Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 10 – The Kazan Tatars increasingly define themselves not just as a
Turkic nation but as a Muslim one; and consequently Moscow must come to the defense
the Kryashens, Christian Tatars whom most Tatars view as a religious subgroup
of their community but who see themselves as a separate nation.
That
argument, which Moscow has accepted at various points in the past, has just
been made yet again by Kryashen activists and by Rais Suleymanov, the head of
the Volga Center of Regional and Ethnographic Research, whose commentaries over
the last several years have been a bellwether of Moscow’s policy toward Kazan (www.apn.ru/publications/article27704.htm).
In
an article posted on the APN.ru portal last week, Suleymanov reports on a
conference held in Kazan at the end of last month by the Russian Institute of
Strategic Research of which his center is a part on “National
Self-Determination of the Kryashens: History and the Present Day,” and on both
his remarks to that meeting and those of other researchers and activists.
Suleymanov told the meeting that “up
to now” no one had properly discussed “the problem of the national
self-determination of the Kryashens,” a statement that presupposes that they
are “an independent Orthodox Turkic ethnos” of some 300,000 people, of whom
250,000 live in the Republic of Tatarstan.
Except in the 1926 census where they
were listed separately, the Kryashens were treated in Soviet times as a
religious sub-group of the Kazan Tatars. But in the two post-Soviet censuses, “thanks
to the federal center,” they had the opportunity to declare themselves Kryashens
in the 2002 and 2010 censuses, something that both reflected and helped power
their identity.
The Kazan researcher says that this
provoked anger among the Tatar “national separatists” who viewed it as Moscow’s
way of cutting the numbers of Tatars to under half of the republic’s population
and dividing the Tatar nation and who frequently referred to the Kryashens as “agents
of Ivan the Terrible” and “a living reminder of the times of the Orthodox
inquisition.”
This Orthodox people, Suleymanov
continued, was even dismissed during the run-up to the 2002 enumeration as “the
appendix of the Tatar nation” by several journalists, a term that suggested
both that they were an integral part of the Tatars and that they could be
amputated from the nation without any serious loss.
Since
that time, some Tatars, he said, have sought to promote the Kryashens’ “return
to Islam,” something a few have down out of “careerist considerations” but a
shift that reflects the more profound shift among the Tatars themselves from a
self-definition as a “poly-confessional” nation to a purely Muslim one.
Suleymanov, who describes himself as
a Tatar Muslim, says that as a result, other Tatars are “attempting to ‘push’
the Kryashens into a mono-confessional Tatar ethnos completely failing to
understand that the future of the Kryashens is only in Orthodoxy because a
Kryashen who adopts Islam ceases to be a Kryashen.”
According to the researcher, there
are only 26 Kryashen priests, down from 78 in 1917, and only five parishes
where services are conducted in the church-Kryashen language: the villages of
Bolshiye Aty, Chura, Kryash-Serda, and Melekes and in the republic capital of
Kazan.
Other speakers at the meeting
weighed in with the same message.
Yevgeny Petukhov, a “Kryashen Cossack” from Chistopol, said that Muslim
Tatars had introduced mullahs in Kryashen religious celebrations. One can only
imagine, he continued, how Muslim Tatars would react if Orthodox priests and
literature were present at their rites.
Arkady Fokin, the president of the Couuncil
of Veterans of the Kryashen Movement, noted that the Kryashens were “the only
people in Russia who have two different ethnic statuses” under Boris Yeltsin,
the Nagaybaki, historically a stratum of the Kryashens living in the Urals
received the status of ‘a numerically small native people,’ but the Kryashens
in Tatarstan, where the majority of them live, have the status of a sub-confessional
group within the Tatar ethnos.”
Vasily Ivanov, an ethnic Russian who
works at Suleymanov’s center, pointed out that “for the self-identification of
any ethnic community, there is the need for the image of ‘the other.’” For
Tatar nationalists, that “’other’” includes the Kryashens and thus their
negative attitude toward that community is part of efforts to boost their own
identity.
Ivanov said that this has had a
curious result. Many young Kryashens now
have “a dual ethnic identity” and declaring themselves for official purposes to
be ethnic Russians “because of the Christianophobia of the Tatar nationalists.”
Their re-identification as Russians helped boost the number of Russians in
Tatarstan between 2002 and 2010 by about 8,000.
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