Sochi Update: Earthquake Prayers, Racist Rings, Gay-Pride Flag Kerfuffles, Jailed Activists

Here is the latest news from the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where politics is the most interesting spectator sport.

Islamists pray for Sochi earthquake
The Caucasus Emirate movement, which aims to separate the North Caucasus region, including Sochi, the site of this year’s Winter Olympics, as a separate Islamic state, is considered the greatest threat to the Games.  The group’s Vilayat Dagestan subdivisions claimed responsibility for the recent lethal bus bombings in nearby Volgograd, and the group has promised to send Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, “a present” during the Olympics.  But no concrete security threats have materialized.  (The Caucasus Emirate was no. 1 in this blog’s list of “10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games.”)

The imaginary Islamic state of the Caucasus Emirate includes a province (vilayat)
called Ġalġayçö, consisting of Ingushetia and predominantly-Christian North Ossetia.

On February 10th, however, the local branch of the Emirate for the Republic of Ingushetia, a Russian republic east of Sochi, veered toward the supernatural.  An announcement on the Ingush branch’s website asked the faithful to pray for an earthquake to devastate Sochi during the Olympics.  The Emirate movement, as well as more moderate Circassian nationalist groups, have condemned the Russian decision to hold the Games near the site of a genocide of predominantly-Muslim Circassians, exactly 150 years ago this year.  (The Circassian genocide was no. 2 in this blog’s list of “10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games.”)

Funeral for a policeman killed in the Islamist terrorist attack on Volgograd

The Emirate’s appeal read, in part, “All who are able to read this letter can supplicate that the Almighty destroys the land in Sochi with an earthquake, and makes the infidels ‘drunk of water’ before Hell and drown in a flood!”  It added, “The Games of the atheists and pagans!  The pigs are so arrogant that they decided to host the Games on the ground where our ancestors shed their blood to defend Islam and Muslims.  Even the blind can see it!”  The statement concluded, “May Allah give the infidels in Sochi the last earthquake of their lives.”

The Caucasus Emirate glee club

No seismic activity has as yet been detected.

Gay-pride flag raised—sort of
There was a brief kerfuffle after the Games’ opening ceremony on February 7th, when some international media openly interpreted the gloves worn by Greece’s national team as using differently colored fingers in reference to the gay-pride flag (technically, the LGBT flag).  This was seen as a middle finger—a yellow middle finger!—to the host country, Russia, and its draconian anti-gay laws (which were no. 3 in this blog’s list of “10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games”).  Greece, after all, because of the openly homoerotic culture of ancient Athens, is practically synonymous in the wider world with homosexuality (we’ve all heard of Lesbos), though nowadays it is far tougher to be gay or lesbian in the Balkans than in northern Europe.

Greek officials pointed out, however, that the colored fingers corresponded to the five colors of the Olympic rings (see more below on that) and not the gay-pride flag.  Germany’s team also wore rainbow colors in its opening-ceremony uniforms, but corresponding neither to the gay-pride or Olympic color arrays.

The most serious flag controversy of the Olympics so far, however, has been far from Sochi, in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada.  There, the city has been divided over the question of whether to fly the gay pride flag during the Olympics.  Many Canadian city halls are doing this as a protest of the Russian Federation’s new anti-gay legislation.  These include those in Edmonton, Montreal, Quebec City, Regina, St. John’s, Toronto, Vancouver, and the national capital, Ottawa.  The attack on Calgary’s use of the flag has been led by Jerry Joynt, a member of the Olympic organizing committee back in 1988, when Calgary hosted the Winter Olympics.  Media have also lodged criticism.  The mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, has nonetheless defended the decision; which flags fly are ultimately his decision.  When a city official took the occasion of Nenshi’s visit to a conference in London to announce that the flag was coming down, Nenshi telephoned from London to overrule him.

Calgary’s city hall

Alberta, often called “the Texas of Canada,” is the epicenter of fundamentalist religion and social conservatism in Canada—a country where religion otherwise, certainly when compared with the United States, plays very little role in public life.  Nenshi, the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city, whose parents were members of Tanzania’s diaspora South Asian community, is locally regarded as very liberal and is a vocal champion of gay and transgender rights.  His house was vandalized in 2010 on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and he has faced a barrage of criticism from extremist Christian activists.

