‘Sultan-Galiyev was Smarter than Stalin,’ Khakimov Says He Learned from His Father

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 8 – Rafael Khakimov, former political advisor to Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiyev and one of Russia’s leading specialists on and advocates for federalism in the 1990s, recounts an instructive case from his own life in the latest installment of his memoirs now being published seriatim by the Milliard.Tatar portal.

            When he was a student at Kazan State University, he learned about Mirsaid Sultan-Galiyev, the chief theoretician of Muslim national communism who was driven from the Bolshevik leadership and ultimately killed by Stalin, only from attacks on him (milliard.tatar/news/otec-suxo-otvetil-sultan-galiev-byl-umnee-stalina-2191).

            These attacks did not provide any sources for Sultan-Galiyev’s ideas; and when Khakimov sought information in the university library and even in the restricted “special collections,” he could not find anything about him. Thus, it turned out that the Muslim national communist did exist but at least for the Soviets did not leave any traces.

            The future Tatar historian and political advisor said that he asked his father, a prominent Tatar intellectual, about Sultan-Galiyev and specifically about why he had been shot by Stalin. His father replied, “in his usual manner,” Khakimov says, “briefly and dryly” and declared that the reason was simple: “he was smarter than Stalin!”

            At the time, he continues, he was “completely puzzled” by this; but his father’s remarks clearly led him to try to find out more and to develop as a thinker who respected the actual history of his people and not just the one Moscow had tried to impose upon it and to place the ideas of Sultan-Galiyev at the center of his understanding of federalism.

            On Sultan-Galiyev and the way his thought has echoed in the works of Khakimov and others, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/08/sultan-galiyev-warned-ussr-would.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/three-events-in-sultan-galiyevs-life.html, and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/08/sultan-galiyev-now-having-his-day-in.html.