Non-Russian Republics Need Allies in Russian Regions for Federalism to Emerge, Tatar Activist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 30 – Even though Moscow’s heavy-handedness has generated in him “a quiet separatism, Tatar activist Lenar Miftakhnyky says that he knows very well that a suddenly independent Tatarstan would for economic reasons seek “on the very next day some kind of union with Russia.”

            Speaking with Vadim Shtepa, the editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal, the activist says that Russians need to recognize this reality rather than continue to assume that they have to maintain the empire by force alone. Using force is counterproductive especially when there are compelling reasons for coming together (region.expert/kerpe/).

            “Tatarstan is interested in getting out from under Moscow’s control, but at the same time it would only lose if a common Russian political and economic space were to be destroyed in the process,” Miftakhnyky says. “The reason is elementary: we need the Russian market.”  But that is true for Russian regions as well.

            “A Russian who is living in the Urals, in Siberia, in the Far East, and what is particularly important in Central Russia has just become to recognize his colonial dependence on the Kremlin … he is waking up” and recognizing that he too needs to be freed from Moscow’s tutelage and to take control of his own life and region and that limitless Russia has less meaning for him.

            Non-Russians came to this understanding some time ago. They focus on every square meter of the land that is their small Motherland. “The collective farm approach when everything is common and at the same time nothing is something not for us.” Increasingly, Russians are coming to the same conclusions.

            “Now we see that the Russian people … has begun to seek independence from the Kremlin for its regions. The present-day imperial power unwittingly by its own actions in the construction of a super-centralized unitary state has been able to show the baselessness and lack of life in imperial ideas.” What is happening in Khabarovsk highlights this trend.

            Miftanykhy has set up a public organization called “the Path of the Hedgehog” (in Tatar, Kerpe yuly) to promote these ideas because he believes that the hedgehog has many of the essential qualities of the Tatar nation, cautious but clear in its goals, and capable of proceeding even when all roads seem blocked.

            He and his colleagues recognize that without Russian support, there won’t be a federation. The desires of the Tatars and other non-Russians for that are not enough. Unfortunately, many Russians have not yet recognized what the non-Russians like himself have: there will be federalism or there will be the further disintegration of the Russian state.

              Miftakhnyky says that he is reaching out and building bridges to regionalist movements in other parts of Russia as well as to national movements.  This process is only beginning, but for a hedgehog, the obvious single path ahead is already clear.