‘Like Russians, Tatars are a Political Nation and a State-Forming People,’ Fakhrutdinov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 14 – All groups which include Tatar in their names are part of the Tatar nation, a group “like the Russians” which represent “a political nation” formed by the experience of the states they formed or lived within and even form are “a state-forming people,” Rail Fakhrutdinov says

            The direction of Kazan’s Institution of International Relations, History and Oriental Studies adds that again like the Russians, the Tatars passed from being “a confessional identity” into being “a national one” at about the same time in the 19^th century, the Russians a little earlier and the Tatars only a little later (milliard.tatar/news/rail-faxrutdinov-tatary-eto-politiceskaya-naciya-gosudarstvoobrazuyushhii-narod-9496).

            The Soviet state sought to divide up the Tatars, but “the thing is that the Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian Tatars and the Mishars entered a single Russian state at approximately the same time having preserved a common cultural and linguistic space,” he says. To this day, they are all part of the modern Tatar nation.

            More to the point, “the Tatars like the Russians are a single nation” despite differences in dialects and regional identities. “More than that, our history is indivisibly connected with the history of a state: we are a state-forming, imperial nation” as the history of those Tatars who worked for the Russian state at various points demonstrates.

            And Fakhrutdinov concludes: “despite the presence of ethno-territorial groups with local language and cultural distinctions, which characterizes many peoples of the world, the Tatars form a single people, single with a common language, a common culture, historical straditions, self-consciousness and finally with a common ethnonym, Tatars.”

            The Tatar historian’s argument is likely to inspire many Tatars, but it will certainly outrage many Russian nationalists and Moscow centralists both because it posits that the Tatars have evolved in ways parallel to the Russians and because it suggests that many in Kazan view all Tatars are part of their patrimony. 

Soviet Regime Collapsed in Third Generation; Putin One Won’t Survive Even into a Second, Kurilla Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 12 – Many Russians now in the West are increasingly identifying themselves not only as emigres but as emigres like the wave that left a century ago after the Bolshevik revolution and even are beginning to think that few if any of them will ever return, Ivan Kurilla says.

            But in fact, the Russian historian who now teaches in the US, says, it is important to remember that while the two emigrations  do bear a certain resemblance to one another, “Putin’s Russia and Soviet Russia differ fundamentally in their horizons and future prospects” (echofm.online/opinions/perezhivet-li-putinizm-putina).

            “A century ago, Soviet Russia was a young, ideologically driven state, led by young leaders and a party apparatus that was resolutely focused on the future. Putin’s Russia in contrast is a regime of aging leaders that relies neither on a political party or the military and has no vision for the future, let alone ideas that might prove appealing to anyone,” he says.

            The Soviet regime “collapsed during its third generation,” Kurilla points out; “the current one will not even manage to survive the transition to a second,” given the absence of any vision of the future other than a continuation of the present and opposition across the board not only in the population but among elites to such a prospect.

            “Consequently,” he concludes, he “fully expects to go back” and to a Russia very different than Putin’s. “I cannot predict how the current regime or the one that comes after will go about ending the war and normalization relations with Ukraine and with other countries around the world.”

            But the Russian historian says he is convinced that “Russia will not disintegrate” and the arguments of those who say “we need not concern ourselves with the future of a unified country” because it won’t exist “to be fundamentally mistaken.”

Moscow to Limit Ability of Federal Subjects to Modify List of Numerically Small Indigenous Peoples

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 13 – Under existing Russian law, the heads of federal subjects have the power to propose including or dropping nations from Mocow’s Unified List of Numerically Small Indigenous Peoples, which determines whether members of these groups are entitled to special subsidies or not.

            But if new draft legislation proposed by the government is adopted, something that is almost a certainty, the regional heads will be severely constrained in their ability to do so (pnp.ru/social/status-korennykh-malochislennykh-narodov-predlozhili-prisvaivat-po-soglasovaniyu-s-ran.html).

