Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s
gutting of Tatarstan’s 1990 sovereignty declaration has cost every resident of
that Middle Volga republic not only his or her rights and dignity but also has
meant that some 70,000 US dollars earned
from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural resources that should have gone to each of
them has gone instead to Moscow.
That is just one of the bitter
reflections about what Putin has done that is contained in an article on the 24th
anniversary of that declaration which occurs today by Rashit Akhmetov, one-time
head of Tatarstan’s Popular Front and now editor of “Zvezda Povolzhya” (“Zvezda
Povolzhya,” no. 31 (711), August 28-September 3, 2014, p. 1).
Since Putin began his attacks on the
sovereignty of Tatarstan and the other non-Russian republics within the borders
of the Russian Federation, Akhmetov says, approximately 10 trillion rubles (270
billion US dollars) has gone to Moscow from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural
resources instead of into the hands of the Tatars as the 1990 declaration
insisted.
But that financial loss is only a
small part of the deprivations Tatars have suffered because of Putin’s
policies, Akhmetov points out, and he provides a history of how the declaration
came to be and what has happened to its provisions over the last quarter
century by considering where Tatarstan has been on its anniversaries.
On August 30, 1990, Tatarstan adoped
its Declaration on the State Sovereignty of the Republic of Tatarstan. By this declaration, Kazan changed Tatarstan’s
status from an autonomous republic to a union republic and thus gave it the
right, under the Soviet constitution, to leave the Union and become an
independent country.
Tatarstan had tried to do so four
previous times: in the 1920s, in the 1930s, in the 1950s, and in the 1970s, but
its fifth attempt in 1990 was the result of a combination of circumstances that
meant, the Kazan editor says, that had the August 1991 coup “taken place
several weeks later, the history of Tatarstan would have been different:” It
would now be an independent state.
According to Akhmetov, “the parade
of sovereignties” of which Tatarstan was a part “was organized by the apparatus
of the USSR president who used it as a means of pressure on Boris Yeltsin and
on the recalcitrant Supreme Soviet of Russia.” Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief
operative in this regard was Gumer Usmanov, the former Tatarstan first
secretary.
Usmanov was Gorbachev’s chief
advisor on nationality policy, Akhmetov continues, and he in turn employed as
his assistant Oleg Moronov, a young intellectual, who as “the living embodiment
of the idea of Euro-Communism” in Tatarstan and one of those who succeeded in
overcoming the opposition of conservatives and installing Mintimir Shaimiyev as
Usmanov’s successor in Kazan.
“Thus,” Akhmetov continues, “Mikhail
Gorbachev to a large extent opened the way to the real sovereignty of
Tatarstan,” an opening that he says the leadership of the republic succeeded in
using about “70 percent.” An achievement
but one somewhat less than they and many others hoped for.
Many people remember that Boris
Yeltsin told the Tatars to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow,” the
Kazan editor says, but in fact, it was Gorbachev not Yeltsin who promoted the
sovereignty declarations. And it was Yeltsin who worked step by step once he
became president of the Russian Federation to rein them in.
Initially, the anniversary of the
adoption of the declaration of state sovereignty was marked in Tatarstan as a
significant political event, one in which all leaders and thousands of people
turned out and in which military formations and VIPs from other parts of the Russian
Federation took part.
But with time, it lost that
importance and even was renamed the Day of the Republic as the content of the
original declaration was destroyed.
Today, Akhmetov says, he has the impression that “the current
celebration has been changed into a not entirely comfortable show” and that
those invited from elsewhere have been given “unwritten” instructions not to
come.
More seriously, he continues, the
provisions of the 1990 declaration, even though they were ratified by referendum
and enshrined in the Treaty on the Delimitation of Authority between the
Republic of Tatarstan and the Russian Federation, are no longer implemented. The republic and its citizens now “do not
have any of the rights proclaimed” in it.”
Tatarstan and the Tatars do not own
the natural resources under their territory and so they have not enjoyed the
earnings from them. Moscow has taken almost all of these and left Kazan with
little. The Tatar language has suffered,
and Russian is used in 95 percent of the cases of official and educational
life.
Indeed, Akhmetov argues, with regard
to language, “the Soviet Union was much more democratic than contemporary
Russia,” and “despite all the efforts of the Tatar intelligentsia, the Tatar
language [even within the borders of the republic] remains a second-class
affair.” And no one now talks about
Tatarstan citizenship.
Given all this, the editor concludes
with obvious bitterness, it might be better or at least more honest if the
republic’s State Council would just go ahead and denounce the 1990 declaration
and rename the territory either “the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan” or go
all the way and call it what some in Moscow want: “the Kazan oblast.”
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