It isn't everyday it looks like Russia's preparing to nuke Poland.

The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential aggressor".

The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations appeared to have an offensive nature.

The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline.

The operation also involved the simulated suppression of an uprising by a national minority in Belarus – the country has a significant Polish population which has a strained relationship with authoritarian government of Belarus.

It goes without saying that the cause of this conflict is implausible. The Polish military isn't geared for offensive operations, and more importantly Poland isn't an ultranationalist country and its population is geared towards "let's-get-rich" as opposed to "let's-imitate-Turkey-in-Cyprus." Besides, Lithuania is a much more tempting target with a highly concentrated population of ethnic Poles in the Vilnius Region, forming a majority of the population in the rural area of that region, a larger share of the population in Vilnius proper than the Russians, and Vilnius having a long history as "Wilno" and included in the Second Polish Republic under that name. Should the Baltic tree-worshippers be permitted this territory, I ask you?

Belarus' Poles are much more dispersed, the remants of a Polish population expelled after the Second World War and substantially descended (as in Lithuania) from local Slavs and Balts who were assimilated into the more prestigious Polish culture and to the Polish language in past centuries. The Polish minority hasn't fared especially well, true, with schools regulated, the Catholic Church suspected, and claims that the minority might be a "fifth column" made, although these seem to be associated less with ethnic animosity and more towards the Lukashenko government's strongly association of Belarus' Poles with an autonomous civil society and a Polish-cum-Western influence aimed at undermining his government. That latter makes a certain amount of sense, immoral as the treatment may be, given Poland's strong support for the Eastern Partnership of the European Union that aims to bring the western and Transcaucasian republics of the former Soviet Union into the European Union orbit. That analysis, though, suggests that the status of Belarus' Polish minority might change given Belarus' intermittant attempts to distance itself from Russia.

Strange Maps has uploaded an interesting map of Gagauzia, an autonomous if territorially fragmented territory in southern Moldova mostly populated by--unusually enough--Christian Turcophones.

[W]hile the Moldovans were busy maintaining that they are not Romanian, some of their countrymen were keen to stress that they are not Moldovan. As with most post-soviet national identities, Moldova’s was based on the dominant ethnicity, leaving minorities wondering what they were doing in a state run by Moldovans and for Moldovans. This spurred two separate autonomist movements.

The mainly Russian region of Transnistria has seceded with support of the Russian army, and is maintained by it in in a state of phantom-nationhood. Its obscure history – and especially its strange shape – has been described on entry #311 of this blog. Another, more amicable path towards autonomy was achieved by the Gagauz, a tribe of Turkish-speaking orthodox Christians whose homeland, in the south of Moldova, received a degree of autonomy – and the promise of independence, if Moldova chooses to (re)unite with Romania.

Where the Gagauz came from, is unclear. Local historians have listed over 20 different theories on their origins. There is even uncertainty about the origin of the ethnonym itself. ‘Gagauz’ might mean ’straight nose’, it possibly refers to the Oghuz tribe, or it could be a reference to Kaykaus II, a Seljuk Sultan who settled in the area. Wrapping this riddle in a mystery is the fact that, before they migrated from Bulgaria to areas vacated by the Nogai tribe in present-day Moldova, Gagauz referred to themselves as “old Bulgars” or “true Bulgars”. The question whether the Gagauz are turkified Bulgars or christianised Turks is hardly trivial – we are, after all, in the Balkans – but very difficult to answer.

During the 20th century, the Gagauz have been independent twice, albeit very briefly. In 1906, a peasant uprising led to the Republic of Komrat, which collapsed after either 5 or 15 days (sources vary). In August 1990, Gagauzia proclaimed its autonomy, mainly in reaction to Moldova’s adoption of Moldovan as its official language. On 18 August 1991, the day of the Moscow coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, Gagauzia proclaimed its independence. Transnistria would follow its example in September 1991. Both declarations were annulled by the Moldovan government.

