A few comments on the Turkish election results

March 31, 2009 On March 29, nationwide elections were held in Turkey for various offices in provincial, municipal, and neighborhood government. I'm sure many of you have already seen the headlines regarding the election results, so I'll jump quickly to a few points that interested me. This was the first time since the AK Party was founded in 2002 that the party has lost votes from one election to the next. In the last local elections, held in 2004, the AK Party received 41.7% of the vote for city mayors. In the last parliamentary elections in 2007, the AK Party won 47% of the vote. This year, the party won a little less than 39% of the vote--a disappointment, but still more than the 34% than the party one the first time it picked up a parliamentary majority in 2002.

Eurasia and Steve Kotkin's "Ab Imperio," Part deux

March 30, 2009 In my previous post, I summarized Princeton historian Steve Kotkin's important article, "Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space."  As someone who works primarily with Turkic and Russian documents with respect to issues spanning Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, the Ottoman center and the Turkish Republic, the question of what to call the region I work on is something that I've put a lot of thought into over the years. Originally, I tried to get out of the question altogether by simply describing myself as a "modernist historian," but people always wanted me to be more specific than this. In just about every job interview I had, someone from the hiring committee asked me to describe the region that I work on.

Eurasia and Steve Kotkin's "Ab Imperio," Part I

March 28, 2009 As some of you may have noticed, I've recently been playing around with the name of this blog, switching from something that was totally generic to something using the name 'Eurasia' to something else. And ruminating about what to call my blog [I ultimately decided to switch away from "Eurasia" but not because I think it's a bad name for an academic subfield] got me thinking again about Steve Kotkin's 2007 piece "Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space," which I first read closely when I was in Ufa last summer.  In this piece, which was published in the journal Kritika (which is itself devoted to "Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History"), Kotkin takes on the concept of "Eurasia" and its use by North American academics to describe what once was called "Russian and East European Studies" (or variations thereof). "Suddenly," writes Kotkin, "Eurasia is everywhere."

Decision 2009: The Race for Muhtar

March 25, 2009 A fair bit of attention is being paid in the international media these days to the upcoming municipal elections in Turkey. On March 29, cities across Turkey (and “boroughs” inside major cities like Istanbul) will vote for mayor. One of the major questions of the day is whether or not the AK Party, which also holds power nationally in Ankara, will be able to receive more than fifty percent of the vote nationwide. While reaching fifty percent will have no practical impact on the status of the ruling AK Party in Turkey (except, of course, with respect to election returns), given the dominant position of the party in Turkish politics these days the "fifty percent or more" question is one of the only mysteries left. What can Terzi Hikmet do for you?

Azeri referenda

March 21, 2009 A constitutional referendum proposal was officially approved this week in Azerbaijan lifting presidential term limits. According to official tabulations, over 71 percent of the country's 4.9 legal voters turned out to vote in the referendum, which was held on March 18. According to Azeri law, there must be at least a 25 percent turn out for referendum results to be considered valid. The Central Election Commission, a state-based organization, claims that 91.7 percent of voters supported ending term limits, which will allow Azeri president Ilham Aliyev to extend his term beyond 2013.

Turkey's upcoming elections

March 18, 2009 Howard Eissenstat has an interesting piece in Juan Cole's Informed Content re the upcoming nationwide municipal elections in Turkey. In this piece, Eissenstat predicts a big victory for the ruling AK Party, and gives several reasons for backing up his argument. I agree with Howard--in my opinion, the AK Party might even outdo their mandate of 2007, when the party won nearly 47% of the nationwide vote in parliamentary elections. One point that I would add to Howard's analysis is the benefit that AK Party municipal candidates will reap from the fact that the AK Party has controlled a solid parliamentary majority in Ankara since 2003. Indeed, while it might not show up in ideologically-based formulations set up to explain the popularity of the AK Party, it's generally understood in Turkey that if you want your city to receive money from Ankara in order to pay for mass transit, a new university, or infrastructure maintenance, you'd better vote in an AK Party mayor. Not only does the AK Party have enough seats in parliament to approve spending bills for AK Party-friendly cities, but the government has now been in power long enough to have filled much of the permanent bureaucracy of the country with political supporters.  Turkish PM Erdogan In Izmir, where the AK Party is fighting hard to finally capture the mayoralty, Erdogan has given a series of speeches lately where he has emphasized the kind of service that municipal AK Party administration can give.  Universities, schools, roads, metros, and other forms of municipal improvement take place in AK Party controlled cities. For whatever reason, cities that don't elect AK Party mayors have more trouble getting money from Ankara to finance such projects.

