Tag: Tataristan

By Katherine E. Graney

Besides sending shock waves through the international system and shaking up conventional wisdom about the post-Cold War European balance of power, the recent and brief Russo-Georgian war and Russia’s subsequent recognition of the “independent” states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has also led to speculation about Russia’s own ethnic homelands and about its future as an ethno-federal state. In the wake of these events, independence-minded activists in the Russian national republics of Tatarstan and Ingushetia have made prominent claims that if Russia is willing to recognize the right of self-determination of Georgia’s former constituent ethno-federal units up to and including the right to independence, it must also logically do so for its own ethno-federal units. Such claims, while provocative, and useful as reminders that Russia is both in fact and by law and a multi-ethnic federation where fully one-fifth of the population is non-ethnic Russian and fully one-quarter of the over 80 federal constituent units in Russia has some form of designation as an ethnic homeland (as does Quebec in Canada), should not be taken as evidence that Russia is about to find itself ablaze in secessionist ferment. Rather, they should point us to look more closely at Russia’s ethno-federal situation, and in particular to realize that the quest for autonomy on the part of some of Russia’s constituent ethno-federal units, particularly Tatarstan, provides an opportunity for the United States and its Western allies to reaffirm and strengthen our ties with some of the most pro-Western, pro-federalist, pro-liberal democratic forces in Russia.

Since declaring itself to be a “sovereign state” in August 1990, the Republic of Tatarstan, under the able leadership of its first and only president, Mintimer Shaimiyev, has embarked on a remarkably diverse yet consistent set of initiatives aimed at fulfilling that declaration with real meaning while simultaneously avoiding the type of destructive claims to independence and secessionism that helped lead to the two wars in Chechnya and to the civil wars in Georgia of the early 1990s. Taking as its model the successful drives for meaningful sovereignty within an ethno-federal framework negotiated by Quebec in Canada and Catalonia in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s, Tatarstan’s leadership has also sought to take on as many of the administrative, cultural and economic attributes of a modern nation-state as it can while staying within (if also attempting to expand) the legal boundaries of Russia’s post-Soviet ethnofederal system. These include innovative legal reforms and economic policies that have resulted in Tatarstan having one of the highest standards of living in the Russian Federation and recently led the Russian-language version of Forbes magazine to name Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital, as the third-best city in Russia for foreigners to do business. Tatarstan’s leadership has also pursued what is at once both the most ambitious program of ethnic revival for a non-Russian people in Russia (in terms of promoting the Tatar language and culture and Tatar history among Tatars both in the republic and in the rest of Russia and the CIS) and the most sincerely multi-cultural program of cultural revival for other non-Russian peoples living in Tatarstan (including Bashkirs, Mari, and Udmurts). Tatarstan’s leadership has claimed, rightly, that in the absence of a meaningful commitment by the federal government in Moscow to protect and promote the cultural and linguistic rights of non-Russian minorities in Russia (despite the presence of such protections in the Russian Constitution), it has a moral obligation to provide for these needs.

The other significant aspect of Tatarstan’s quest for sovereignty over the past two decades is its extremely pro-Western and internationalist character. Since 1990, Tatarstan has taken the lead in establishing contacts between Russian ethno-federal units and their European counterparts, participating since 1990 in the activities of the Assembly of Regions of Europe and Committee of the Regions of the European Parliament. It has also sought closer ties with other all-European institutions, such as the EBRD, which held its annual meeting of shareholders in Kazan in May 2007, the first time it had been held anywhere in Russian since 1994. In its attempt to construct some sort of “international personality” that will help it to further its stated goal of “building a meaningful form of federalism in Russia,” Tatarstan has also instituted firm ties with the United States, Canada including Quebec), the United Nations and, as befitting a state where the 50% ethnic Tatar population is almost entirely self-declared Muslim, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, where the OIC’s 2001 invitation for Tatarstan to join the OIC as an observer state paved the way for Putin’s decision in August 2003 to pursue OIC membership for the Russian Federation. Indeed, another important part of Tatarstan’s attempt to institute its cultural, political and economic autonomy in the name of building a real and functional federalism in Russia is its self-promotion as a the home of “Euro-Islam”, an ecumenical, tolerant form of Islam, whose experience Tatarstan feels can be useful for the West in terms of both their domestic and international issues with Islam.