While Transnistria and Moldova are still at odds with each other, Gagauzia came back into the fold. On 23 December 1994, the Moldovan parliament approved Gagauzia’s current special status. The size of the region was determined by referendum, three towns and 27 villages wanting to be included. The Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia (3) consists of four separate areas in the southern part of Moldova, near the border tripoint with Romania and Ukraine. The largest, northern area contains the region’s capital, Komrat.

It's worth noting, I think, that territorial governments controlled by ethnic minorities like the Gagauz and the Transnistrians are going to be especially skeptical of the idea of uniting with Romania, not least because they'd be that much relatively smaller in a Romanian-Moldovan state: 150 thousand people isn't a lot as things stand.

I did not know that Acadian writer Antonine Maillet was being honoured for her literary career, or that her career was fifty years long.

The 50-year publishing career of a New Brunswick author was honoured in Moncton as she launched her new book on Friday.

Antonine Maillet's new book, Le mystérieux voyage de Rien, was released on Friday with a launch at Moncton's Capitol Theatre.

"It's just like before giving birth to a new child," said the 79-year-old author.

'The Acadians have decided to remain alive'

Scholars from Japan, Sweden, Slovakia, India, Brazil, the United States and Canada have converged at the university to pay tribute to the author who has been recognized as the first person to take the oral language of the Acadians and turn it into literature.

The Bouctouche native has written 40 books of which Pélagie-la-Charrette is the best known. The novel allowed her to become the first non-European to win France's top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

[. . .]

Mini Nanda, who is attending the conference from the University of Rajasthan in India, said Maillet's work also reflects the experience of minorities in her country.

"What is common to both of them is their sense of deep empathy, love and concern for their own community — a community that is marginalized, a community whose language and culture is threatened by the central forces," Nanda said.

The books give a voice to the people who are suppressed or silenced in society, Nanda said.

"The writers are struggling to keep the rich oral tradition alive," she said.

Birgitta Brown, from Goteborgs University in Sweden, said she first discovered Maillet's work in 1979 and decided to do her doctoral thesis on the author. "From my point of view she's the finest Canadian writer," Brown said.

Maillet said she is honoured by the attention her work is getting and that she has no plans to stop writing.

"It always surprises me that I'm still there, still writing and still enjoying it more and more," she said.

For the uninitiated, her 1979 Pélagie-la-charette is a novel narratted by the old Acadian woman Pélagie as she brings Acadian survivors of the Great Deportation in the American South back to their homeland in what is now Atlantic Canada.

Cristóbal Williams' paper "Empirical Data on the Issue of Ethnic Minorities in Russia" is a worthy debunking of the idea that the post-Soviet Russian Federation was or is on the verge of breaking up on ethnic lines. Many of the largest minorities (Ukrainians, Belarusians) are so Russified as to be ethnic Russians in all but census record, while other ethnic minorities are either far outnumbered by ethnic Russians (Buryats, Karelians), are geographically surrounded by Russia (the republics of Tatarstan and Yakutia are good examples), or possess cultural traditions compatible with continued associated with Russia (the Tuvans of south-central Siberia). The sole exceptions lie in the Muslim-majority republics of the North Caucasus, which not only have international borders but share a long history of suffering at the hands of the Russian state.

Belgian's electoral crisis has been solved for now with a new government, though the underlying tensions between the Netherlandophone Flemish and Francophones in Wallonia seems set to explode into confrontation sooner or later. Perhaps it will be over Francophone migration to Brussels' nominally Netherlandophone suburbs, or it might be that Miss Belgum's inability to speak Dutch will be the trigger.. One group of Belgians most notable for its absence from the past year's crisis are the seventy thousand or so Germanophones of Belgium, concentrated in a few territories in eastern Belgium and described--as in Reuters' November ""Achtung?" -- Belgium's German-speakers pipe up" and Le Monde's more recent "Les germanophones, des Belges heureux" ("The Germanophones, the happy Belgians")--as a satisfied minority perplexed by its fate in the case of a Belgian breakup. Says Reuters:

At a parade in the mostly German-speaking town of Eupen on November 11 to honor Saint Martin, the patron of generosity who shared his coat with a beggar, the carnival mood was tinged with concern and rare shows of patriotism.

