Five years ago in Izhevsk, the life of Albert Razin – a scholar, Director of the Institute of Human Studies at Udmurt State University, prominent public figure, and high priest of Udmurt traditional beliefs – was tragically cut short. He committed self-immolation in front of the State Council of Udmurtia in protest against Moscow’s state policy towards indigenous people. This act was not merely a suicide, nor the act of a mentally unstable person – it was a cry of the soul.
Few people are aware that Albert Razin spent years persistently appealing to both local and federal authorities, sounding the alarm about the disappearance and assimilation of indigenous people due to misguided national policies of Russia. He attributed this to the revival of an “imperial” mentality, which eventually contributed to the war with Ukraine. As early as 2019, he warned about the dangers of boasting about military strength and pride in territorial conquests. Unable to counteract these political trends and facing only formal responses and silence, he took the drastic step of setting himself on fire in front of a local parliament session. He carried placards bearing quotes from Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov: “And if tomorrow my language disappears, then I am ready to die today.”
After five years, we can look back and see how much Albert Razin was right. His act was a tragic heroism performed not only for the Udmurt language. All indigenous nations -from the Circassians to the Tatars, from the Oirat-Kalmyks to the Erzya, from the Sakha to the Buryats – are disappearing, assimilating, and losing their cultural identity and language due to Russia’s imperial policy. Razin warned that preserving cultural diversity is correct, important, and beneficial for all the residents of Russia. On the contrary, simplification, degradation, and erasure of differences between peoples, and the creation of a monoethnic state, may seem attractive from the outside, but small nations who lose their identity become marginalized. A forest glade is a living ecosystem with its advantages and disadvantages. An artificial, uniform polyurethane lawn is beautiful but dead.
We declare that as a result of the policy of forced assimilation and Russification pursued by Moscow, the culture and language of our people are on the brink of extinction. Albert Razin was an advocate for the right to self-identification and a hero. Moscow’s policy towards the regions of the Russian Federation is a metropolis’s policy towards colonies, involving resource extraction, appointed governors, and transferring key assets to a new aristocracy.
The Indigenous people of Russia will survive only if they establish their own independent states. These states should be prosperous, democratic, and friendly to their neighbours, prioritizing trade and cooperation over war and territorial expansion. The emergence of such independent states would signal the end of Putin’s era in Russia.
