For First Time Since 2011, Tatars Demonstrate in Front of Kazan Kremlin, Make Sweeping Demands

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 9 – For the first time since Tatars protested the results of the Duma elections in December 2011, some 500 of them came together in front of the Kazan Kremlin (with the permission of the republic authorities) to express their anger at the direction Tatarstan and the Russian Federation are going and to make sweeping demands for change.

            The protest was organized by the Councils of Social Self-Organization of the Republic of Tatarstan, an umbrella organization set up on November 21 in order to organize the meeting and draft an appeal to Vladimir Putin and the authorities of the Republic of Tatarstan on a wide variety of subjects (idelreal.org/a/29646094.html).

            Among the subjects that brought the demonstrators together, IdelReal reports, were trash disposal, pension reform, pollution, the status of the Tatar language, the bankruptcies afflicting Tatarstan banks, and the emptying out of villages as a result of aging housing and rural economic decline.

                Among the demands the protesters made were the establishment of a Tatar national university, the use of Tatar in all Tatarstan government offices, the repeal of the federal law making instruction in Tatar voluntary, and the reversal of the federal law raising the pension age (idelreal.org/a/29645683.html).