As children and brass bands paraded towards a giant bonfire in one of the main town squares, Belgian flags were -- unusually -- displayed on windows, and painted on some people's cheeks.

"It's always about the Dutch and the French-speaking communities and I'm a little disappointed that they don't even talk about us," said Henri Sparla, a senior citizen.

To date the German-speaking community -- most of whom are tucked into the east of the French-speaking region of Wallonia -- has been served well by Belgium's political system of compromises between 6.5 million Dutch-speakers and 4 million francophones.

The kingdom recognizes German as one of its three official languages, the community has its own parliament and education system, and the European Union has described Belgium's German-speakers as one of Europe's most pampered minorities.

[. . .]

"What makes Belgium is that we speak different languages," said Katerin Bauer, a 24 year-old scout leader. "The Flemish don't consider themselves Dutch, the French-speaking don't consider themselves as French and we are not German."

As children followed tradition to walk through the streets singing songs and carrying paper lanterns, some of the German-speaking adults wondered what they would do if Belgium were no more.

"I wouldn't know where I belong anymore. I speak German and live in Wallonia, where shall I go to? To France, Germany, Luxembourg? I would lose my attachment to what I call home," said father Michael Kempen as his children gathered around the traditional bonfire.

Some German dialect speakers were included on the wrong side of the Germanic-Romance language frontier within the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Limburg in 1839, but most of Belgium's Germanophones are live in Eupen-Malmedy. Formerly a territory of Prussia's Rhine Province, after the First World War Eupen-Malmedy was ceded to Belgium and, apart from an interlude in 1940-1945, has remained Belgian ever since. After a period of Belgian repression, from the 1950s onwards Belgian Germanophones eventually came to enjoy the same government policies of cultural decentralization and self-rule as Belgium's two dominant language groups. The modern institutionalized German-speaking community of Belgium seems to have succeeded in preserving the German language in Belgium, as described in Mercator's analysis of that language's position.

What would happen to this minority in the event of Belgium exploding, I wonder? The Le Monde article seems to suggest that independence might be the least unpopular choice, given a reluctance to join Germany and the potential unattractiveness of a continued alignment with an independent Wallonia. The idea of Eupen-Malmedy becoming a European Union member-state does have a certain Grand Fenwick appeal to it, but ...

Television New Zealand recently carried a story about the Sorbs, a West Slavic people related to the Czechs and Poles who reside in the region of Lusatia, which straddles the borders of the eastern German states of Brandenburg and Saxony. The Sorbs are like the Ruthenians or Rusyns in being a small Slavic nation that never quite managed to break through into nationhood but the Sorbs, unlike the Ruthenians, lack any one sizable territroy where they predominate. Sorbs form a minority throughout Lusatia, with a population distribution akin to that of a diaspora, the closest thing to a Sorb homeland being certain rural villages where Sorb traditions are strongest. Many of these villages are now face physical destruction.

Germany's Sorbs, one of Europe's oldest and smallest minorities, are mounting a last-ditch campaign to preserve a rural way of life that survived Nazi persecution and decades of communist rule.

Energy group Vattenfall Europe wants to uproot thousands of people from their homes to expand its open cast brown coal mines in Lusatia, the watery flatlands in the south eastern corner of Germany which are home to the 60,000-strong Slav community.

"We are fighting against Vattenfall and local politicians - this is about the environment and about keeping our way of life," said Rene Schuster, a Sorb environmental campaigner.

Sorbs have lived in Germany for more than 1,000 years and their language has similarities to Czech and Polish.

Lusatian street signs are in two languages and local radio airs a few hours of Sorb programmes each week.

Sorbs marry in black, play bagpipes and stage a pig-slaughtering festival in January.