America, Turkey and the 'Moderate Islamic Republic'

March 9, 2009 In a post from this past Saturday on Hillary Clinton's appearance on an evening talk show in Turkey, I mentioned that the first query posed to the American Secretary of State had been a bit of a trick question: does America see Turkey as a "moderate Islamic republic?" Clinton visiting Ataturk mausoleum

Cumhuriyet Ankara Bureau Chief Re-Arrested in Ergenekon Case

March 7, 2009 Mustafa Balbay, who is the Ankara Bureau Chief for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, was arrested at his house at seven o'clock in the morning on Thursday, then was transported to Istanbul as part of the ongoing Ergenekon investigation. Last July 1--just weeks before a decision was to be made on the AK Party's closure in Turkey--Balbay had been arrested along with three other journalists and interrogated for four days in connection with police suspicions that the four journalists had been involved in the plotting of a coup against the AK Party government of Tayyip Erdogan.    Mustafa Balbay was arrested again on Thursday morning

Hillary in Turkey

March 7, 2009 Hillary Clinton is visiting Turkey for one day during the course of her eight day trip through the Middle East. Visiting Ankara, Clinton met with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan. During the course of the visit, Clinton announced that President Obama would be visiting Turkey in April of this year. In the evening, the television network NTV broadcast a thirty-minute interview Secretary Clinton conducted with the panel and studio audience from "Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol" ("Come and Join Us"), an evening current events show hosted by four Turkish women representing different generations.

Cumhuriyet asks: if we go silent, who will speak out?

March 5, 2009 On Sunday the front page of Cumhuriyet was left almost entirely blank in order to protest growing government interference in the free press in Turkey. As I wrote in my posting yesterday as well as in an earlier posting, the largest media group in Turkey, the Dogan Group--which is considered unfriendly to the AK Party government in Turkey--has recently been targeted by the Turkish Ministry of Finance for an investigation looking into non-payment back taxes. This comes on the heels of the suspicious takeover of the second-largest media group, ATV-Sabah, by a group headed by the son-in-law of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in November of 2007.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan: I'm no Maganda