While Tatarstan’s leadership is not the crystal clean beacon of democracy that it often claims to be, plagued as it is by the same types of nepotism, corruption and authoritarianism that characterize all post-Soviet leadership in Moscow and the rest of Russia, on the matter of the liberal democratic commitment to federalism as a way of increasing representation in general and ethno-federalism as a way of ensuring the protection of the cultural rights of ethnic minorities in particular, Tatarstan’s leadership is the most consistent and authentic, and quite nearly the only, voice left in Russia today. Tatarstan’s leaders have also consistently turned to the West for support in their quest to make Moscow live up to its constitutional commitments to protect and promote a democratic form of ethno-federalism in Russia. The Georgia crisis has given us the opportunity to remember these requests, and honor them.

Katherine E. Graney is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her book, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism, was published by Lexington Books in November.

This editorial was posted to the Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Blog at:

Paul Goble

Kuressaare, November 18 – Despite the human suffering it is bringing, the current financial crisis may force Moscow to make concessions to non-Russian groups because in the past, the Russian government – tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet — has done so “only when the state has serious problems,” according to a senior Tatar politician.
In an interview with Rosbaltvolga.ru, Razil’ Valeyev, who chairs the nationality policy committee in the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan, pointed out that Moscow created the non-Russian republics after the 1917 revolution and opened “hundreds” of non-Russian language newspapers during World War II (www.rosbaltvolga.ru/2008/11/17/542241.html).
Consequently, Valeyev argued, one should not exclude the possibility that as the economic crisis deepens, it will lead the central government to address some of the problems of the non-Russians in the country, perhaps in the first instance reversing what he calls the “unconstitutional” elimination of non-Russian courses from required educational programs.
If the law goes into force, Regions and republics would still be allowed to offer non-Russian language and local history courses, but they would no longer be able to require them. And consequently, some students and their parents would thus be inclined to choose to study other courses instead, something that would strike a blow at many non-Russian groups.
“The exclusion of the national-regional component from the federal education standards [scheduled to take place in 2009] directly contradicts the Russian Constitution,” he said. “And if we do not follow the provisions of our own constitution as any state based on law does, then what kind of a country are we?”
Valeyev pointed out that Tatarstan has been fighting this step for several years and not long ago sent an appeal not only to Moscow but to all the federal subjects asking that it be reversed as unconstitutional. So far, he says, 21 other subjects – including some Russian ones — support Tatarstan’s position, but until recently, it seemed unlikely Moscow would change course.
One of the reasons the Russian government has adopted this policy, the Tatar State Council committee chairman continues, is that “empire-forming peoples cannot understand the problems of other peoples.” While there are exceptions, of course, “the majority of government officials are not among them.”
Asked whether he was fighting against globalization, Valeyev said that “globalization is affecting everyone and not just the Tatars,” and many Tatars now send their children to Russian language schools so that they can pursue the careers that such educations offer in the country as a whole.
Even more will do so if non-Russian subjects become optional because they will see that Moscow has a negative attitude toward national education and “understand that if they do not change, their children will not become part of contemporary realities and participate in the state’s mentality.”
There are other reasons parents are making these decisions. Many Tatar schools were opened only a few years ago and often lack the facilities Russian-language schools there have. That has made the Turkic-Tatar lycees that Ankara opened in the republic far more important than they otherwise would be, lycees that Moscow unfortunately is trying to close.
Asked to respond to suggestions that Tatar national identity is too focused on the past rather than the future, Valeyev said that peoples like the Tatars who have been deprived of statehood and who fear they may not recover it naturally look back to the time when they had it, especially if they have been denied the chance to do so as the Tatars were in Soviet times.
Valeyev said that the Tatars do not want the Russian Federation to fall apart but rather to be strengthened, however much Russian nationalists think otherwise, but at the same time, he noted, the Tatars want Moscow to respect their constitutional rights, something the center is not always doing.
But “if Russia wants to preserve its future and to be strengthened, then it must turn particular attention “to the issues the Tatars raise. “We are not going to go anywhere, we do not have a second state.” And consequently, Tatars and Russians must cooperate if they are to have a good future together.
At present, Valeyev stressed, Tatarstan is “resolving many questions more or less normally. We are concerned most of all about the status of Tatars living beyond the borders of the republic [where most ethnic Tatars live and] who have enormous problems in the sphere of preserving language and culture.”
“If Russia were to adopt a new, democratic conception of nationality policy … and the laws and decrees needed for its realization, then there would not be any special problems” in the relationship between Moscow and Kazan, Valeyev said, adding that “I have not lost hope that we despite everything will come to that.”
“Russia too ought to have an instinct for self-preservation,” he continued. If, however, it is completely lost, then additional complications will appear. But the process of the rebirth of national consciousness is not something that happens over night.” Thus, there is time, but it is not unlimited, perhaps no more than “20 or 30 years.”
Russia needs to become what it is, the common home of Slavic and Turkic peoples, he argued in conclusion. And he said that was not as impossible as it might seem: “Who could have thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart and in its place would arise independent states – Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and so on, not to mention Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-financial-crisis-may.html

