Confronting crises in Russia

Opening the seminar, Greg Simons, UI Research Associate and Researcher at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (UCRS) highlighted the institutional aspect of Russia`s crisis management, primarily represented by EMERCOM (Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations). 

The Ministry deals with a great number of tasks - from forest fires and floods to international humanitarian aid. Simons noted that EMERCOM proved to be a quite effective agency given the size of the country and the variety of tasks; the positive public image of the Ministry and its stability also attested to that.  Although, the expert argued, the high degree of centralization at times undermined the efficiency of crisis management, especially in distant parts of Russia. On different examples, Simons demonstrated both the ability of the Russian population to civic action, involvement and self-organization when confronted with natural disasters, and EMERCOM`s hesitation about transforming the bottom-up civic engagement into its permanent resource.  At the same time an important point of the expert was that the biggest challenge for the Ministry in terms of man-made disasters is the "absence of a safety culture."

Benedicte Berner, Acting President of Civil Rights Defenders and Associate to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard University), concentrated on Russia`s authorities` solutions to the political crises in the country, specifically focusing on North Caucasus. 

Her presentation was based on the argument that the Russian government had used three instruments to address this kind of crises - 1) the military, 2) economic pressure or 'favours' and 3) the instrumentalization of the media. 

In the case of the first instrument, Berner pointed out that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for various reasons, only Chechnya, of the six North Caucasian republics, claimed independence. So, in contemporary Russia, the factor of military influence was used during the two wars in Chechnya, both by Boris Yeltsin and by Vladimir Putin. 

Berner argued, while the first war opened a road to international Islamism, the second war - although putting an end to insurgent groups in Chechnya, however, as a result, made the insurgents move to the Dagestan area. The scholar specifically noted, against this backdrop, Islam survived in the region in the form of Sufism, while any version of Salafism, brought in by those educated in the Middle East and often non-militant, was suppressed by the federal authorities. 

The economic 'favours' instrument, in the case of North Caucasus, was used in recent years through federal money supporting the region, especially on the eve of the Sochi Olympic Games. A new ambitious plan on regional development had been launched, but many issues, such as high unemployment rate remained. 

The instrumentalization of the media, which was two-fold in North Caucasus (it included isolation and direct censorship), led to the dominance of national reporting. 

Of the three instruments, the third one proved to be the most successful, in terms of result.    

The seminar was the third in a seminar series on Russian domestic politics organized in cooperation with UCRS.

By Victoria Vasilenko, visting scholar.

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