Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 25 – Russians and
Tatars are again arguing about who the Kryashens are and how they are being
treated, with Russians and some Kryashens saying their 250,000-strong nation is
being abused by Kazan and ignored by Moscow and Tatars insisting that the 18,000
Kryashens (according to the 2010 census) are a well-treated subgroup of the
Tatar nation.
The Kryashens have a long and much
disputed history. Some of their number and many Russian nationalist and
Orthodox writers insist that they are a Christian people with a history that
extends far more distantly than the Kazan khanate. But others, including most
Tatars, see them as members of the Tatar nation who were forcibly Christianized
after 1552.
There is evidence for both these
positions. But the Kryashens seldom
attract much attention except when Moscow and Kazan are at odds. That happened most prominently in 2001-2002
when some Russians sought to promote the Kryashens as a nationality for the
census in order to reduce the number of the Tatars, the largest ethnic minority
in the Russian Federation.
Now, the Russian Orthodox Church and
some Russian commentators have taken up the Kryashen issue again, apparently as
part of a broader effort to undercut the reputation of Tatarstan as an island
of ethnic and religious harmony and to justify intervention by Moscow possibly
up to and including the abolition of that republic.
The dispute, which has been bubbling
in church and nationalist sites over the last few months, was joined at a
conference in Moscow on Monday at the Human Rights Center of the World Russian
Popular Assembly on the subject of “Whence Comes the Threat to Orthodoxy in
Tatarstan?” (regnum.ru/news/1749948.html).
Archpriest
Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for
church-society relations, opened the meeting by observing that the Church is
especially concerned by developments in Tatarstan given what he called “the
mass burning of churches and the murders of representatives of traditional
Islam.”
If Chaplin spoke in the most general
terms, Father Dimitry (Sizov), a Kryashen priest from the Pestrechinsky
district of Tatarstan, argued that the Kryashen issue was central to the fate
of Orthodoxy and Russians in Tatarstan and urged that Moscow devote more
resources than it has up to now in supporting his community.
He said that there were only seven
Kryashen priests for the 192 places in the republic where Kryashens live, and
only six of them conduct services in the Kryashen language. The other 12 Kryashen priests in Tatarstan
were serving in non-Kryashen parishes. And many Kryashen churches built before
1917 need reconstruction.
According to Father Dimitry, there
are 250,000 Kryashens in Tatarstan, a number far larger than any census has
shown. He added that they are subject to
the most intense discrimination and said “as a result of what is happening
regarding the Kryashens in Tatarstan, we can lose an entire Orthodox people.”
From his seat in the presidium,
Chaplin intervened with the statement that “if the Kryashens consider
themselves Kryashens, then that means that they are!”
Other speakers took up this call.
Anatoly Yeldashev, an instructor at the Kazan Theological Seminary, told the meaning
that “the Kryahens are a separate people, a separate nation.” Suggesting
otherwise and that the Kryashens are baptized Tatars is “stupid” because “the
Kryashens never adopted Islam.”
And Roman Silantyev, currently
director of the Human Rights Center which hosted the meeting and infamous in
many quarters for his attacks on Islam and Muslim leaders, said that “in terms
of the level of inter-religious stability, Tatarstan today is in Russia in last
place and can be compared only with Daghestan.”
One Tatar specialist at the meeting
and a senior Tatarstan official after it took issue with both the general
claims that the religious situation in that republic is unstable and that the
Kryashens are suffering. Aleksandr
Terentyev, head of the domestic policy department in the office of the Tatarstan
presidency, acknowledged that Tatars had encouraged Kryashens to declare themselves
Tatars in the census but denied that Kazan has mistreated them.
And Farid Mukhametshin, chairman of
the State Council of Tatarstan, reiterated those points. He acknowledged that
there are disputes about the ethnogenesis of the Kryashens but said that there
was no need to continue them and no basis for asserting that Tatars were
discriminating against them (interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53937).
Mukhametshin pointed out as well
that many Orthodox and Kryashen spokesmen overstate the size of the
Kryashens. According to the last census,
there were only 34,000 Kryashens in the Russian Federation and only 18,760 in
Tatarstan – less than one percent of the republic’s population.
Within Tatarstan, there are a total
of 152 Kryashen villages which are located in 23 of the republic’s 43
districts. And Mukhametshin noted that
four of these districts have Kryashens as their heads and that the official
organization of Kryashens functions in 14 different cities and districts.
“We are doing a lot to help the
Kryashens,” he continued, and there is no basis for using them to suggest, as
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has, that there is religious intolerance or
instability in Tatarstan.
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