March 3, 2009 In a recent post, I talked a little bit about the numerous lawsuits that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has filed in recent years against journalists and cartoonists. Today it was reported that Turkey's litigious leader is suing the leader of the political opposition, Deniz Baykal, for character assassination. According to the newspaper Vatan, Erdogan is suing Baykal 100,000 Turkish Liras (about $57,000 US) becasue Baykal criticized Erdogan's "maganda style" (maganda üslubu) at a rally in the Black Sea city of Sinop on February 28. Erdogan is also suing Republican People's Party spokesman Mustafa Ozyurek for 20,000 Turkish Liras. In Turkish, the term 'maganda' is a very offensive word which is used to evoke hot-headed macho gold-wearing men lacking in general culture. That Baykal would even use the word at all is representative of his generally tin ear when it comes to addressing anyone outside his educated urban base. Don't call this guy a maganda, either This marks the fifth time that Erdogan has sued Baykal for character defamation. On two occasions, Erdogan sued for 25 thousand liras, and a third time for 20 thousand, losing on all three occasions. There has not yet been a ruling on a fourth lawsuit, in which Erdogan is demanding 40,000 liras. Last month, Erdogan won an award of 4,000 liras from the Turkish humor magazine Leman, after Leman published a photomontage of Erdogan flipping his middle finger. Erdogan had originally sought 20,000 in the case. I've written about this before but I'll say it again: Erdogan's frequent lawsuits against journalists and political rivals (thought to total over fifty lawsuits since Erdogan's AK Party took power in 2003) amount to an intimidation tactic unbecoming to Turkey. These lawsuits, moreover, need to be placed in the context of other events which have taken place in recent years. In late 2007, the second largest media company in Turkey, ATV-Sabah, was put into government receivership after its owner went bankrupt. Emerging out of nowhere to buy the company was an outfit called Calik Holding, which obtained loans from state-controlled banks in order to purchase the media firm. And who is Calik Holding's general manager? Tayyip Erdogan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. Now the Turkish government is going after the largest media holding company in the country, the Dogan Group. In late February, the Ministry of Finance announced that it was fining the Dogan Group--whose owner, Aydin Dogan, has been sharply critical of Erdogan over the past six months--a record 826 million Turkish Liras ($490 million). This amount is larger than the value of the entire company, which would most likely send it into government receivership if the Dogan Group fails in its bid to appeal the ruling. While there have always been certain issues (mostly relating to Kurds, Armenians, Islam, and--once upon a time--communism) that could get people in trouble if they wrote about them, within such boundaries the media has generally been free in Turkey. Since I first began living here in 1992, I have never seen anything like the concerted and multi-faceted effort that is currently taking place to silence or buy out government critics. When this happened in Russia several years ago, the editorial staff at the Washington Post and other American media outlets routinely (and rightly) denounced Vladimir Putin for quashing democracy and the free press. In the case of Turkey, however, it's really a non-story. Indeed, while Turkish journalists have to defend themselves from lawsuits filed by their own Prime Minister, American journalists who are paid to report the news from Turkey are largely ignoring this story.

Turkish Politics and the News I: A Putinesque Muzzling of the Media

February 23, 2009 Last week, the Turkish ministry of Finance fined the Doğan media group 826 million Turkish Liras ($490 million), the result of the state's investigation into the company's taxes. The fine, which is the largest ever assessed a company in Turkey, is larger than the company's entire estimated value. The company has vowed to appeal the ruling, which will cripple the media group if allowed to stand. This news comes in the wake of a series of events taking place in Turkey which, in some ways, are reminiscent of efforts undertaken by the Kremlin in recent years to bring independent media in Russia under state control. Whereas in the case of Russia such efforts have been roundly (and justifiably) criticized in the western media, the increasingly interventionist approach of Turkey's AK Party (whose Turkish initials stand for Justice and Development, or Adalet and Kalkınma) government vis-a-vis the country's independent media has been largely ignored.

Turkish Politics and the News II: the Ergenekon investigation

February 23, 2009 At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote that western media correspondents covering Turkey are failing to look closely enough at the efforts of the AK Party to silence media criticism. Indeed, Western (and particularly American) correspondents continue to see the Turkish military as the main threat to democracy and press freedom in Turkey--and the military is, of course, an important threat in this respect. But the AK Party itself, as I discussed yesterday, is also showing a troubling tendency to silence its press critics. As has been the case in Russia in recent years, this is being done through state-sponsored purchases of media companies whose media outlets criticize the state, and through seemingly targeted investigations into their tax payments. Unlike Russia, however, the AK Party government tends to receive generally good press in the American media, which continues to view the party as an important counterweight to the anti-democratic impulses of the military. Nowhere has this tendency to focus on the military and ignore the AK Party been more pronounced than in American coverage of the Ergenekon trial.

Turkish Politics and the News III: A Newspaper Called Taraf and its Many Foreign Fans

February 23, 2009 This is the third and final post in my "Turkish Politics and the News" trilogy. I hope it's been as fun for you as it has been for me. In my first post from a couple of days ago, I wrote about the machinations which had brought ATV-Sabah, the second largest media group in Turkey, under the control of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan's son-in-law, and the attacks that the largest media holding company in Turkey, the Doğan Media Group, is now facing from Turkey's finance ministry.  In my post yesterday, I discuss the Ergenekon trial, and my concerns that it is being used to not only unearth secrets from Turkey's "Deep State," but also to attack the opposition. Today I'm going to talk about American coverage of Turkish politics, as well as discuss a newspaper, Taraf, which is becoming increasingly influential among foreign observers of Turkey.