            That is because census results seldom provide sufficient information on the smallest ethnic groups in the country and so regional heads have been able to add or subtract groups to this list on their own. Under the new law, these heads will be required to support their claims with materials from the Academy of Sciences and other Moscow agencies.

            There are currently 47 national groups on the Unified List of peoples with fewer than 50,000 each. Some of them number only a handful but others are close to or even have exceeded the 50,000 threshold. In the first case, some groups may disappear; and others may become too large to be included.

            By imposing the new requirements, Moscow will thus take away the ability of regional heads to act as independently as they have in the past of making such determinations, although to be fair the heads were never all that independent as the Russian government could reject their applications for changing membership. But now that ability will be codified and thus reduced.

            According to some Duma deputies, the measure is intended to save money, although given the small number of people involved, there are few economies. More likely what this means is that Moscow will decide who gets to be a favored minority and who loses that status on the basis of the needs of the government and its business allies.

            At the very least, it will give Moscow even more leverage on the question and mean that some groups on the list will be dropped either because they have effectively died out or because they have grown to beyond the 50,000 upper limit of this category and promote the further homogenization of the population of the Russian Federation.

            Some of the smallest groups will be Russianized and even reidentify as ethnic Russians, but at least some of them are likely to assimilate to other numerically small groups as these populations seek to find ways to continue to get the benefits both financial and in terms of rights into the future.

            The biggest fights, however, are likely to be at the other end, involving those groups which are now close to or even above the 50,000 threshold as once Moscow experts decide that they have done so, these groups will almost certainly be removed from the list and lose the subsidies and special benefits they currently receive.

            Two groups that may be most at risk are the Abaza in Karachayevo-Cherkessia and the combined Evenk-Even nationalities. The former is approaching the 50,000 limit and the latter, if the two do combine – they are closely related – are already above that threshold.

Team Against Torture Report Provides Rare but Very Partial Window into Torture by Russian Force Structures

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 13 – The Team Against Torture, an independent human rights group, has released a report on torture in the Russian Federation. Its findings are interesting but necessarily incomplete because the report was based exclusively on incidents where those who committed this crime were brought to court and convicted.

            That is likely why there are no cases reported of torture against women prisoners or of torture carried out by the FSB which is likely to have more success in protecting its officers against charges than are the militia of the interior ministry (echofm.online/documents/pytki-delo-molodyh-novoe-issledovanie-komandy-protiv-pytok-o-portrete-pytatelya-v-rossii).

            Nonetheless, because data on torture in Russian penal institutions is so rare and usually anecdotal, the report is worth noting because it was based on an examination of 77 torture cases held in the archives of human rights defenders in which 144 law enforcement officers were convicted of torture.

            Three-quarters of those convicted were under the age of 35, 93 percent were employees of the interior ministry, with 88 percent being officers of various territorial subdivisions and 43 percent were part of the Criminal Investigation Department of the ministry, according to the Team Against Torture report.

            Fifty-eight percent of those convicted were cooperating with others, the report says, noting that “securing a conviction against those who did not participate in torture but merely turned a blind eye to it is practically impossible.” It also notes that sometimes officers failed to stop their colleagues from torturing people because of ignorance of the law.

Moscow Not Only Carried Out a Genocide against Soviet People but Announced It was Planning to Do So and Even Boasted about It, Savvin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 13 – The Putin government has now pushed through legislation that makes it a criminal offense to deny that the Germans carried out a genocide against the Soviet people and continues to persecute those who point out that the Soviet regime was responsible for many of the losses Moscow now wants to blame exclusively on the Germans.

            But in doing so, Dimitry Savvin says, editor of the Riga-based conservative Russian Harbin portal, the Putin regime is seeking to cover up that the Soviet regime launched a genocide against the Soviet people shortly after it came to power in its September 1918 Decree on the Red Terror (harbin.lv/dekret-o-krasnom-terrore).

            That has been covered up now as the Putin regime has tried to shift all the blame for losses on the Germans and has been largely ignored by many in the West who are prepared to accept Putin’s lies as long as they are doused in what has become a kind of universal moral solvent provided by Soviet victories in World War II.

