Road Dispute Pushes Town near Moscow to Declare Independence from Russia—but with Dusted-Off Fascist Ukrainian Flags, Oddly Enough

A group of citizens in the exurbs of Moscow on October 3rd notified Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, that they intended to hold a referendum on independence for what is being called, variously, either the Domodedovo Republic (after the main city in the area) or the Russian Democratic Republic, also translated as the Democratic Republic of Rus.  In a movement initially reported on this week by the Association for Russian Human-Rights Lawyers, the activists were pushed to secession by a long-simmering dispute over a toll-road project, rejected by 95% (or 98%, depending on whom you believe) of local residents in a 2007 referendum, though the road was put through anyway two years later.  The road will link Moscow to Sochi, the Black Sea resort in the region of Circassia which will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.  One attorney for the movement, Yevgeny Arkhipov, cited residents being forced off their land and some being forced to pay fees for gathering mushrooms and berries in what had once been land for public use.  Another activist, Marina Zlotnikova, put the blame on ethnic-Azeri criminal syndicates in league with developers, who are thought to be in league with Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev.  (In the working-class Russian imagination, all bad things in the world can eventually be blamed on some minority group from the Caucasus.)

The Domodedovo separatists have also written to the European Union (E.U.) declaring their intention of being a member-state, while still being apparently—the phrasing is vague—a constituent autonomous unit within the Russian Federation.  Other statements, however, refer to full independence.

Map showing the locations of Domodedovo and Podolsk, near Moscow

The area in question includes not just Domodedovo (population: 96,000) and Podolsk (188,000), in Moscow Oblast, but also, according to one source, the smaller community of Shebantsevo (?).  But there is still confusion as reports, some of them hastily translated, trickle into the English-language media.  The story was pounced on gleefully by the often-inaccurate Kavkaz Center website, run by the Caucasus Emirate movement, a radical-Islamist terrorist network which aims to carve out an independent theocratic caliphate in what is now Russia’s predominantly-Muslim southwestern rim.  The site celebrates any thumb anyone sticks in Moscow’s eye, with constant reference to “Czarist” “minions” and “puppets.”  The Islamists’ article on the subject connects the Domodedovo separatists with the medieval state of “Przemysl,” meaning perhaps one of the 14th- and 15th-century Upper Oka Principalities around Muscovy, one of which had its capital at Peremyshl (Перемы́шль), now a village of 3,000 or so in Kaluga Oblast, to Moscow Oblast’s southwest.  I am not sure at this point, however, if its territory included Domodedovo and Podolsk.  Nor have I seen a source directly quoting a member of the separatist movement itself invoking the Paremyshl principality.  (The C.E. site adds to the confusion by referring to it as a Polish principality, but I think, after comparing a lot of sources, that they are in their haste confusing it with a much earlier, similarly but not identically named Principality of Peremyshl, an imperial subject of Kievan Rus’ centered on what is now Przemyśl (that’s the modern Polish spelling; in Ukrainian Cyrillic, it is Перемишль), a town in southeast Poland at the border with Belarus.)

This, of course, takes us to the important question of what this new republic’s (or revived prinicipality’s??) flag will be.  If there is truly a push to restore the Peremyshl Principality, then I have not found a specific flag for this polity, but its ruling Gorkachov dynasty used this rather shabby-genteel-looking sepia coat of arms:

Certainly, not very modern looking.  At the other extreme is the modern, Soviet-designed coat of arms for the Domodedovo Urban Okrug (not all Russian municipalities have flags but nearly all have coats of arms or seals):

This seems to be a tribute to the glorious liberated workers whose job is to stack oddly-shaped crates on pallets at the Domodedovo airport—with an eye-strainingly minuscule St.-George-slaying-the-dragon squeezed into the top left just to relieve the drabness.  Those boxes look even slightly sinister to me, like some debased version of the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  No, this will not do at all either.

I much prefer the Premeshyl (Russia) coat of arms created for the town during the Czarist period:

This shows a river flanked by two sheaves of wheat.  The best so far.  However, the one image I’ve seen of the Domodedovo separatists themselves waving a clearly visible flag is from the Euronews video clip on the movement.  Here it is (alongside the E.U. flag):

I had never seen this flag before.  (Using the wickedly useful online flag-identifier tool at http://www.flagid.org/, I came up with only two red-above-black bicolors—the Republic of Angola and the Republic of Colombia’s Department of Norte de Santander, and both those use very different emblems.)  Then, it seemed, some avocational Russophilic vexillologists were way ahead of me (you gotta love the World Wide Web): the article on the Domodedovo movement on http://www.russiaslam.com, a website featuring translations of Russian news articles, presents a very Czarist-nostalgic news story from Russia which describes the movement thus: “The founding of the [Domodedovo] Republican Committee is as a result of the interests of local residents and history, we are in fact talking about a revival of the Russian state that had its roots in Kiev Rus’, the first national revival of Rus’ in 800 years, after the occupation by the Golden Horde.”  This source calls the new entity the Domodedovo Slavic Democratic Republic (S.D.R.) (in Russian: Домодедово Славянской Демократической Республики (СДР)).  The flag from the image above is reproduced, here shown:

