Tatarstan’s ‘Deep State’ Helping Other Nations of the Middle Volga Region, Sidorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 11 – The top leadership of the Republic of Tatarstan increasingly has been forced to follow Moscow’s warnings against Kazan’s giving help to other peoples in the Middle Volga region in order to maximize Tatarstan’s influence, but what might be called the republic’s “deep state” continues to carry out exactly that policy, Kharun Sidorov says.

            The Prague-based commentator notes that this was highlighted by two recent events, the publication with money from Tatarstan of a textbook for Udmurts in Udmurtia who would like to learn their native language and a special congress in Tatarstan of teachers of Chuvash (idelreal.org/a/32169390.html).

            Such actions appear to fall below Moscow’s radar screen, Sidorov continues, but there is no question that they represent an increasingly important form of “soft power” at a time when more public displays by more senior officials is not possible except at great risk to those who speak out.

            And that suggests that the Tatarstan bureaucracy, many of whose members joined at a time when a more nationalist and regionalist policy was possible, still supports the idea of a Greater Idel Ural association and that they will be more than ready to back it when that becomes possible even if their political bosses appear to have given up.

            It is likely that the bureaucracies in many of the other non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation are playing and will play a similar role, a possibility that so far has been largely ignored by researchers both in Moscow and in the West. At the very least, the concept of republic "deep states" is one that deserves to be kept in mind in thinking about the direction these entities are going.