Calgary’s mayor, Naheed Nenshi, is not your typical Albertan.

Ideally, Nenshi says, he would like the Olympic and gay-pride flags to fly side by side outside city hall.  But any flying of the Olympic flag anywhere needs to be authorized by the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.), and they have not done so.  Nenshi generously says that official permission must be bogged down by red tape, but is the real reason that the I.O.C. does not want to offend this year’s Olympic hosts by having the gay-pride and Olympic flags flying together in an Olympic city?

Calgary hosted the Olympics in 1988.
Shoulder pads, fringe—that was the ’80s.

And, of course, we are still awaiting word on whether anyone in Sochi has spotted the flag of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a constituent unit of the Russian Federation—originally Josef Stalin’s Siberian dumping ground for troublesome Jews—whose flag so resembles the gay-pride flag that last year (as reported at the time in this blog) officials had to issue specific statements outlining their differences.

See?  The J.A.O. flag has two different shades of purple.  It’s totally different.

Russia puts racial categories back into Olympic symbol
Though there have been few flag kerfuffles in Sochi, there is some controversy over the way that Russia’s Olympic organizers have been displaying a monument in Sochi featuring the Olympic rings.  The five rings representing the Olympics are generally assumed to represent the number of continents in popular conception at the time—and indeed European schoolchildren, for example, still learn that there are five continents.  (To explain this to Americans: they lose Antarctica—no one lives there anyway—and merge North and South America.)  While it is true that the number five was originally chosen to represent the continents, there is no truth in official Olympic rules or in original intent to what has by now become the common popular interpretation: that the different colors of the rings indicate which of the five continents they represent.  The founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, intended the colors to represent the different colors in all of the flags represented at the first modern Games in 1896: “the blue and yellow of Sweden, the blue and white of Greece” (note: white is the Olympic flag’s background), “the tri colors of France, England, and America,” etc.  (England’s flag is a two-colored St. George’s Cross: like most Frenchmen, the Baron did not know the difference between England and the United Kingdom, but never mind that.)

Nonetheless, the rings as they appear prominently on an Olympic monument in Sochi are labeled by continent: yellow is Asia, black is Africa, blue is Europe, green is Australia, and red are the Americas.  This has caused some complaints.  However, a similar official display at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, also featured continent-labeled rings.

Incorrect—though most people do not realize it

Georgia warns Olympic guests away from Abkhazia
The foreign ministry of the Republic of Georgia on February 12th asked visitors to the Winter Olympics not to visit the nearby Republic of Abkhazia, which functions as a Russian puppet state separate from Georgia but most of the world—other than Russia and four other nations—regards as Georgian territory.  Russia and Georgia cut off diplomatic relations after a 2008 war in which Georgia tried to reclaim Abkhazia and another de facto independent puppet state, South Ossetia.  Georgia came close to boycotting the Olympics this year.  Georgia calls the Russian effort to lure Olympic tourists to Abkhazia “a provocation aimed at undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia.”  But an I.O.C. spokesman, when asked about tourism to Abkhazia, said, “Why not?”  He added, “ The talks and exchanges between the two governments, that’s entirely been to the two governments. In terms of going to Abkhazia ... well if it’s safe, people will go there.”  (Abkhazia and South Ossetia were no. 5 in this blog’s list of “10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games.”)

Environmental activist sent to labor camp
The public outcry over this week’s sentencing of Yevgeny Vitishko, a 40-year-old geologist critical of the environmental damage done by the Sochi Olympics, has increased in recent days.  The I.O.C. has demanded an explanation, and Human Rights Watch (H.R.W.) has condemned the move as well.

