Putin has Used and Gutted the Tatar National Congress Just as Stalin Used and then Destroyed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Aysin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 4 – Vladimir Putin has exploited and destroyed the World Congress of Tatars, ramming through a resolution none of the delegates had seen in advance approving everything he has done and that many Tatars who should have been at the meeting were not because they could see where the Kremlin leader was heading, according to Ruslan Aysin.

            The IdelReal commentator says that what has just happened in Kazan was thus “the funeral” of an organization which had played a serious role over 30 years, and he pointedly compares what Putin has done to the Tatars with what Stalin did to the Jews during and immediately after World War II (idelreal.org/a/31973477.html).

            What Putin has done to the World Congress of Tatars echoes what Stalin did with Jewish activists in the 1940s, Aysin says. “In 1942, he created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to help influential Jewish communities around the world in the struggle” against Nazi Germany and to make the USSR look committed to the Allied cuse.

            “After that task was completed,” the commentator says, “the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was shut down ‘as a center of anti-Soviet propaganda,’ and its head, Mikhoels, was executed on the personal instructions of the leader of the peoples.”

            “Dictators always operate according to the same paradigm,” Aysin continues. “For them, people, nations, religions and the state itself are simply tools to be used to strengthen their personal power.”

            The Tatar commentator draws that bitter conclusion after examining what happened at a meeting that was almost entirely scripted from behind the scenes, so organized that many prominent Tatars didn’t take part, and that featured the ramming through of a resolution approving Putin’s war in Ukraine without any serious discussion.

            Indeed when Fauziya Bayramova, the “grandmother” of the Tatar movement, attempted to speak, she was ignored, forcing her and some others at the meeting to withdraw because they were no longer allowed to speak to a meeting which in the past had featured serious debates about serious issues of concern to Tatars.

            It is quite clear that the Kremlin wanted to split the Tatar world into an archipelago, with the diaspora in one place, Tatarstan in a second, and all other Tatars in yet a third. “What can connect these worlds today” now that the Congress which was intended to do that can’t? The answer he says, is “nothing.”

             Aysin says that with the gelding of the Congress, “the Tatar nation stands on the edge of a deep abyss. National education has been destroyed, the population is being rapidly assimilated, and Tatarstan has been reduced to an ordinary region” whose “political institutions have been killed, its intelligentsia suppressed,” and the people left without leadership.

            And he adds in this regard that Moscow’s plan to organize national battalions to fight in Ukraine is intended to “dirty everyone so that we forget about our rights, freedoms and future. Aysin concludes by citing the observation of Karl Marx that “in politics for the sake of a goal, you can make an alliance with the devil himself.”

            “You just need to be sure that you are the one who draws the line and not the devil,” the German political theorist said. Unfortunately, those who took part in the charade Moscow has reduced the Congress of Tatars have failed in that regard.