This essentially reproduces the coat of arms of Ukraine—Kievan Rus’ being the connection here, because in the Middle Ages what is now Muscovy was ruled from Kiev (Kyiv), in modern Ukraine—using the (how ancient?) Ukrainian trident—

—and changes the colors from blue and yellow to red and black.  One reader, “Retif100,” comments: “Such a flag was adopted by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a variation on the theme of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and UNA-UNSO.  Now, that flag hangs at the City Council in Ivano-Frankivsk” (in western Ukraine).  But not just any O.U.N. flag, Retif100 fails to add, but the right-wing fascist “O.U.N.–B” faction that pushed for an independent anti-Communist Ukraine during the Second World War.  The O.U.N.–B’s armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, used this flag:

There it is—red and black.  And the O.U.N.–B itself used this rather creepy, vaguely-swastika-like emblem:

Yuck, right?  I feel like taking a shower after looking at that logo.  (The more moderate O.U.N. faction used a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian trident stylized into a sword.)  [For more on red-and-black Ukrainian flags, see my more recent article on the Euro-Maydan protests from this blog.]

These Domodedovo secessionists may be worried about Azeri influence in their region, but they might also want to examine the Ukrainian fascist heraldry being revived in their own ranks.

Oh, and as to the question of whether the movement can succeed.  Um, no.  One possible obstacle is that the territory claimed also includes Domodedovo International Airport, which serves Moscow and is Russia’s busiest hub.  They can wave their Nazi-style flags for the moment, but mark my words: if they ever try to disrupt the economy, old Vlad will go all Second Chechen War on their asses and the cobblestone streets of Domodedovo will run with blood.

[Note: This version of the article corrects an earlier version which mischaracterized the “russiaSLAM” website, which is indeed a news portal featuring translation, not a source with its own perspective.  Thanks to russiaSLAm for taking the time to clarify this.]

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a 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.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

New Georgian President, South Ossetia Border Clash, Zhirinovsky on Dagestani Wedding Shootings: Caucasus Update, 30 September - 6 October 2012

The radicals’ envisioned Caucasus Emirate

NORTH CAUCASUS (CHECHNYA, INGUSHETIA, DAGESTAN)

13 Killed in Blasts, Sieges, Shoot-Outs in North Caucasus; Dagestan Synagogue Bombed.  In the Republic of Ingushetia, in southwestern Russia’s insurgency-ravaged North Caucasus region, four interior-ministry police were killed on October 3rd, in an incident that also wounded two others.  All of the attackers—suspected of belonging to the Caucasus Emirate movement, which aims to carve an independent state out of Russia’s predominantly-Muslim border regions, managed to flee.  Meanwhile, in neighboring Dagestan, also part of Russia and home to a Caucasus Emirate insurgency, a synagogue was damaged by a bomb planted on the night of October 3rd in Derbent, but there were no injuries.  The same day, in Buynaksk, a grenade attack on an interior-ministry facility killed two police officers.  Also in Dagestan, four rebels were killed by police on October 4th and the following morning, also in Buynaksk, police ended a siege of an apartment building where three rebels were barricaded by storming the entrances, killing all three.  The Caucasus Emirate’s not-always-reliable website claimed that a battalion of 10 to 30 Emirate mujahideen ambushed “a whole squad of Russian terrorists from military intelligence” near Dattykh, Chechnya, on October 3rd, prompting a day of Russian air attacks on Chechen rebel positions but, miraculously, without a single rebel casualty.  Curiously, no other news source has mentioned these events.

Zhirinovsky Demands Prison Terms for Trigger-Happy Dagestani Wedding Revelers.  Russian hostility toward ethnic minorities from the Caucasus resurfaced in Moscow this week as Russia’s ultranationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a member of Russian parliament for the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, called for the imprisonment of wedding-party revelers from southwestern Russia’s Republic of Dagestan who caused a stir on September 30th when they celebrated by firing weapons into the air just outside the Kremlin on September 30th.  The one Dagestani man charged was given the equivalent of a $60 fine.  Initial reports of the incident said that the partiers were aiming their live fire at passing cars, but that turned out to be inaccurate.  Nor was this among the more dramatic types of wedding celebration known in the predominantly-Muslim North Caucasus region, where elaborately staged and chillingly realistic “bride abduction” scenarios are sometimes acted out.  Zhirinovsky called the gunfire incident and other such incidents “signs of banditry” and called for prison terms.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky

SOUTH CAUCASUS (GEORGIA, ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN)

Gunfire Exchanged at South Ossetia–Georgia Border on Eve of Tbilisi Power Shift.  Amid diplomatic tensions and back-and-forth accusations of military build-ups (reported on earlier in this blog) along the border between the Republic of South Ossetia and the country it unilaterally seceded from in 2008, with Russia’s military help, the Republic of Georgia, a South Ossetian border checkpoint came under live weapon fire on September 29th.  South Ossetia’s security forces claimed that they arrested a Georgian interior-ministry official, Mogol Tomiashvili, in connection with the incident.  A rifle and grenade launcher were seized from the official.  Later, after Georgia’s aggressively anti-separatist president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was defeated in an election this week, the deputy speaker of the South Ossetian parliament, Yuri Dzitstsoity, predicted that, “after the departure of Saakashvili into oblivion,” the new Georgian regime, under Bidzina Ivanishvili of the Georgian Dream–Democratic Georgia party, would recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent.