Seeing Islam in the Violence

February 22, 2009 In the Washington Post this morning there were two stories which caught my eye. Both of them, unfortunately, related to murder. The first related to the efforts of Muslim organizations in the United States to speak out against domestic violence in the United States. These efforts were spurred, in part, as a response to the beheading of Aasiya Zubair Hassan in Orchard Park, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. Hassan's husband, Muzzammil, has been charged in the murder. The second story I noticed was about the arrest of an 11 year-old boy in Wampun, Pennsylvania. Authorities there say that the child had been charged, as an adult, in the murder of his father's 26 year-old girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant. The 11 year-old who was charged with the murder is believed to have shot the woman with a "youth model 20-guage shotgun." The gun, which apparently belonged to the boy, "is designed for children, and such weapons do not have to be registered."

Kurdish protests mark 18th anniversary of Ocalan's arrest

February 15, 2009 Protests took place today across Turkey to mark the tenth anniversary of the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ӧcalan in Kenya. Ӧcalan was later brought to trial and imprisoned on the island of İmralı in the Marmara Sea, where he is the only prisoner in residence. Pictures taken of demonstrations taking place in Batman, a city in southeastern Turkey, can be seen here.  Abdullah Ocalan in the 1990s

Turkey and the Armenian Genocide Issue

January 16, 2009 Yigal Schleifer, writing for Eurasianet.org, has recently posted an interesting piece regarding  a Turkish website set up last December which apologizes for "the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915." The site, which was set up by 300 Turkish academics and intellectuals, invites Turks to sign their names below a statement reading: My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them. As of January 17, more than 27,000 individuals are listed as having signed the petition. The petition campaign hasn't received a lot of attention in the Turkish media, but it has attracted numerous retorts and counter-allegations from within the Turkish blogosphere.  When I first started living in Turkey in 1992, I was often surprised by the degree to which almost all of the people I met here seemed to feel personally invested in the issue of whether or not the Ottoman government committed a "genocide" against Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Not only did I find the near uniformity of opinion on this matter to be striking, but it also seemed interesting that Turkish people would feel their national honor to be so closely bound up in events which occurred eight years prior to the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.  I often had trouble understanding why, having traditionally rejected so much of their Ottoman past in favor of the Turkish Republic, Turkish people would feel so defensive with regard to this issue. Yet there are a number of reasons, of course, why Turkish people would feel so defensive about this issue. Many Turks feel that their history is being compared to that of Nazi Germany, which strikes them as particularly galling when so much of Turkey's current population is made up of the descendents of Muslims who fled genocidal conditions in the Balkans, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. Why, it is asked, does no one ever seem to raise the question of genocide with regard to the French in Algeria, or the United States and the native Americans, the Russians in the Crimea and Chechnya, or the Armenians themselves in Nagorno-Karabakh? Additionally, many people are concerned that, since Turkey is the legally recognized successor state to the Ottoman Empire, any acceptance of culpability to genocide could lead to claims for reparations, even demands for territory. Indeed, many of the postings I've read on Turkish blogs in relation to the online petition campaign raise these questions. There is a lot of finger-pointing, and a lot of effort to distinguish the events of 1915 from the Holocaust or from various definitions of the term "genocide." Clearly, the Armenian genocide issue is something which is still extremely difficult for people in this country to talk about. After all, the Republic of Turkey was founded at the conclusion of over a solid decade of war which witnessed an incredibly brutal series of events befalling both the Muslim and the Christian populations of the region. Talking about these events outside of the traditional "forging of a nation" narrative surrounding the triumphs of Ataturk is not something that many people in this country are accustomed to, and doing so opens up a very painful chapter in Ottoman/Turkish history. But I think that undertakings like the petition campaign are an indication that people here are growing more comfortable bringing up these issues.  It is worth noting that the online petition does not mention the word "genocide" anywhere. I think that's probably a good idea. Discussion of this issue has all too often concentrated on the suitability of the term "genocide" for describing the events of 1915. While I think that such a debate is definitely worth having, I also feel that arguments over terminology have too often become a distraction from what should be the most important issue here: the recognition of the incredible suffering that befell innocent civilians of a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds during a very dark period in this region's history. Perhaps by starting with such a recognition, both Turks and Armenians can begin to move towards a healthier discussion of these events.