Yevgeny Vitishko being arrested last week

Vitishko was first arrested in 2011 for “hooliganism” when he and other members of his group, Environmental Watch on North Caucasus, broke through an illegal fence erected in a public forest.  When the activists discovered evidence of illegal logging of protected species, some members of the group spraypainted on the fence, “This is our forest.”  The trouble was, the fence was considered part of the summer home of Aleksandr Tkachev, governor of Krasnodar Krai.  Vitishko was sentenced to three years’ labor in a penal colony, pending appeal.  Then, last week, when he was on his way to speak to reporters in Sochi about his case, he was (as reported in this blog) arrested for using profanity at a public bus stop and taken away for a 15-day jail term.  A legal appeal of his sentence failed on February 12th.  Yulia Gorbunova, of H.R.W., said, “The case against Vitishko has been politically motivated from the start. When the authorities continued to harass him it became clear they were trying to silence and extract certain retribution against certain persistent critics of the preparations for the Olympics.”

The Krasnodar crime scene: “This is our forest”

Governor Tkachev, a certified ultranationalist loon, has been in the news before.  As governor of the jurisdiction which includes Sochi, he has been among those most outspoken in casting the security threats to the Olympics as a racial problem.  It was he who (as reported at the time in this blog) first invited Cossack troops to patrol both Sochi and Krasnodar Krai as a whole, promising local police that “what you can’t do, the Cossacks can”—while also reassuring rights groups that Cossacks do not carry firearms, only whips (phew!).  There are 1,000 Cossacks in full uniform currently patrolling Sochi.  Tkachev has also called for Cossacks to expel North Caucasus minority groups, who are predominantly Muslim, from the province.  He referred to the region as “crawling” with Caucasus people who he said “make ethnic Russians feel like strangers in their own country.”  Nor is he ignorant of the fact that the minorities in question are the indigenous peoples of the region and that Russia brutally conquered the territory only a few generations ago.  He is a foremost proponent of Putin-era Russia’s fascist-style worship of authority and the ideology of “might makes right” on which modern Russia’s authoritarian regime is built.

Gov. Tkachev in his Cossack regalia

Arbitrary arrests, labor camps, Cossacks, ethnic cleansing, shameless apologism for genocide—the “new Russia” sure looks a lot like the old one.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Anna Sidorova, from Russia’s curling team at the Sochi Olympics

Related articles from this blog:

“Sochi Update: Puppet States under a Cloud, Pussy Riot in New York, Ukrainian Hijacker Questioned” (Feb. 2014)

“Games Begin! Ukrainian Hijacking, Putin Rounds Up Dissidents” (Feb. 2014)

“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

“Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“‘Separatism’ Added to List of Things Russians Aren’t Allowed to Talk about” (Nov. 2013)

“Abkhazia & South Ossetia Won’t Compete in Sochi Olympics, I.O.C. Declares” (Oct. 2013)

“Putin Wants to Revive Stalin’s Old “Jewish Region” in Siberia; Israel Not Amused” (Aug. 2013)

“She Recognizes Me, She Recognizes Me Not: Fickle Vanuatu Dumps Abkhazia for Georgia” (March 2013)

“Separatist Football Update: Carnage at a Dagestan–Netherlands Match, Alderney vs. Sealand, Barotseland’s National Team” (Aug. 2012)

“Somaliland’s Own Mo Farah Clinches Olympic Immortality” (Aug. 2012)

“Olympic Update: Femen Protest, Bigoted Judokas, Sudanese Defectors” (Aug. 2012)

“Celts, Cypriots, Aborigines Raise Stink at Olympics: Ethnonationalist Protest Update” (July 2012)

“10 Ethnonationalist Causes That Might Disrupt the Olympics” (July 2012)

“Will Siberia Become the 51st State—or Maybe 51 through 77?” (Jan. 2012)

“Separatism” Added to List of Things Russians Aren’t Allowed to Talk about

Dead journalists.  The existence of homosexuality.  Anything which “offends” Eastern Orthodox Christianity.  And now Vladimir Putin’s political allies in Russia’s Duma (parliament) put forth a bill on November 8th which provides for prison terms of up to 20 years for “spreading separatist propaganda.”  The move comes on the heels of other assaults on free speech which have been damaging Russia’s already-precarious reputation as a new democracy: the jailing of members of the anti-clerical, anti-Putin dissident punk band Pussy Riot, the requirement that any charitable or nonprofit groups branching out into Russia have to register as “foreign agents,” and, most controversially in recent weeks, a new law criminalizing so-called homosexual propaganda.  This last has prompted calls at the popular level for boycotts of next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, or at least for protest actions to disrupt the Olympics themselves.  (Putin has promised that no athlete or spectator at the Games would be prosecuted under the new law, but that sort of misses the point.)

