MAJORITY RULE
By Richard Lourie

St.Petersburg Times
2&story_id=30831
Feb 16 2010
Russia

As a rule, I’m not much one for statistics, but every so often one
stops me cold. In the December issue of Russian in Global Affairs,
political scientist Igor Zevelev pointed out in his article "Russia’s
Future: Nation or Civilization" that "Russians … now make up almost
80 percent of the country’s population (compared with 43 percent in
the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and 50 percent in the
Soviet Union)."

The statistics that are usually bandied about concern Russia’s horrific
death rate and shrinking population, though that’s showing signs of
leveling off. But what Zevelev is telling us speaks of an emergence,
not a diminution. For the first time in centuries, the Russians are
a majority in their own country.

It is not as if the Russians weren’t running the show toward the end
of the empire and the Soviet Union as well (Josef Stalin aside). But
in Soviet times, it was a common conception among Russians that
everyone — Poles, Czechs, Hungarians with their goulash communism
— lived better than they did. And no one suffered more from Soviet
oppression than the Russian themselves.

But now there’s been an essential demographic change, one in which
quantity becomes quality. Russia has been shorn of all the nations —
the Baltic states, Ukraine, the "stans" — that made it an empire. The
United States may have had tens of thousands of Armenians, but the
Soviet Union had Armenia itself. Now, Russia has been delivered of what
many like Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought was "the Slav man’s burden,"
and all that’s left is the 20 percent non-Russians composed mostly
of small Islamic nations, some of whose citizens identify themselves
as Russians anyway.

What has to happen for the Russians to realize the full significance
of their becoming a majority in their own land? In "Warsaw Diary,"
the Polish writer Kazimierz Brandys describes one of the unexpected
and unintended consequences of Pope John Paul II’s first visit to his
native Poland in 1979. The pope drew vast crowds, and for the first
time the Poles were able to see just how many of them there were. And
from that they drew the strength and courage that led to the Solidarity
movement in 1980 and the eventual overthrow of communism.

Throughout its history, Russia’s development has typically been
thwarted by tyranny, invasion and war. The country’s nascent capitalism
was, for example, booming at the beginning of the 20th century —
Russia was the world’s leading oil producer in 1898-1902 — but that
promising trend was cut short by two wars (the Russo-Japanese war
and World War II) and two revolutions (1905 and 1917). Many thinkers
concluded that what Russia needed was a stretch of peace combined
with a not overly oppressive government.

Well, that’s what it has had for the nearly 20 years since the Soviet
Union imploded. The Chechen wars and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s
crackdowns are relatively mild by Russian standards. There is no
real enemy like Nazi Germany was during World War II or the United
States during the Cold War. So the question is: Now that the Russians
are a majority and have had a break from the exigencies of history,
why haven’t they created a better country for themselves, one with a
clear and definite Russian identity? And to paraphrase a perennial
question, what can still be done? This is a question that only the
Russians themselves can answer, with their choices and their actions.

Richard Lourie is author of "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin" and
"Sakharov: A Biography."