by Paul Goble

But a review of these supposed challenges from abroad featured in Moscow's "Komsomolskaya Pravda" this week, a survey clearly intended to stoke such fears, in fact shows that any foreign claims to what is now Russian territory are currently far less of a threat than those arising from domestic ethnic and regional concerns.

In an article titled "They want to divide up Russia slice by slice" and featuring a cartoon showing Ukrainians, Germans, Balts, Finns, Japanese and Chinese eating a layer cake labeled "Russia" (in English) apparently under the direction of an American soldier, the correspondents of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" review what the paper calls the "pretensions" of these groups to Russian territory. The article, including this illustration, can be found online.

In every single case, there turns out to be less than meets the eye, or than the newspaper's journalists and editors apparently want to suggest, or than many of their readers are likely to conclude if they only glance at the article.

The first of these seven locations is Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. Many people there have traveled far more often to Poland and Germany than to the Russian Federation proper, the paper notes, and many of them apparently identify far more with Europe than with Moscow.

The paper says that Moscow has largely blocked the activities of the pro-independence Baltic Republic Party, but it adds that no one can prevent the widespread telling of the local update of an old Soviet joke: Reportedly, Kaliningraders now say that "the pessimists are learning to speak Lithuanian; the optimists, German; and the realists how to use the Kalashnikov (AK-47 automatic rifle)."

The second of these regions, with some 35,000 people, lies along the Estonian and Latvian borders with Russia. But both Baltic governments have disowned any claims to those territories, and most of those in these Russian-controlled regions who wanted to have their lands joined to the Baltic countries have already done so.

The third area consists of part of Karelia, a region adjoining Finland that many Finns would like to have joined to their country. But the Finnish government is opposed, and few Karelians have much interest. As one of them told the Moscow newspaper, "I don't live badly in Russia, and I can go to Finland several times a month. There things are OK: quiet, peaceful, but boring."

The fourth area involves the Vyborg and Priozersk regions of Leningrad oblast, or region. Again, Finland is said to have pretensions to this region. But again, Helsinki is opposed, and local people are inclined to treat the possibility of a change in borders as a joke: "We would gladly surrender to the Finns," they say, "only they won't take us ..."

The fifth such area involves supposed Ukrainian pretensions to the Kursk and Belgorod oblasts, or regions of Russia, an area where some 2.7 million people live. But Kiev has not made any demands of this kind, the paper reports, and local residents, even though the population is having a hard time dealing with being "border" regions, are happy with their current lot: In Russia, they told the journalists, their pay and pensions are higher.

The sixth area involves the Kurile Islands, where in fact Moscowhas been locked in a territorial dispute with Tokyo for half a century. The Russian government has offered to return two of the four islands, but Japan wants all of them and reportedly is willing to make significant investments in and concessions to Russia if it does get them back.

Despite alarmist articles in the Russian press and anger among many Russian about a transfer given its symbolic importance, these islands are in fact very small: They have a population of only 19,000 people. And many of them are not opposed, because they think they would get a big payday if Japan took control.

And finally, the seventh supposed area of foreign pretensions involves the Amur oblast in the Russian Far East. "Komsomolskaya Pravda" included the following sub-headline: "On maps, we are already colored yellow." But neither the text nor the opinions of experts supports that alarmist language.

Beijing has made no claims on the region. And while there has been an influx of Chinese citizens there since 1991, the number who have settled there permanently -- although much disputed -- is relatively small and may remain so. As demographers have noted, it is rare for people living in a prosperous country to settle in one with a lower standard of living.

The fact that none of these supposed "pretensions" appears to represent the kind of threat to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation that many Russians now say they fear, of course, does not mean that there are no threats to the country's borders at all

Instead, it is to insist that almost all of them -- like Chechnya at present and perhaps Siberia or other regions in the future - are the result of homegrown processes rather than the work of foreign agencies, however much the writers of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" and its Russian readers may be inclined to believe otherwise.

(Paul Goble teaches at the Euro-college of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)

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