And what counts as “separatist propaganda”?  Well, the most likely answer—as with “homosexual propaganda”—is: anything that makes the authorities decide they want to arrest you and throw you into a hole for as long as they want.  This will doubtless include, along with violent insurgents who mean ill, many peaceful citizens with legitimate aspirations for autonomy for their ethnic and national communities.

It will also probably include much silliness as to what constitutes a separatist propaganda.  The ban on so-called gay propaganda, incidentally, has gotten so silly that last month a Kremlin vexillologist addressed a minor kerfuffle over Russia’s far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Oblast (J.A.O.)—which is, as discussed recently in this blog, a godforsaken patch of Siberia set up by Josef Stalin as a dumping ground for a troublesome minority, though today almost no Jews live there.  It seems the J.A.O. has a flag which some mistake for the “gay pride” flag.  But as the federal government official explained, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast flag ...

... was not in fact the same as the “gay pride” flag:

The designer of the J.A.O. flag, Alexandr Valyaev, even chimed in, explaining, “ On its flag the gay movement uses seven stripes, not six.  ...  The rainbow is a divine symbol, taken from the Bible.  God threw the rainbow from the sky into the wilderness of the desert as a symbol of hope.  Gays used this divine symbol, the rainbow, but removed from its spectrum the light blue color, so it’s already not a rainbow.”  In fact, the J.A.O. flag just has a lighter blue than the gay-pride flag; nothing is missing.  But, nonetheless, I notice that this Valyaev fellow seems suspiciously well versed in what the gay-pride flag looks like.  Check his papers.  (Also, the Kremlin will have a harder time explaining away the official protocols for the display of the J.A.O. flag, which call for the flag-bearer to hang the banner out of his back left jeans pocket, and then take it out and swing it above his head in a rotary motion when “Disco Inferno” comes on.)

Islamists’ proclaimed “Caucasus Emirate”

Seriously, though, Russia does have a separatism problem—most seriously in the predominantly-Muslim North Caucasus region.  Though Chechnya was pacified in two horrific wars of aggression by Russia, nationalism still persists there, awaiting a reawakening, while a Chechen government-in-exile still operates out of London.  More seriously, the Caucasus Emirate movement—a salafist, jihadist Islamist terror group which came into being after the Chechen wars lured floods of idealistic, battle-hardened young Muslim fighters from Afghanistan and the Middle East—claims that the Muslim regions of Russia’s southwestern rim are a separate Islamic state and that Russians are the interlopers.  They have killed hundreds over the last few years in a merciless campaign of ambushes, assassinations, massacre, and suicide attacks on government targets and “moderate” (mostly indigenous Sufi) clerics.  Ingushetia and Dagestan have been hit especially hard.  The Emirate has also shown signs of spreading into other restive Russian regions, such as the far-flung Republic of Tatarstan in central Russia, which was one of two republics to refuse initially to join the new Russian Federation after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

Smaller, lesser known movements persist as well.  President Boris Yeltsin had told Russia’s constituent republics and other jurisdictions (oblasts, okrugs, krais, etc.) to “take as much autonomy as you can stand.”  But Putin has reversed that course—withdrawing de facto autonomous status from places like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan and even installing loyal Kremlin stooges to run places like Chechnya.  There is always the possibility that some of these other regions will get ideas and rise up—from the Finno-Ugrian-speaking Karelians along the border with Finland to the mostly-Buddhist Kalmyks and Tuvans, to the Sakha (Yakuts), Altai, Chukchi, and other peoples of the far east, to ethnic-Russian frontiersman who would like to see Siberia (all of Russia east of the Urals—i.e., 10% of the land surface of the world) become its own independent nation (some have even called for Siberia to join the United States), to “Volga Germans” who once had their own republic within Russia, to residents of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave in former German territory who would like to split and join the independent Baltic States, and even to revived Cossack hosts along the border with Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the cis-Caucasian steppes who recall their days of glory when separate Cossack republics flicked in and out of existence during the Russian Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Could it come to this?