Turkish Money Talk

January 11, 2009 "That'll be one million seven hundred thousand" said the man in the shop, charging me an amount which, if calculated literally, would come out to a little more than one million US dollars. I was purchasing a small box of band-aids. On January 1st of this year, the government of Turkey replaced the currency, which previously had been called the New Turkish Lira. The new currency is just called the Turkish Lira, minus the 'new.' So: the old currency is called the New Lira, and the new currency is just called the Lira. This is because, in the bad old days of 100% annual inflation the (old) Turkish Lira (not the old New Turkish Lira) was devalued so much against the dollar that it had to be replaced by the New Turkish Lira, which is now old. Now, they're dropping the 'New' and going back to the old. This of course is not the old Lira, but a new Lira entirely. But not, mind you, the New Lira.

Film Review: Mustafa

November 9, 2008 Earlier this week I went to see "Mustafa," Can Dündar's controversial new documentary about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. I have always considered Dündar a rather bland figure, well-known for his vaguely liberal left-of-center and very uncontroversial views. Dündar is a newspaper columnist who has written a number of books on contemporary affairs, but he'd always struck me as someone who was more interested in asking questions than in staking out an opinion. Fifteen years ago he came out with an earlier documentary of Atatürk which I have never seen, but which was tame enough to have served as standard fare for Turkish elementary school classrooms every since. It was therefore surprising to hear that many people had found his latest endeavor insulting to Atatürk, even in a country where hagiography often passes for history when it comes to Turkey's first president. I found the first half of 'Mustafa' much less interesting than the second. Indeed, Dündar is mainly concerned with the Turkish War of Independence and subsequent years, so the parts of the film detailing Mustafa Kemal's childhood and early career offer little excitement. Indeed, Dündar seems to be in a bit of a hurry to get on to the War of Independence, skipping over major events like the Unionist takeover in 1908 and Kemal's activities in Libya. There is, in fact, much about Kemal's life during these years that I think audiences would find interesting, but Dündar doesn't stray far from the general outlines of Kemal's life that are already of general knowledge in Turkey. As a result, the film feels like it is simply going through the motions at this stage while Dündar looks ahead to the second half of the film.

Ergenekon: Turkey's Troubling Trial of the Century

October 20, 2008 The so-called 'Trial of the Century' began here today. Eight-six people, including a number of retired generals and prominent journalists, have been accused of plotting to overthrow the government. The undertaking was supposedly called 'Ergenekon.' It is so strange, so sensational, that frankly I have no idea what to believe. It all started on June 29 of last year, when police raided a home in the Ümraniye district of Istanbul, where they found a stock of weapons. Six months later, in January of 2008, police took thirty-three suspects into custody, claiming they were part of a terrorist group that had been carrying out political assassinations in Turkey, including the January 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, editor of an Armenian-language newspaper in Istanbul. The suspects rounded up included a former Major General by the name of Veli Küçük, a retired army colonel named Fikret Karadağ, a journalist for the newspaper Akşam, Güler Kömürcü, and several other figures. One of the most intriguing names to emerge from the early investigation was Sami Hoştan, who was involved in the Susurluk scandal from the late 90s (more on that below). Police claimed that they had found a so-called 'death list' created by the group which included the names of Kurdish political figures like Ahmet Türk, Leyla Zana, Sebahat Tuncel, and Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir, as well as Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk and Zaman newspaper journalist Fehmi Konru. The group, which police claimed was a nationalist death squad with links to the state, was called Ergenekon.