Paul Goble

Vienna, September 16 – In advance of commemorations of the 456th anniversary of the Russian defeat and occupation of Kazan, the Tatar Ittifaq Party of National Independence this week has launched a website to ensure that its declarations and those of other Idel-Ural nations will reach a larger audience.
The site, which is located at azatlyk-vatan.blogspot.com/, consists of three sections: current news, including a declaration posted online today concerning the upcoming anniversary; a file of earlier posts in Tatar, Russian and English; and an extensive listing of Tatar and Muslim resources on the Internet.
In her lead post for yesterday, Fauziya Bayramova, Ittifaq’s leader and a member of the executive committee of the World Congress of Tatars, argues that the fall of Kazan to the forces of Ivan the Terrible was “the greatest tragedy in the history of the Tatars, not only extinguishing their independent statehood but opening “centuries’ long slavery” for them.
Let no one be fooled by statements about the “sovereignty” of Tatarstan,” she writes. “Tatarstan is not an independent state and Kazan is not a Tatar city because [there] Russian laws rule. To say nothing about such historically Tatar lands as Astrakhan, Siberia and Crimea, which long ago were hopelessly russified.”
But the Tatars of Kazan must not give up, Bayramova continues. “If we cease to struggle for independence and the right to our own bright future, the same fate awaits us, the Tatars of Idel-Ural, because Russian laws prohibit instruction in [Tatar], courses on Orthodoxy are included in the curriculum in many regions, and there is ongoing talk about the destruction of national republics and the unitarization of the Russian state.”
“After the occupation of Kazan, the Russian empire set itself a single goal – to russify and baptize all the peoples of the empire, in the first instance the Tatars. But the empire was never able to subordinate the Tatars all the way. Even having destroyed [the Tatar] state, it could not destroy the language and religion of the Tatars or the spirit of resistance which helped the Tatars to survive as a nation.”
The situation has continued to get worse in recent decades, the Ittifaq leader insists, and “in such conditions, we have only two ways out – to struggle for independence and having build our own Tatar state, to begin to live by our own laws or to cease to exist as an independent nation.”
“We Tatars must choose the first path, the path of life, struggle and victory! Right is on our side!” she says. And she points to one new reason for her hopeful conclusion: shifts in the position of the West and of the Russian Federation itself concerning the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination.
“The international community having recognizing the state independence of Kosovo, and the Russian Federation having recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Bayramova says, “must recognize the independence of the Republic of Tatarstan! The Tatar nation has every right to live in its own independent state!”