The most delicate area right now, though, is the Circassians.  Inhabiting an area of the northeastern Black Sea area, including the northwestern Caucasus, the Circassians were dispersed and nearly exterminated in a series of brutal invasions by Russia in the mid 19th century.  The remnant Circassian subgroups are now spread out as mostly minorities in three different republics—all of which, to complicate things, are claimed as territory of the so-called Caucasus Emirate.  Circassians, already becoming more nationalistic in their diaspora in Turkey, Syria, and elsewhere, have become especially politicized by the choice of Sochi as a site for the 2014 Olympics.  Sochi was the site of one of the worst of the Russian massacres, in which the Ubykh subgroup of Circassians was wiped off the map exactly 150 years before the 2014 Games.  For Circassians, Sochi is hallowed ground and the choice of the site a provocation.  The Caucasus Emirate has vowed to cause trouble at at the Olympics, and Cossacks, hired by the government, have vowed to defend the Games from the trouble-makers.

Circassians remember their genocide.

But is this ideologically consistent?  Of course it isn’t.  This is Putin we’re talking about.  Although Putin cites Russia’s own internal insurgencies as it blocks the accession of the Republic of Kosovo (which split from Russia’s ally Serbia) to the United Nations, he has long played a double game.  Regular readers of this blog well know that Putin used the occasion of a 2008 war with the Georgia to grant diplomatic recognition to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions that de facto seceded from Georgia (and cleansed their territories of ethnic Georgians) right after the fall of Communism.  (A month ago, as reported at the time in this blog, Moscow narrowly decided against allowing Abkhazia and South Ossetia to send their own Olympic teams so Sochi.)  More quietly, Russia props up the de facto independent Republic of Transnistria, which seceded (never formally recognized) from Moldova in the 1990s, and, even more quietly, backs the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which Armenia (which remains friendly to Moscow) carved out of the west flank of independent Azerbaijan in a nasty war.  Isn’t all this separatism too?  Well, yes, unless you classify those regions as “properly” part of Russia.  Putin hasn’t come right out and said that, but if he wants to have that conversation we can certainly have that conversation, and he won’t end up looking very good.

Russia’s newly empowered Cossacks.  Don’t worry, they’ll keep things nice and orderly
and peaceful—you know, like before.

In any case, will a new law criminalizing separatist propaganda make Russia’s separatist problems better or worse?  It will certainly allow Russian authorities to round up radical clerics, Muslim gang members, and anyone else suspicious with little provocation and lock them up for a long time.  In the past, though, in the Caucasus, that kind of thing only angers and emboldens the insurgency.  It is also likely to lend international sympathy to the cause of an autonomous or independent Circassia, something the movement, because of past association with jihadists, it does not enjoy.  If the Olympics were already going to be a headache for Putin, they certainly will be now.  Already, gay activists—and lots of just plain old visitors and participants who have a sense of equality and decency—are plotting ways to whip out and unfurl gay-pride flags at various times during the games, even the opening ceremonies.  Perhaps lots of other flags will start appearing as well.

Tatarstan’s flag.  Will it fly again?
Maybe even in Sochi?

Putin needs to realize that democracy means having the right to express whatever your views are on how you should be governed, including separatist sentiment.  And he will learn the hard way that suppressing national aspirations only stokes the fires.  But tyrants never learn.

[You can read more about Circassia, Siberia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Circassia, Chechnya, and many other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Putin Wants to Revive Stalin’s Old “Jewish Region” in Siberia; Israel Not Amused

Shalom! and welcome to remotest Siberia!

Vladimir Putin has had some crazy ideas in his time.  Shooting Siberian tigers.  Supporting the dictatorship in Syria.  Hang-gliding with migrating cranes.  Putting the Olympics on the site of a Russian genocide of Muslims just as he is trying to tamp down Islamist terrorism in that very region (discussed extensively last year in this blog (also in this article)).  And, um, you know, stuff like systematically dismantling Russia’s fragile democratic structures and its civil society to replace it with a corrupt and intolerant oligarchy.  But at least he’s put the Stalin era behind him.  Well, not quite.