Trouble in Ukraine

September 27, 2008 Nobody's talking about it in the United States, but a serious political crisis has broken out in Ukraine. Those of you keeping score might remember that in 2004 the Orange Revolution brought a pro-Western government to power in Kyiv, and since then Ukraine and Georgia have emerged as the two most important allies of the United States among republics of the former Soviet Union which have not already joined NATO. The crisis has been brought on by a feud between two of America's most important supporters in the country, President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. On Wednesday, Tymoshenko joined forces with Viktor Yanukovich (who was the Moscow-sponsored opponent of Yushchenko in the 2004 elections) in supporting a measure to limit the president's powers. The rumors are now that Tymoshenko and Yanukovich will form a coalition government with Tymoshenko as Prime Minister. Yushchenko's supporters have accused Tymoshenko of treason and Yushchenko himself has threatened to dissolve parliament and call new elections--a move which seems unlikely given his party's own weak standing in opinion polls. All of this comes at a time when Washington finds itself in an increasingly defensive position in Eurasia. After the heady days of 2004-2005 and the installation of pro-American governments in Georgia and Ukraine, the Bush administration's goals of incorporating both countries into NATO have already contributed to the partitioning of Georgia and risk creating a similarly volatile situation in Ukraine, where the idea of joining the alliance is anathema to the large Russian-speaking population of the country. As I argued in a recent posting, the Bush administration's obsession with extending NATO membership to these countries is self-defeating. In Ukraine, the prospect of joinging the EU would be a far less divisive and equally effective means of guaranteeing Ukrainian territorial integrity. Indeed, Washington's current plans of putting Ukraine and Georgia on the fast track to membership in NATO could very well lead to the very breakup of Ukraine that Washington is seeking to avoid by promoting its membership. Particularly in today's heated atmosphere, Russians in Ukraine--particularly in the the Crimea--are simply not going to stand for it.

Recent Events in the Caucasus and Russia's Mini-Republics

September 12, 2008 The other day in the New York Times Ellen Barry had an article on the separatist movement in Tatarstan. According to Barry, the Russian government's abandonment of a policy of steadfast support for the principle of territorial integrity in the face of separatist movements has already attracted the attention of separatists within Russia. “In the long term, they could have signed their own death warrant,” said Lawrence Scott Sheets, the Caucasus program director for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to prevent and resolve global conflicts. “It’s an abstraction now, but 20 years down the road, it won’t be such an abstraction.”

More thoughts on South Ossetia

August 27, 2008

Well, the big story here is of course Russia's recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On Russian state television, the decision is being presented quite clearly as a response to the recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year by the United States and the European Union. Indeed, an extended excerpt of a speech by Vladimir Putin in Germany last June in reaction to the recognition of Kosovo's independence was shown on the news tonight. I'd never seen it, but in it he clearly says that if such rules apply to Kosovo, then they can apply to countries all over the world. Indeed, Russia's recognition today marks a reversal of a policy Russia had followed since the end of the Cold War, in which Moscow steadfastly insisted upon the principle of territorial integrity while the United States and the European Union recognized the independence of one state after another in the Balkans. While Russian support for Belgrade was often presented in the Western media in terms of some kind of mystical Orthodox brotherhood between the two countries, in fact Russia supported Yugoslavia's territorial integrity because the Russian Federation is itself divided into republics and autonomous regions which could likewise break apart--and which appeared to be, for much of the 1990s. Thus, despite the fact that the Russian government for years supported the breakaway republics in Georgia, it never went as far as to recognize their independence--until now.

A busy week in the borderlands...