They are famous for their intricately painted Easter eggs and colourful processions.

Open cast mining has forced 30,000 people and 136 Lusatian villages to move since 1924 and much of the upheaval happened during and shortly after East German Communist rule.

Vattenfall has recently submitted plans to extend its open cast mining in five areas which would mean moving another 3,000 to 4,000 people.

The community blames the brown coal industry, one of the most highly polluting forms of power generation, for the decline of the Sorb, or Wendish, culture.

"We get more consultation and better compensation now but that does not help preserve Sorb traditions," said Schuster, pointing to a water pump in the former village of Lakoma where his house used to stand.

If history in Lusatia had gone differently--if they had remainder under the Bohemian Crown from the mid-17th century on, say--there might well be a coherent Sorb homeland. It hasn't, of course, and it's difficult to avoid pessimism. Outnumbered at least ten-to-one in their traditional districts in Brandenburg and in Saxony, lacking even a compact majority-Sorb enclave, with universal fluency in German, no foreign sponsorship like that enjoyed by the Danish minority of Schleswig-Holstein, and no taboos regarding intermarriage with Germans and no demographic advantage over Germans, it's difficult to imagine that an actively lived Sorb identity will outlast the 21st century. Vattenfall's planned coal mining project certainly will be culturally destructive, and the idea of burning coal as fuel does strike me as a s[pectacularly bad decision, but even if Vattenfall has its way the effect will be only that of a coup de grace.

Russia Profile's Nadezhda Sorokina recently reported news of the very recent Finno-Ugric summit held in Saransk, capital of the Russian autonomous republic of Mordovia.

This year’s festival of national cultures of the Finnish-Ugric peoples promises to be one of the largest in the event’s history. For the first time in the history of this annual event organized by the Finno-Ugric world the Russian President Vladimir Putin will be taking part. At previous events he sent representatives who read words of greeting from the head of the Russian state.

Now, however, Putin intends not only to hold a three-way Russian-Hungarian-Finnish meeting with the participation of Finnish president Tarja Halonen and the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. He also intends to attend one of the cultural exhibitions being held in Saransk as part of the event.

Putin’s interest in the festival in Mordovia is no coincidence. Over half the Finno-Ugric peoples live in Russia, with a total world population of this ethnic group of around 20 million. The group includes Hungarians, Veps, Votes, Izhorians, Karelians, Kvens, Komi, Komi-Permyaks, Livonians, Mansi, Mari, Moksha, Nenets, Sammi, Selkups, Udmurts, Finns, Finno-Ingermanlands, Khanty, Erzyas and Estonians.

In Russia, the Finno-Ugrics are the third major component of the Russian people, along with ethnic Russians and Tartars. According to some estimates, half of the Russians are related to Finno-Ugrics. Members of this ethnic group reside in 12 regions in Russia and are the native inhabitants of the Volga and the Urals, Karelia and the Kola Peninsula.

The Finno-Ugric languages that have served as the basis for this reunion are associated with a group of a couple dozen peoples dispersed across northeastern Europe, from the Danubian plain and the Baltic Sea to the Urals and beyond.



The Hungarians of the Danubian basin and the distantly related Khanty and Mansi of northwestern Siberia, speakers of Ugric languages all, are associated with a branch of the Finno-Ugric language family separate from the geographically and culturally more diverse community of Finnic language-speakers. The relationship of the Ugric languages with the Finnic languages might be more distant still, as The Economist's 2006 article, "The dying fish swims in water" suggests. (The article itself takes its name from what an Estonian linguist thought was the only sentence intelligible in both Finnish and Hungarian, but turns out to be actually unintelligible after all.) Over the 20th century, Finland and Estonia have turned out to be the countries most involved with the Finno-Ugric movement, using it to connect with the vast and diverse assortment of distant ethnic kin described by the Estonia-based Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples.