Russians Believe Their Country Needs a Strong State More than an Open Political System, Busygina and Filippov Argue, and Putin Relies on That

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 11 – Many assume that Putin remains strong because of repression and fear, Irina Busygina and Mikhail Filippov say; but in fact, it is because he relies on the widespread belief among his countrymen that Russia can be successful if and only if the state is insulated from the buffeting of a competitive political system.

            The Kremlin leader’s “regime does not merely suppress alternatives: it offers its own distinct political formula for the country, one that is internally consistent, historically recognizable and institutionally codified. At its core is the idea of the need for a strong state” (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/04/11/gosudarstvo-vmesto-politiki).

            Because of the need for such a state, the two Russian analysts who now teach in the US, most Russians follow Putin and believe that “open competition for power must be expunged from public life. Politics is permitted only in forms that are controlled—and, for the regime, safe.”

            For that reason, Busygina and Filippova argue that “Putinism frames depoliticization not as a restriction on normal life, but as its very precondition. This concept was not imposed from above; rather, it rests upon a genuine and broad consensus that took shape within Russian politics as early as the 1990s.”

“In various guises,” they continue, “this consensus was shared by democrats, federalists, nationalists, and communists alike. While they harbored profound disagreements on nearly every other issue, they concurred on one point: Russia requires a strong state. It is upon this very foundation that Putinism has constructed its political hegemony.”

The Putin regime delivers “a level of macroeconomic stability, administrative competence, and targeted social support adequate to ensure that the majority does not view democratization as a necessary price to pay for improving their lives” that the Kremlin feels no compulsion to promise freedom.

Instead, the two write, the Putinist state “promises a ‘managed normality’—and, moreover, a ‘modern’ normality: a market economy without political competition, technocracy without accountability, and limited openness to the world without political pluralism.” That is why this state is so hard to change and why the war in Ukraine has made it more not less so.

For a successful challenge, “simply calling for freedom of speech, fair elections or a reduction in arbitrary rule is not enough.” Instead, those making it must “answer a more complicated question: how can a strong Russia be built without a ruling elite that is insulated from political competition and accountability?”

According to Busygina and Fillipova, “the Russian opposition lacks a coherent answer to this question and, as a result, the system is resilient,” with most of the elite and much of the population believing that “even a limited liberalization ‘within’ the regime appears to be too dangerous.” Until that changes, the Russian regime isn’t going to change, even after Putin.

A Measure of Moscow’s Desperation: People Visiting AIDS Centers in Karelia Urged to Join Russian Army

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 13 – Even though the Russian defense ministry prohibits those with HIV or hepatitis from serving in the military, recruiters in Karelia are now circulating appeals to those visiting HIV/AIDS centers in Karelia to join up with promises that they will get substantial bonuses, debt relief and consideration even if they have criminal records.

            The ban can be found at publication.pravo.gov.ru/document/0001202601300038; the report about this recruitment effort in Karelia is at ru.thebarentsobserver.com/v-centre-spid-razmestili-reklamu-kontraktov-dla-ludej-s-vic-i-gepatitom/448477; and background on such efforts elsewhere at t.me/istories_media/10317.

            The Russian military has avoided recruiting those with such illnesses in the past not only because such soldiers would likely require more medical attention but also because knowledge by the Russian population that the military was allowing those with HIV/AIDS  to serve would likely discourage others from signing up.

            Hence, this recruitment effort, which explicitly says that “recruitment is [now] open for people with HIV and HEPATITIS,” strongly suggests that the Russian military is having increasing difficulty filling its depleted ranks in Ukraine and has apparently has been directed to take in even those with serious and highly communicable illnesses.

            Not surprisingly, this effort so far appears confined to places far from Moscow where coverage is less likely to reach a broader audience. For that reason, The Barents Observer is to be commended for reporting in detail on this latest action by the Moscow authorities. Its report should be picked up and disseminated by others.