August 16, 2008 I'm in Kazan, now. It's been an incredibly busy week, as my final days in Ufa involved a lot of work and numerous courtesy calls. Now I'm looking forward to settling down again and getting some more work done in Kazan. As I mentioned earlier, I spent the first part of the week working in the archive of Rizaeddin Fahreddin, someone who was much involved in Muslim activist circles in the late imperial period and later became the second mufti of the Soviet Union. Fahreddin's archive is useful not only for the material relating to Fahreddin himself, but also for its wealth of documents pertaining to the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly. Indeed, Fahreddin spent much of his time as mufti going through documents in the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly's archive. In some instances, he recopied materials into his notebooks, but many of the documents here are originals. Russian Academy of Sciences, Ufa The materials on the Orenburg Assembly are not as vast as those of the Central State Historical Archives in Ufa, but I would think that anyone working on the Orenburg Assembly would definitely want to look at them. I should also say that Ramil Makhmutovich has provided a real service to research into Islam in Russia by cataloguing this large fond of materials.  Monday and Tuesday were thus spent working intensely at the archive of the Academy of Sciences, where I took over one thousand photographs of documents. On Wednesday, however, we took an excursion. Ramil Mahmutovich (Bulgakov) had suggested that we visit the grave of Rizaeddin Fahreddin, so on Wednesday the two of us went there, accompanied by the historian Marsil Farkhshatov, as well as Gülnar Iuldibaeva, a folklorist at the Academy of Sciences in Ufa, and Liliia Baibulatova, a kandidat nauk from Kazan who recently published a book on Fahretdinov's Asar. Then we all went to a restaurant looking over the Ufa river and had lunch. After lunch, we headed back to the Academy of Sciences so that I could deliver my otchet, or report on my activities, to the Director of the Academy, Professor Firdaus Khisamitdinova, a former Minister of Education for the Republic of Bashkortostan. It also turned out that Firdaus hanım is an old friend of Flera Safiullina, one of my Tatar teachers from way back in Kazan. Some photographs were taken, after which I was presented with a book. All in all, a nice afternoon.  On Thursday, I took the bus from Ufa to Kazan. It's a lot cheaper than flying ($35 versus $170), and shorter than the train (ten hours, they said, versus twenty-two). In all, the trip ended up taking sixteen hours, two of which were spent sitting by the side of the road ten miles outside of Kazan due to construction. It was a pretty lousy trip, but not much worse than expected. In Kazan I was picked up at the bus station by Lolla, the woman from whom I'm renting an apartment here. Lolla is orginally from Abkhazia, and like everyone else I've ever met from the Caucasus is extremely hospitable. Indeed, this morning she was taking her children to the "Blue Lakes" outside Kazan and called to ask if I wanted to go. They're quite interesting--today was my first time there. Due to mineral deposits they are a deep blue-green color, and for some reason are extremely cold--no warmer than the mid-forties, in my estimation. When I jumped in the first time, I felt my heart contract and thought I was going to die for sure. It was so cold I could barely feel my toes after just a few seconds. The most anyone could do was swim from one side of the pond to the other--a distance of about forty feet. It was definitely refreshing, though, and fun. In the afternoon on Friday I worked for a couple of hours at home until heading down to Bauman Street to meet Igor, my old landlord from my Fulbright year. Igor has since sold the apartment I used to live in and is planning to emigrate to South Africa, but for the time being is renting a place on Tatarstan Street. Both he and his girlfriend, Sveta, love going to Ikea, which is located in the enormous Mega shopping center on the edge of town. I drove out there with them, and we sat in Ikea for a few hours, drinking tea in the Ikea cafe and chatting about people we know. Then we were joined by a couple of Igor's friends, who were also hanging out at Mega. A friend of mine, Ramil, owns an apartment out near Mega, so after leaving the shopping center Igor dropped me off there, where I had dinner with Ramil, his cousin, and his sister. After speaking with Igor and his friends in Russian all afternoon, it was fun to switch into Tatar, something which reminded me of one of the reasons why I like this city so much. At eleven I got up to leave. In Kazan the public transportation shuts down pretty early, so I had to go home by "taxi"--meaning I flagged down someone in a car and came to an agreement with him on a price. I remember taking a "taxi" like this for the first time, when I lived in Kazan in 2003-2004. I was really anxious about it, and only did so after having spent a couple of months here. Ultimately, climbing into the car of a complete stranger in the middle of the night--or at dawn--became second nature, making small talk in Russian or Tatar as we sped down the road listening to techno on the radio. Anyway, the guy who picked me up was a recent graduate of the Law Institute here, and we started to chat. He asked me my name, told me his was Timur, and by the time we got to my apartment near Sovetskaia Ploshchad' he asked me if he could take my picture. "No one's gonna believe this" he said to himself after snapping a couple of photos. Whatever, I guess all of this sounds a bit self-aggrandizing--and it's not as if people here automatically go nuts upon meeting a foreigner. But all the same, there aren't nearly as many foreigners here as there are in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and people here are less stand-offish about making conversation than they can be in the capitals. Indeed, one of the great things about living in provincial Russia is that it is much easier to make contact with people. The other great thing about living in Kazan is getting the chance to hear two languages constantly throughout the day. Indeed, while bilingual signs (Russian and Bashkir) are more present in Ufa than in Kazan, it seems to me that I hear a lot more Tatar on the street here than I hear Bashkir or Tatar in Ufa. In Kazan, I feel like I can live in both worlds, a feeling I think I've only really had elsewhere when I was a student in Montreal. Two languages, two religions, two great civilizations. Granted, there are a lot of things about living abroad--and particularly about living in Russia--that I can find exasperating, things that I tend not to write about here. Especially at times like this, however, I feel really, really lucky to have been able to have the kind of experiences I've had over here. *** To see more photos from the Caucacus journey, go to the photos page of jhmeyer.net.  *** More links, analysis and photographs can be found at the Borderlands Lounge.