Regarding the type of culture, Estonians, Finns and Hungarians are typical Europeans, while the culture of Volga-Finnic, Permian and minor Balto-Finnic peoples is agrarian, since due to several historic, political and cultural reasons they have had no opportunity to create their own urban culture. Throughout the centuries the culture of the Khants, Mansis and Samoyeds, which has based on hunting, fishing and reindeer raising, has adapted itself to the life under extreme Siberian conditions, nevertheless, it is most vulnerable to the European industrial culture.

As to their religion, Estonians, Finns and Western Lapps are Lutheran, whereas Hungarians are mostly Catholic (Calvinists and Lutherans can also be found). Finno-Ugrians living in the European part of Russia are mostly Orthodox, but the Udmurt and Mari people have preserved the ancient nature religion (i.e. animism). The Finno-Ugrians in Siberia as well as the Samoyeds are shamanists.

The Uralic peoples differ in their political fate and status. Hungarians have a thousand-year-long independent state. Finland with its own Parliament and currency was autonomous in the czarist Russia already. Estonians gained their independence only in 1918. After World War II, Estonians and Hungarians were part of the so-called socialist sphere, whereas Finland succeeded in maintaining its market economy and democracy.

The Finnic minority peoples in what is now Russia seemed on the verge of independence after the collapse of the First World War, when Ingrians constituted their own state in the hinterlands of St. Petersburg, Karelians associated themselves with Finland, and the Mari, Udmurts, and Mordovians in the middle Volga area federated with Turkic populations like the Tatars under the banner of Idel-Ural regionalism. The reunification of Russia under the Soviet Union abruptly ended this period, the subsequent seventy-odd years seeing the constitution of autonomous republics with their own state institutions for many of these nationalities, policies of Sovietization through industrialization-driven immigration and Russian-medium immigration which tended to Russify local populations as in the Komi Republic, and Stalinist state terror that targeted the cultural leaderships of many populations as potentially disloyal. The Finno-Ugric movement took off again after the Cold War, following Hungary's transition to democracy, Estonia's return to independence, and the emergence of federalism in the Russian Federation, but the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia lack the strong identities--and, it should be noted, the supportive state apparatuses, most visibly in Mari-El--that have driven the successful nationalism of Tatarstan. By and large, the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia are assimilating into the general population of the Russian Federation, through intermarriage, language shift, and the depopulation of the rural areas of Russia where so many of these peoples are concentrated.

The Finno-Ugric movement isn't going to disappear. Putin supports the idea of a relatively harmless gathering of distant ethnic kin, even attending the summit in Saransk, promoting it as a way to attract investment and encourage trade in Russia. Sorokina claims that for Finland, "a country with a population that is growing old at a brisk pace and is also enduring the twin onslaughts of European integration and American culture, the related peoples of the Volga and Urals have a romantic connotation and represent an opportunity to rejuvenate its population." Estonia may come to the same perspective in time, for the moment seeing these smaller populations as ethnic kin who (unlike the Estonians) are still being repressed by a Russian empire, as the existence of the Estonia-hosted The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire hints. Perhaps these two countries might even try to promote immigration from these populations, under somewhat the same principle that promoted Ingrian immigration to Finland after the end of the Soviet Union--half of the students recruited from these populations to Estonia under a scholarship program in 1999, The Economist reported, ended up staying in Estonia. Anything more substantive--say, the redefinition of these small peoples, as Udmurt Konstantin Zamyatin suggested in 2004, as "Eastern Finns" so as to ensure foreign support--is exceedingly unlikely in the face of Finnish disinterest, Russian hostility, and the separate histories of these peoples. Given another century, I wonder whether any of these populations will survive as culturally separate populations, as anything more than annotations and other obscure references in geography textbooks and people scattered over the Eurasian landmass who say (when prompted) things like "My grandmother was ...".

The position of the Gagauz, a rare Orthodox Christian Turkic nation concentrated in the south of Moldova. I just wish that I knew more about them--their origins, the process of consolidation, their current dynamics--than what's in the above linked Wikipedia article.