Bidzina Ivanishvili

Former Chechen Rebel Calls Lopota Gorge Siege Georgian “False-Flag Op.”  A former Chechen separatist now allied with the Moscow-appointed authoritarian government of Russia’s reconquered Republic of Chechnya claimed this week that the murky Lopota Gorge siege in late August in a Georgian canyon bordering Russia’s Islamist-infested Republic of Dagestan (reported on at the time in this blog) was in fact a Georgian “false-flag operation” in which Georgia’s government killed its own anti-Russian saboteurs.  The Georgian government’s position is that its interior-ministry forces ended a hostage crisis by killing eleven Islamists who had infiltrated Georgian territory from Dagestan.  The Chechen self-proclaimed whistleblower, Khizri Aldamov, however, claims, “Georgian president [Mikheil] Saakashvili’s plan was to send his own guys across the border into Russia, not the other way round, and then shoot them.  But there was no mission; this was a set-up.”  He says the operation was meant to paint Russia as harboring anti-Georgian terrorists while at the same time eliminate a rogue force that “knew too much” about Georgia’s supposed program of training jihadists to wreak havoc in Russia’s North Caucasus region.  (See another article from this blog looking at other allegations swirling around the Lopota Gorge events.)

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a 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.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Separatist Football Update: Carnage at a Dagestan-Netherlands Match, Alderney vs. Sealand, Barotseland’s National Team

Dagestan football matches are almost as dangerous as Dagestan

Dagestan–Netherlands Football Match in Moscow Leads to Brawling, over 100 Arrests.  The Russian Federation’s Republic of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus region, is called by some the most dangerous place in the world, plagued as it is by daily brutal violence from organized crime, Islamic militancy, clan warfare, and a Salafist separatist Caucasus Emirate movement.  Nonetheless, its collective nose was put seriously out of joint by a June 30th ruling (reported on at the time in this blog) by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) that  Dagestan is too unsafe to play host to games featuring the Dagestani team, Anzhi Makhachkala.  Although Anzhi is ranked fifth in its league, it must still find a new stadium for “home” games.

Thus, it did not really advance Dagestan’s attempt to overcome its branding problem—its association in the public mind with mindless violence—when an August 23rd match in Moscow between Anzhi and the Alkmaar Zaanstreek (A.Z.) team from the Netherlands led to an eruption of ethnonationalist violence.  First, on the day before the match, Anzhi fans brawled with supporters of the Zenit St. Petersburg football club in front of a McDonald’s restaurant in St. Petersburg.  Seven Russians were arrested in that incident, and three Dagestanis were injured.  As the Moscow Times described the mêlée, “Dozens of youths with faces hidden under hoods broke into the veranda of McDonald’s restaurant screaming and sweeping all before themselves.  The terrified visitors ran in panic inside the restaurant .... Those who did not manage to escape were beaten indiscriminately.  The perpetrators were beating one man from Dagestan on the veranda and then dragged him onto the street, where they continued the execution. Two passers-by tried to stand up for the victim, but the assaulters said that the immigrants ‘rape our women.’”

Then, 80 fans were arrested during the match itself for shouting vulgarities and national slurs at players and for throwing lighted flares onto the field.  Later, after the game, brawling in the Moscow metro between Dagestanis and ethnic Russians led to 40 arrests.  Meanwhile, in Dagestan on the day of the match, things were relatively peaceful.  A gang of Islamist terrorists attacked a military checkpoint, killing one soldier and injuring three policemen.  For Dagestan, that’s a quiet day.  (I almost forgot: Anzhi beat A.Z. 1-0.)

BFF Forever! Lozi Found Barotseland Football Team with National Aims.  Football organizers in Zambia’s Western Province have founded the Barotseland Football Federation (B.F.F.), with aspirations eventually to join the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) as a full-fledged national member.  The Barotse, also known as the Lozi, have long been seeking to secede from Zambia, thus restoring a boundary between what were separate colonies in the days of British rule.

Alderney Footballers to Face Sealand in North Sea Micronation Grudge Match.  The Alderney F.A. football (soccer) team is preparing for an August 25th exhibition match against Sealand F.A., the team for the unrecognized Principality of Sealand, a crumbling sea derrick off the coast of Essex, England, which has been de facto independent since 1967, though recognized by no state.  As in Sealand’s May 5, 2012, exhibition match against the indigenous people of the Chagos Islands (reported on at the time in this blog), the Sealand squad will include the television comedian Ralf Little, star of The Royle Family and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.  Alderney is the third-largest of the Channel Islands between England and France and is the second-largest in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a United Kingdom Crown Dependency.  Alderney, which is three square miles in area, is a vast supercontinent compared to Sealand, which is a mere 6,000 square feet and, technically, does not meet the international legal definition of a “territory.”

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a 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.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]