A Second Airport in Russia Becomes a Source of Tension Not Because of Its Name but Because of Its Location

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 10 – Moscow’s decision to rename Volgograd’s airport “Stalingrad,” the name the city bore in Stalin’s time and during the second world war, has attracted international attention as a sign that the Kremlin is increasingly open to giving the city its former name back in the future.

    But a second airport, now under construction in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic in the North Caucasus, is also triggering concerns not because of its name but rather because of its location, one that a Karachay activist says shows Moscow’s fears of Turkish influence and its tilt away from the Turkic Kabards (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/411193 and interfax.ru/russia/985079).

    Ruslan Kipkeyev, a Karachay activist, says that Moscow is becoming “ever more suspicious of small peoples with a strong identity” and that it “is worried about the strengthening of the Turkic factor” in the North Caucasus, especially “given the strengthening of Turkey” more generally.

    The latest example of this, he continues, is Moscow’s decision to build the Arkhyz airport within the Karachay-Cherkess Republic but “far from the territory” in that republic where the Turkic Karachay are the dominant ethnic groups. “This is being done,” Kipkeyev says, “to isolate the Karachay, weaken their influence, and exclude any geopolitical risks.”

    What makes this intriguing is that Moscow has worked far more consistently against the Cherkess, one of the subgroups of the Circassian nation members of whose enormous diaspora continue to seek to return to their North Caucasus homeland rather than against the Turkic groups they live among.

    That Moscow is now turning against the Turkic nations, however, does not so much indicate a softening of its position toward the Circassians than a hardening of its dealings with Turkic groups and that the Russian government has decided to take steps to limit it, including putting the republic airport in other than Karachay areas.

    For background on these binational republics and their role as a barometer of Moscow’s views of Turkic and Circassian groups, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/04/new-book-explains-how-and-why-bi.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/08/circassian-demands-for-meeting-on.html and https://cjh.tgsession.com/7hz2923k41_7ejbvdhebedjqynrvn4owefraepiel/4xj5754/2qx17