Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 10 – Guided by
the ideas of Kazan historian Rafael Khakimov who served as Mintimir Shaymiyev’s
political advisor, the government of Tatarstan from the early 1990s sought to
create a political nation of all the residents of the republic rather than one
based on and called to defend the Tatars as an ethnic nation, Damir Iskhakov
says.
That strategy seemed to many then
and even now to be the only one that would allow for the development of a civil
society there, but that view was mistaken and has now led to Kazan’s defeat on
language rights and the power-sharing agreement without guaranteeing the rise
of a civil society, Iskhakov continues (business-gazeta.ru/article/366490).
In the second part of his lengthy article
on “The End of ‘the Fourth Tatar Revolution” -- for a discussion of the first,
see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-end-of-era-kazan-says-it-wont-seek.html
– Iskhakov analyzes Khakimov’s ideas which he sees as the source of the recent
defeats.
In 1993, he writes, Khakimov
published a small book, “Twilight of the Empire: On the Question of the Nation
and State,” in which the scholar defined the nation as “citizens united in a
state formation independent of their ethnic origin,” an idea that made the
state rather than the people the primary moving force in the definition of
identity.
Khakimov’s argument was sharply
criticized by French political scientist Jean-Robert Raviot at the time for its
failure to make the nation primary and preexistent to the state. (See the
latter’s “Territoire et ethnicité au Tatarstan: une ancienne république
autonome soviétique en quête d'une identit” in Archives Europeennes De Sociologie, 1993.)
“When
Khakimov asserted that the successful functioning of the republic and its
self-determination can be guaranteed only ‘by offering Russianss the very same
rights given to the Tatars,’” Ikhlov continues, “he avoided a discussion … of the
fundamental question” about how a nation arises and finds expression in the world.
And
consequently, the historian continues, Khakimov, “the ideologue of the ‘Tatarstan’
nation like his political chiefs … did not in fact have an idea about the role
of the ethnno-cultural factor in the formation of the state.” That remains the
case, Ikhlov says, as can be seen from Kazan’s handling of language issues and
its capitulation to Moscow on them.
In
1995, Ikhlov recalls, he published an essay “The Tatarstan Model, For and
Against” (Panorama-Forum, nos. 1-2) in
which he sharply criticized Khakimov’s position and insisted that “it is not the
state that makes a population into a nation but rather culture unifies them
into a national community which then forms a state.”
He continued that “Tatarstan
had not been able to become ‘a nation’ entirely distinguished from the Russian
precisely because our cultural space is not separated from its all-Russian
characteristics and thus the republic can be build only on an ethnic basis,” exactly
the opposite to the policies Kazan has been pursuing.
What the republic government should
do, he suggested in 1995 and reiterates now, is to recognize that it must find
ways to support both the entire population of the republic and the titular
nation, something that might have been done by creating a bicameral legislature
in which ethnic groups were represented by quota in one and the population by
numbers in the other.
By so doing, Ikhlov argues, Tatars
and Russians would have equal rights “on the political level,” but “on the
ethno-cultural ome, the Tatars could aspire to certain particular rights since
Tatarstan for all the Tatar community is the only place in the world where the
national culture of the Tatars as an ehtno-nation is being fully realized.”
What this means, he says, is that there
must be “a conscious delimitation of the political and ethnic aspects of the ‘Tatarstan’
nation.” But that idea was rejected by the
Kazan Kremlin which instead pursued a policy to reduce to a minimum the “ethnic”
expression of “’the nations’ of Tatarstanis,” Tatars and Russians alike.
“It is no secret that the Tatars in
Rusisan live in a Russian ethnic world and have the closest ties with Rusisans,”
Ikhlov continues. There is influence in the opposite direction, of course, “but
it is much less.” And so Tatars must recognize what is going on in the Russian
nation, something they have signally failed to do.
At the end of Soviet times, the
non-Russian peoples “awoke” before the ethnic Russians did, and the Russians
experienced the loss of empire much more negatively than did those of other
nations. They felt denigrated and at a
loss. But gradually, they began to reassert themselves with a kind of “Orthodox-Russian
fundamentalism” in opposition to liberalism.
They wanted “red meat” and they
looked around at the non-Russians to get it, Iskhakov says.
The Putin regime clearly feels this
development and with its language and federal policies is playing to it both
for electoral purposes and to distract attention from the failure of the Kremlin
to reconstitute what it calls “the Russian world” abroad by lording it over “alien
groups” within the Russian Federation.
“But what has been taking place with
the Tatars” over the course of the last two decades? After a growth in national enthusiasm in the
late 1980s and 1990s, the unofficial groups that had promoted this first
stabilized and declined; and the republic government took over this part of
life and imposed its an agenda intended to avoid accusations from Moscow of nationalism.
But Tatars in the population
continued to put pressure on their government to do something for them, and the
Kazan Kremlin responded by in ways that were neither well-thought-out,
consistent, or adequately funded. As a result, the republic regime offended both
Tatars and Russians as well especially in the sphere of language and education.
What is happening now is the
inglorious collapse of Kazan’s policies which simultaneously did not recognize
that Russians were becoming more nationalistic and that Tatars were becoming
more restive and that the republic government needed to address both in a
consistent way rather than waiting for Moscow to intervene as it now has.
It is already the case that 20
percent of Tatars consider Russian their native language, and “no more than a
third know their native language” sufficiently well to use it freely. At the same
time, however, Kazan’s educational experiments, including a language test in
the ninth grade only infuriated the Russians and Russian speakers.
Both sides of this equation must be
addressed, but Kazan has done neither in an adequate fashion, thus almost
inviting Moscow to intervene as it has and setting the stage for a time when Tatarstan
may be replaced by a Russian “gubernia” of one kind or another, the dissident
Tatar historian argues.
That “apocalyptic” future can be
avoided if the Tatars make use of their most important resource. They are “part
of the Turkic-Muslim world and traditionally are oriented toward monotheism,
have a strong moral basis, and are capable of opposing let us say ‘petty jinns’”
that threat to lead them into oblivion.
Both Tatars and Russians must be
made aware that the attack on the Tatar language and thus on the Tatar people “is
the beginning of other disturbing processes at the level of our entire big
Motherland. Therefore, salvation within Tatarstan alone is impossible, even
though our task is right.”
“We must in the future act at the
level and in the interests of all Russia and even Euraisa, hand in hand, with genuine
Russian patriots.” Tatars must be clever recognizing the threats first of all
to the Tatars but then to everyone else as well, and they must also recognize
that those guilty of what has happened are in the apparatus of the president of
Tatarstan.
Once these things
are recognized, Ikhlov concludes, the Tatars and their allies can get on with the
increasingly difficult task of saving their republic and their nation.
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