazeta reports, “the Russian authorities, the Church, private business and even scientific and technical progress have consistently deprived the Tubalars of the[ir] accustomed milieu, their health and their national-cultural autonomy.” Labelling them foreign agents is the logical next step (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/22/inoagent-komarik).

In a 12,000-word article about one of the least known peoples of the Russian Federation, Azar says that Moscow banned the organization which unites almost all Tubalars as a foreign agent because it accepted money from the World Wildlife Fund and from other foreign groups to protect the cedar trees and animals that are the basis of Tubalar life.

But the Russian journalist reports that many Tubalars assume the call for this action came from others in the Altai Republic because in their view no one in Moscow knows enough about or cares what happens to them. Consequently, someone local is to blame, although that person still unknown is relying on Russian laws to gain access to resources the Tubalars control.

One likely consequence of this action by the Russian justice ministry is that the continued presence of the Tubalars on the list of protected numerically small nationalities is at risk. Without the aid they have received as a result of being included on that list, the Tubalars face a bleak future.

Their language is already dying out, their national traditions are under attack, and outsiders, predominantly ethnic Russians are coming in. Thus, for them, being labelled foreign agents is a sign that the passing of a people who have lived in the Altai from time immemorial is rapidly approaching.

Source: Window on Eurasia (Paul Goble), 30 March 2022

The inimitable Benjaminian magic of social media: a screenshot from this blog’s Twitter feed, 30 March 2022.
Sources: Olena Halushka and Anton Shekhovtsov

Neither Putin’s speech preceding the invasion (where he stated that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction), nor the invasion itself are something new or unseen – they are merely the next steps in a long history of the Russian colonial perception of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture as a threat that has to be destroyed.

Regardless of this, there are still numerous voices, especially among the “westerners”, calling for the separation of Russian culture from what they call “Putin’s aggression”. One of the most illustrious examples of such shortsightedness is the open letter by PEN-Deutschland, which explicitly states that “the enemy is Putin, not Pushkin or Tolstoy”, and in regard to the calls for boycotting Russian culture notes that “іf we allow ourselves to be carried away by such reflexes, by generalizations and hostility against Russians, madness has triumphed, reason and humanity have lost”. Thus, not only does this statement infantilize the whole of Russian society and redirect the guilt of warmongering onto a single person, but also, on a larger scale, it seems to completely ignore the fact that precisely Pushkin and precisely Tolstoy – among many others – were vocal promoters of the Russian imperial myth and colonial wars.

The historical lack of understanding of Russian culture as imperial and colonial by nature, and of its bearers as people who belong to a privileged group, along with the firmly engraved perception of Russian culture being more important in comparison with the cultures of neighbouring countries has resulted in the current Western belief that the suffering of Ukrainians, killed by Russian artillery and bombing, are largely equal to the inconveniences of Russian civilians. Through this lens, both Ukrainians and Russians are equally considered to be the victims of Putin’s criminal regime. And thus we see a rise in Western emergency residencies and scholarships for artists and scholars from Ukraine AND Russia. We also see plenty of panel discussions on the ongoing war where Western organizers invite participants both from Ukraine and Russia.

Moreover, the responses to sanctions imposed on Russia and the calls for boycotting its culture more and more frequently come with accusations of discrimination, “russophobia”, and hatred. Thus, a reaction directly caused by military aggression becomes reframed as unprovoked hatred of an ethnic group.

In a new music video by the Russian band Leningrad, today’s position of Russians is compared to the position of Jews in Berlin in 1940. To illustrate this comparison, people in the video wear traditional Russian kosovorotkas with makeshift Stars of David attached to them. Such an interpretation is a blatant insult to the memory of the victims of the Shoah. Moreover, the rhetoric of the band discursively coincides with the manipulative methods of Russian propaganda.

Source: Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, “Not all criticism is Russophobic: on decolonial approach to Russian culture,” Blok, 29 March 2022. Thanks to Alevtina Kakhidze for the heads-up.