Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 16 – On Saturday
evening after the commemoration of the anniversary of the Russian sacking of
Kazan in 1552, a second meeting was held among representatives of the peoples
of the Middle Volga or Idel-Ural to create a coordinating committee to fight
Vladimir Putin’s language and nationalities policies.
This meeting may prove even more
significant that the first at which Tatar activists called for reversing Putin’s
language policy and voting against him in the upcoming elections because it
unites the nations of the enormous Idel-Ural region which sits astride all Russian
communication and transportation links between European Russia and Siberia.
As such, preventing these peoples,
who include both Turkic and Finno-Ugric nations, has been a central goal of
Moscow policy makers since at least 1920 when Stalin engaged in his first great
act of ethnic engineering by dividing the Tatars and Bashkirs into two
republics and later the dividing up of the Finno-Ugric population into separate
administrative units as well.
Now, thanks to Putin’s promotion of
Russian and denigration of non-Russian languages and widespread fears that he
plans to do away with the non-Russian republics entirely after the March 2018
elections, the peoples of Idel-Ural whom leaders from Stalin through Putin
wanted to keep apart are coming together to oppose Moscow.
Representatives from Tatarstan,
Bashkortostan, Mari El and Chuvashia say the meeting founded a new Coordination
Council of Peoples of the Volga and Urals Region and declared its primary goal
to be restoration of the rights of the non-Russian educational systems (idelreal.org/a/28796089.html, mariuver.com/2017/10/16/tat-chuv-mari/ and kommersant.ru/doc/3440338).
Marat
Lotfulllin, an expert at Kazan’s Institute for the Development of Education in
Tatarstan, told the group that the republics can only flourish if their
national languages do and the latter can thrive only if they have support from
the government in schools. Tatarstan grew when its schools shifted to Tatar,
and that should be a lesson to all non-Russians.
Ilya
Ivanov, a Chuvash activist, said that unfortunately the non-Russians had not
yet come up with a mechanism to oppose effectively “the pressure of the federal
center,” to which Fausiya Bayramova, the founder of Tatarstan’s Ittifaq National
Independence Party, pointed out the obvious: In an authoritarian system, “it is
impossible” to do that.
“Not
only we,” she continued, “even the Russian democrats cannot influence this
power.” Thus people must vote against Putin and his United Russia party. “Better Yabloko,” she suggested, “than these
dictators.” Bayramova suggested the non-Russians still have a little time to
resist.
The
situation today, she said, is “very dramatic, but it is still not tragic.” It
will become tragic, she argued, only next year after the elections, when “the
national republics will be annulled.”
Activists must explain to their peoples that “the disappearance of
national languages in the schools will lead to the disappearance of national literature
and national culture.”
And
that in turn, the Ittifaq leader continued, will mean “the disappearance of the
nation.”
Aleksandr
Yakovlev of the Mary Ushem organization of Mari El and Ilnar Garifullin, a
historian from Bashkortostan, seconded all her points. But perhaps the most
interesting additional comment came not from a civic activist but from a Muslim
religious leader, something that may make this meeting even more explosive in
its consequences.
Zufar
Galiullin, the mufti of Kirov oblast, said that “the greatest misfortune of
Russia” is that it “was created not as a state but remains the Muscovite
principality which steals all of Russia.”
He called for a Congress of the Peoples of Russia” to address the
situation. “If this will be in Kazan, that would be beautiful,” he said.
That
meeting, the new organization agreed, will take place in the Tatarstan capital
on November 6.
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