Stalin’s First Act of Ethnic Engineering – Dividing Tatars and Bashkirs – Still Working, Aysin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 15 – The current tensions between Ingushetia and Chechnya, two closely related Vaynakh peoples, are a reminder that it is often the case that “the more closely peoples are related, the more tensions between them that are likely to arise,” according to Kazan Tatar political scientist Ruslan Aysin.

            In 1920, he says, Stalin used this tendency to divide the Tatars and the Bashkirs lest they form a united Idel-Ural state that would be more difficult for Moscow to rule. The Soviet ruler created two republics and played up the tensions that inevitably arose among them to keep them apart (business-gazeta.ru/article/398838).

            When the Soviet Union collapsed, Aysin continues, many hoped that Tatarstan and Bashkortostan would be able to look past these tensions and cooperate with one another to promote not only their interests as closely related Muslim Turkic peoples but also to help build the federal system in which not only they but others could flourish. 

            But the watchdogs on the Kremlin towers “weren’t napping,” he says. “Individual politicians began to set Tatars and Bashkirs against one another,” even when there were relatively good relations among those at the top. The principles Moscow used were the same as before: play the ethnic card given the existence of minorities in each republic.

            “In 2002, relations between Tatarstan and Bashkortostan became tense below the waterline, and the ship of friendship began to go to the bottom. Throughout the 1990s, Ufa in essence had ignored the Tatar question,” or more precisely sought to play it down by reidentifying 300,000 Tatars in Bashkortostan as Bashkirs.

            Not surprisingly, Tatarstan leaders were furious, and over the next few years, the contacts that the two had developed from the end of Soviet times one came to an end “at practically all levels.” Indeed, it often happened that Tatar social groups weren’t allowed into Bashkortostan, exactly as Moscow hoped.

           

            The situation if anything became worse after 2010 when the new republic leader, who has just now resigned, sought not to move in new directions but simply to continue whatever had been doing.  As a result, the problems that had arisen in the early years of the decade simply multiplied and became worse.

            “No one sought to approach their resolution in a systematic fashion,” Aysin says. As a result, the two republics were not able to form the “Kazan-Ufa axis” many had hoped for; and that cost both of them and Tatarstan in particular much of the influence it had had as a promoter of federalism in the 1990s.

            And that only became worse, the Kazan political scientist says, when Bashkortostan shifted from being a republic that more than paid its own way to one which relied ever more heavily on subventions from Moscow. Given that, Ufa couldn’t defend its own interests led alone make common cause with Kazan.

            One can only hope this will change, Aysin says; but the arrangements that Stalin introduced at the dawn of Soviet power are still exerting a powerful influence on political life in the Middle Volga a quarter of a century after the USSR ceased to exist, an influence that works not against the center but almost exclusively for its benefit.