South Ossetia and the fate of the 'mini-republics'

August 13, 2008 Something about the recent crisis in South Ossetia that needs to be underscored is the absolute necessity of the next US president coming to some kind of understanding with Russia over the fate of the mini-republics, the “national” republics within states which have been the conflict zone of Eurasian space since the end of the Cold War. Chechnya, the republics of the former Yugoslavia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia are all examples of such “mini-republics,” regions which had their own state apparati--usually autonomous regions or republics within Yugoslavia or the republics of the former USSR. As I discussed in my post yesterday, the question of when to recognize the independence of mini-republics and when to support the territorial integrity of larger state entities has never been answered consistently. Indeed, after years of insisting upon the sanctity of respecting the territorial integrity of states, Russia has now become more aggressive in defending separatism when it suits its interests. The United States, which for years has supported separatist movements when it felt like it, is now up in arms over Russia's support for South Ossetia.

A little bleary in the archives...

August 11, 2008

Well, it's been a long day but a good one. I was supposed to call the Academy of Sciences first thing this morning to see if they had decided to let me research there or not. Two weeks ago when I applied for permission they told me I'd find out within a week, but when I called them last week they had hemmed and hawed and told me to call back a week later. I therefore had assumed that it wasn't going to work out, and so went out to a bar last night with Albert and a few of his friends. Indeed, I'd only been out a couple of times in Ufa since arriving here a month ago, and I'll be leaving later this week. I figured it was time to do something other than sit inside all day in front of my computer. So, in the daytime I walked around town taking photographs, and in the evening called up Albert and proposed getting a few beers at Ogni Ufi, a complex consisting of a number of bars and an outdoor terrace not too far from my apartment.

Russian media coverage of the fighting in Southern Ossetia

August 9, 2008 Well, it's not looking good right now in South Ossetia, a republic that Georgia and most of the rest of the world recognizes as part of Georgia, but which the South Ossetian and Russian governments consider independent. Russian troops have been stationed in South Ossetia for years, where the Russian ruble is the currency and where most people have been given Russian citizenship. Today, some of their soldiers were killed when Georgian troops attacked in an apparent effort to retake the region. Russian troops then responded in force, sending tanks across the border. I won't go into details about what is actually happening there, since the facts are in dispute and my only access to news right now is Russian television. However, I can make a few observations.

From Ufa V

August 8, 2008 It's rainy and cold again here. Actually, it's kind of nice at night--with the temperatures dipping into the low fifties--to sleep with the windows open and listen to the rain while a cool breeze blows into the apartment. I've been sleeping really well, although that also might be due to the fact that I've been working twelve hours a day. Last night I didn't call it quits until after three, and I was up again at eleven today working some more. Rainy days in Ufa just won't go away

A Loser's Bet

August 6, 2008 Hardly anybody is talking about it in the American media, but the implementation of new regulations by the US Department of Homeland Security has made the nightly news in Russia two nights in a row, where it has been criticized as a "violation of human rights." The measures allow US customs agents to copy any and all data on people's electronic hard drives, and even confiscate people's computers. To what depths have we sunk when Russian state television is able to chastise the US government--and rightly so--for its intrusions into people's personal freedoms?