[CivilSoc] Baikal Amazons, Baikal Inst. for Mutual Understanding and Tolerance

[Center for Civil Society International]

Following are excerpts from an interesting Washington Post article on
Buryatia.  The full article was reproduced in Johnson's Russia List
#5387, 11 August 2001, davidjohnson@erols.com
..................
#13
washingtonpost.com
August 9, 20012
On the Road in Russia's Land of Abundance
Independence Without Radicalism
In the Buryat Republic, Pride Doesn't Mean Conflict
By Robert G. Kaiser
Washington Post Staff Writer
ULAN-UDE, Buryat Republic, Russia--This scruffy but charming old city
can be found on the map at 108 degrees longitude--nearly due north of
Saigon, deep in Asia. Its Buryat residents, close cousins of the
Mongols next door, look more like the people of Saigon than of
Moscow. And yet Ulan-Ude is palpably part of Russia, as it has been
for 335 years, since the conquering Cossacks established a community
above the intersection of the Uda and Selenga rivers. From here the
Selenga flows into Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water on
earth.
We've been in Ulan-Ude for four days, enough to get a sense of
Buryatia. It is a unique place in Siberia, probably because its
ethnic minority group has survived, where most of the indigenous
Siberians were wiped out completely, or nearly so. They included the
cousins of the Indians of North and South America, who set out from
Siberia eons ago to populate our world.
The ethnic and historical stew that produced Buryatia has given the
place a special quality. Russians and Buryats alike say that the old
superstitions of native peoples and the newer influences of Buddhism
help explain this quality, which is visible to a visitor in the
independent spirit one finds here, and in a shared sense that
avoiding conflict is far superior than engaging in it.
Women at the Wheel
The independent streak can be most appealing. Svetlana Budashkayeva
and her friends who make up the Baikal Amazons are a good example.
The Amazons are a women's organization that allows a few male
members. The ladies like to drive cars fast, hard, and over long
distances, and in the winter on the ice. They drove their cars
through China and Mongolia a couple of years ago, and are now
plotting a round-the-world drive as soon as they can raise the money
for it. But they need a million dollars, so it could be a long time
coming.
The Baikal Amazons are feminists. One of their slogans, "women at the
wheel," in Russian and in English, conveys the idea of women in
charge, which obviously appeals to them. But they shy away from any
hint of aggressiveness. Their cause is to promote tolerance,
friendship, good vibrations. Budashkayeva and her friends are also
creating the Baikal Institute for Mutual Understanding and Tolerance.
Budashkayeva is an ethnic Buryat with a round face and a great spray
of curly black hair. Buryats are a minority here now, constituting
about one fourth of the million people who live in the Buryat
Autonomous Republic. The Buryats seem very proud, but in no way
nationalistic. Those in Ulan-Ude, where more than a third of
Buryatia's one million citizens live, have mostly adopted Russian as
their first language, and their children don't know Buryat well at
all.
Many of the Russians in Buryatia are descendants of the Old
Believers, pious and stubborn Orthodox Christians who fled European
Russia for Siberia in the 17th century when the official Orthodox
church tried to bring Russian rites and rituals into conformity with
other Eastern Orthodox churches.  Others are the offspring of
political prisoners sent by the hundreds of thousands to Siberia,
most profusely in the 1930s.
A missing ingredient in Buryat life is radicalism of any kind. The
city's most famous landmark, a bizarrely enormous head of Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, still stands where it did when the Soviet Union
collapsed, on the main square in the center of town. In Ulan-Ude it
is known simply as "the head."  Lenin Street (known as The Big Street
before the 1917 communist revolution)  is still Lenin Street; same
for Communist Street which runs into Lenin near the old department
store. This intersection is in the old, tree-lined downtown
neighborhood where, in summer, outdoor beer bars operating out of
tents are now common just off the sidewalks.
The leader of the local branch of the Union of Right Forces, the
Moscow party that represents free-market Democrats who are the most
outspoken anti-communists in the capital, is a low-key Buryat named
Sergei Podprugin. He speaks proudly about his service in the
Komsomol, the Young Communist League, of which he was a senior
official until 1991. Podprugin also ran an independent television
station here for several years. He boasts that the Union of Right
Forces won more than eight percent of the vote in last year's
elections for the national Duma, or parliament, entitling them to
three members from Buryatia. In the next breath he expresses
satisfaction that people in Buryatia "don't like sudden changes."
Would he remove Lenin's statue, or change the names of those streets?
No way: "Maybe we should keep these symbols as a reminder of how NOT
to live."
... We leave here wondering what it might look like ten or twenty
years from now. Buryatia is huge, almost as big as Germany, but it is
poor and underpopulated. The city has a growing drug problem; AIDS
has arrived. The government has little money for projects to benefit
the public.
Outside of Ulan-Ude, this huge territory has perhaps 650,000
residents (a census next year will try to determine just how many).
The rural economy is in ruins. Free enterprise hasn't made much of a
dent here outside the realms of retail trade and small manufacturing.
Vast mineral deposits remain to be exploited, but many of them are in
remote locations far from railroads or roads.
But the citizenry is awakening, as the Baikal Amazons demonstrate.
There are dozens of "social organizations" here now, and individuals
are beginning to find their voices. Ecological activism has become a
force that the government has had to reckon with. But all this is
just a beginning. Podprugin of the Union of Right Forces offered this
prognosis: "I think it will take 10 years, maybe 20, for mentalities
to change."