Russian Hostility Makes Tatar Woman More Attached to Her Own Nation and More Sympathetic to Other Non-Russians

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 21 – In the latest story in its continuing reporting on what is happening among non-Russians, the Horizontal Russia portal tells the story of a young Tatar woman who insisted she was a Russian but who was treated as someone alien by ethnic Russians and only came to accept her own nationality at the age of 25.

            Her experience of parental denial and then hostility from and discrimination by ethnic Russians had two effects, she says. On the one hand, it ultimately led her to identify even more strongly with her own nation than might otherwise have been the case; and on the other, it caused her to be more sympathetic to other non-Russians and less to ethnic Russians (semnasem.org/articles/2026/07/21/nerusskij-mir-alisa).

            Alisa grew up in a family where her father insisted that she was a Russian even though she looked Tatar because he was convinced that “’non-Russian’ means something bad.” When she was a child, she accepted that; but growing up, she experienced such hostility from Russians that she came to recognize she wasn’t one of them.

             Her father was an ethnic Russian who viewed all non-Russians with disdain, while her mother was half German and half Tatar. The girl herself looked like her mother, and her classmates in school not only laughed at her appearance but looked down at her as something less than themselves.

            Alisa says she became ashamed of her looks and tried to do everything to pass as an ethnic Russian to meet the demands of both her father and her fellow pupils. But that didn’t help and she grew up ashamed of what she was and what she apparently would never be able to fully become.

            When she got a job, her coworkers asked her what her nationality was. She suggested they guess. They offered a variety of suggestions but never got it right that she was a Tatar. As a result, Alisa says, she “understood” that they “associated her with all nationalities except Russian” – and she began doing the same thing.

            That led her not only to take pride in being a Tatar but to feeling closer to and identifying with all non-Russians. At the same time, Alisa says, she has come to feel less close to and is less inclined to identify as Russian because so many Russians are hostile to all non-Russians and lump anyone they don’t identify as Russian in that group.