Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Kazan Officials Want to Set Up a Republic Personals Service so Tatars can Find Tatar Partners and have More Children

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan 26 – In Gorbachev’s times, personals columns begam to flourish in Soviet youth newspapers; and one of the signs that the friendship of the peoples he and other Moscow leaders talked so much about was coming to the end was the appearance of posts in which individuals said they were looking for partners from particular nationalities.
    Usually, those making such requests indicated that they wanted to meet someone of the same nationality as themselves, although not always. There were some striking cases in which Russians and others said they wanted to meet Jews or Germans, perhaps because they believed that if they married members of those groups, they could escape the USSR.
    Since the demise of the Soviet Union, personals columns have continued to appear but with less obvious political messages. However, that may be changing. Officials in Tatarstan want to establish a republic “acquaintance agency” so that Tatars can meet Tatars, marry and have more children (nemoskva.net/2025/01/27/v-tatarstane-chinovniki-hotyat-sozdat-respublikanskoe-agentstvo-znakomstv/).
    This builds on earlier efforts in which Tatarstan officials have sought to boost marriage rates among Tatars by matching them at polling stations or at skating rinks (t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/23714  and t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/39394) so as to boost the marriage and fertility rates of Tatars as Moscow is demanding.
    But while such programs at least for the time being enjoy Moscow’s support to the extent they increase the number of marriages and children, they may have the effect as their predecessors in the 1980s did of intensifying ethno-national identities, exactly the opposite outcome to the one the Kremlin favors.  

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