National Autonomy And Federal Structure In The Russian State

Abstract

The globalization processes cause irreparable damage to the values historically established in each community, forcibly unifying the legal, political, national and cultural space of the peoples living in different states. One of the peoples inhabiting Russia for more than four centuries are the Kalmyks. At the beginning of the XVII century a significant part of the Oirats, ancestors of the Kalmyks, migrated from their historical homeland (Dzungaria) to the Russian state, voluntarily joining it. On the territory of the vast steppe plains between the Volga and the Don, they created their own, almost independent nationhood - the Kalmyk Khanate. Since then, the history of the Kalmyk ethnic group is inseparably associated with the history of the peoples of multinational Russia. In the process of the Kalmykia's nation building, one of the fateful historical events was the First All-Kalmyk Congress of Soviets, which was attended by the Kalmyks from all the uluses located in the Kalmyk steppe, on the territory of the Don and Terek regions, in the Urals, in the Astrakhan, Stavropol and Orenburg provinces, etc. At the Congress on July 5, 1920, the Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People was adopted, proclaiming "the unification of all scattered parts of the Kalmyk people into one administrative and economic unit within the RSFSR" – "the Autonomous region of the Kalmyk people" which was reorganized into the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic in 1935.