The conveniently located Jewish Autonomous Oblast

The Russian Federation surprised the world this month with an announcement that it would like to revive the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (J.A.O.), a remote scrap of Siberian tundra on the border with China which Josef Stalin had used as a dumping ground for Jews in the 1930s.  Actually, it wasn’t quite as bad as that sounds.  The creation of the region was not at first punitive in the same way as, say, the removal of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other peoples eastward later on after the Second World War.  It was part of a Bolshevik plan to keep various internal nationalisms in check by granting autonomous regions for some minorities while also discouraging them from ideologically incorrect ideas such as ethnic chauvinism and religion—and, in the case of the J.A.O., Zionism.  Some of the territorial entities created in this era survive today, such as the Republic of Tatarstan.  Others, like the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic just west of Kazakhstan, or various Cossack autonomous districts, have gone the way of happy-Proletariat posters and scratchy toilet paper.

Downtown Birobidzhan, J.A.O.

The J.A.O. was, by Stalinist standards, an enlightened project.  Yiddish was the official language and throve there, as did other aspects of Jewish culture (except for the Judaism part).  Later, Stalin eyed the oblast as a place to put troublesome dissidents, especially Jewish ones, but after Nikita Khrushchev took power in 1953 he eased up a tad on minorities and dissidents and brought home many of the groups Stalin had exiled eastward (without, however, creating a more conveniently located J.A.O. farther west).  When Leonid Brezhnev opened the floodgates of Jewish emigration in the 1970s, the J.A.O.’s remaining Jewish population was depleted, most leaving for Israel.  Today, the Oblast still has Jewish newspapers and radio stations but by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 only 2% of the population was Jewish, and by 2010 it had dropped below 1%.  It is a Jewish homeland mostly without Jews.

Jewish culture in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is not exactly thriving.

The new plan, as enunciated by Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s prime minister, is to offer financial incentives—the equivalent of $8,000 U.S.—for about 2,000 Russian Jews living elsewhere in the Federation, or even in the rest of the former Soviet Union and farther abroad, to settle in the J.A.O.  The problem is that while many Russians might consider the Jews who fled Russia in the 1970s as Russian emigrants whose departure constituted a regrettable brain drain, many of those emigrants today consider themselves more Jewish and Israeli (or American or whatever, depending on where they settled) than Russian.  It remains to be seen how many Jews in non-Siberian parts of Russia would relish relocating.

Monsoon season in the J.A.O.

And, to be honest, the name Siberia does not focus-group all that well for descendants of Soviet Jews.  The J.A.O. is a little bit bigger than Belgium, but with only 175,000 people—mostly Eastern Orthodox ethnic Russians.  It is one of the fartheast east of the Russian Federation’s constituent units, it is landlocked, and its climate is deathly cold and windswept in winter, while in summer it is rocked by monsoons, which this season caused the worst flooding in a century.  Its economy is agricultural but increasingly dominated by mining operations run by Chinese corporations.

Whose numbers are dwindling faster?  Siberian tigers or Siberian Jews?

Alexander Levin, president of the World Forum of Russian-Speaking Jewry, probably spoke for many when he said, in response to the Medvedev plan, “We do not think that today, for the Jews, this initiative is relevant or realistic, as the Jews in Russia and Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries live in big cities and are economically successful for the most part. ... Jews have a strong and developed State of Israel and it is specifically there that they should to go to in order to express their Jewish national identity.”

The unlikely founder of the first modern Jewish homeland

Well said.  But here’s another reason Putin might want to just leave the Jewish Autonomous Oblast idea be.  Right now, a wave of bigoted anti-gay legislation in Russia is making the country into even more of a pariah state.  There are calls for a boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi, on the Black Sea, and fears in Moscow that the Olympics will become a staging ground for gay-rights protests that will embarrass the regime.  Putin doesn’t want a whole bunch of Olympic athletes pulling out flags like this—

—but if they do, they can get around the laws by saying they’re just flying the flag of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which, I swear to God, looks like this:

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]