Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 26 – Moscow’s Kommersant reports today that an
anonomous source in the Presidential Administration says that there will not be
any new power-sharing agreement between the Russian Federation and the Republic
of Tatarstan and thus the present accord will be allowed to lapse.
The paper says opposition in the
Kremlin has been led by Sergey Kiriyenko, who is now in charge of domestic
affairs within the Presidential Administration but who a decade ago was
presidential plenipotentiary in the Volga Federal District and helped prepare
the extension of the accord which was originally signed after Tatarstan (like
Chechnya) refused to sign the federation treaty (kommersant.ru/doc/3336514).
The original power-sharing accord on
the delimitation of authority between the Russian Federation and Tatarstan was
signed in 1994 by the two presidents of those republics, Boris Yeltsin and
Mintimer Shaymiyev respectively. It
specified that the republic had the right to its own laws, taxes and
citizenship.
The revised accord, signed in 2007
for a ten-year period, reduced the powers of Tatarstan relative to the Russian
Federation but allowed Kazan the right to adjust laws to its own conditions,
have its own special passport inserts, and require that any president of the republic
know both state languages, Russian and Tatar.
In recent months, Tatar nationalists
and Tatar leaders both past and present have pressed for the extension of the
power-sharing accord, with Shaymiyev specifying repeatedly that it simply needs
to be extended and does not require renegotiation as was the case with the first
treaty a decade ago.
As Kommersant acknowledges, it is still not clear that there will not
be a last-minute announcement of a new treaty. (The treaty will lapse only in
July.) Members of the Duma and the Federation Council the paper contacted
couldn’t see for certain but indicated that the whole issue was so sensitive that
no one should talk about it.
If the treaty isn’t extended, the World
Congress of Tatars will take up the issue at its congress in August; and the
All-Tatar Social Center will press for more radical solutions including some
kind of unilateral action by Kazan. But
the big loser will be the current president of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov.
Not only would he likely then lose
his title as president – Tatarstan is the only federal subject which still has
a president, an arrangement it bases on the current power-sharing accord – but he
would lose much of his standing among Tatars who see the accord, as limited as
it is, as a surety of their special, even unique status within the Russian
Federation.
That may be exactly why Kiriyenko is
opposed to extending the treaty. Clearly, Kommersant
suggests, he does not have warm feelings for the leaders of Tatarstan as a
result of the difficulties of negotiating the 2007 accord. And now, he may be taking his revenge from
his new vantage point in the Kremlin.
But a weakened Tatarstan may become
a less stable one, with nationalists pushing for more radical measures and some
in the republic government possibly seeking to exploit them against Moscow. And
such instability given Tatarstan’s geographic location and influence could have
serious consequences well beyond its borders.
Up to now, most analysts have
pointed to the ways in which the end of the power-sharing arrangement will mean
the strengthening of Moscow and the final victory of the power vertical over
regional elites. But that may be a
misreading, and one Ukrainian commentator, Sergey Ilchenko, has suggested that
the end of treaty relations could lead to Tatarstan’s independence and ultimately
the disintegration of the Russian Federation.
In an article in Kyiv’s Delovaya stolitsa today, he argues that
the end of the treaty arrangement could mean that “Tatarstan will not be a
subject of the Rusain Federation but an independent state that has been
recognized as such by Russia” by earlier treaties (dsnews.ua/world/usmirit-kazan-stanet-li-tatarstan-dlya-rossii-vtoroy-26062017220000).
And if that is so,
Ilchenko continues, Tatarstan’s geographic location and importance means in
turn “the end of this [Russian] federation as a single whole.” That is, once the
power-sharing treaty lapses, “no Russia in its current form exists.” Tatarstan
could form its own foreign ministry, ask to join the UN or take any of a number
of similar steps.
Were it to do so – and the Ukrainian
commentator clearly hopes Kazan will – such actions “could serve as the
detonator of the total collapse of Russia, just as the striving of Ukraine for
independence [in 1991] set in train mechanisms for the collapse of the USSR.”
In short, he concludes, the issue of
the treaty is far from dead. Neither side is going to forget what it means. And
as a result, the immediate future in Tatarstan and for Russia is certain to be “interesting.”
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