Moscow Wants to Break Tatarstan on Language Issue to Bring All Republics to Heel, Garifullin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 9 – Vladimir Putin’s recent attack on those he says are attacking the Russian language has attracted more attention (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/dont-call-russian-language-weapon-lest.html), but at the same meeting, remarks by Vladimir Alpatov are likely to prove the move important in terms of Moscow’s next moves on the language front.

            Alpatov, head of the research center for national-language relations at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics, said that his institution has come up with draft legislation that would end what he said was Tatarstan’s failure to live according to the spirit as well as the letter of existing law on languages of instruction.

            As  Ilnar Garifullin, a commentator for the Idel.Real portal says, that makes Tatarstan “the target” of Moscow’s campaign to boost Russian while reducing the number of non-Russians not only in that republic but across the Russian Federation studying  in non-Russian languages and toward that end cutting in half (idelreal.org/a/30260286.html).

            Alpatov suggested that the number of hours Tatar-language students should study Tatar each week should be further reduced form six hours to three. And despite his call for “defending” non-Russian languages, his approach like Putin’s would lead to the disappearance of non-Russian languages and therefore “the disappearance” of the language issue.

            What the remarks of both Putin and Alpatov mean, Garifulllin says, is that “the former course of the most far-reaching Russification” has been confirmed “and not simply Russification but the most far-reaching unitarization of the country, the liquidation of the national republics and the construction of some ‘[non-ethnic] Russian’ nation.”

            And they mean something else as well, the commentator continues. “Questions of language and culture are completely political.” Nothing threatens the Russian these people want to defend, but they are threatening the non-Russian languages to the point of extinction and few are coming to the defense of these basic building blocks of culture.

            On the Tatar Politics telegram channel, Kazan activist Ruslan Aisin has proposed that the government of Tatarstan in response to what Moscow is doing create a Presidential Council on the Tatar Language analogous to the federal one supporting Russian (t.me/tpolit/1730). That is an absolutely necessary step, Garifullin says; but it is far from clear whether Kazan will take it.

            “There is a real war going on against Tatar. And we are absolutely unprepared for it organizationally and ideologically,” he continues.  Moscow has chosen Tatar as the target because if it breaks Tatar, all the other non-Russians will have little choice but to fall in line and accept the destruction of their languages and then their republics as well.

            Tragically, Garifulllin points out, there are many in Tatarstan, like Radif Zamaletdinov of the Institute of Philology and Inter-Cultural Communication at the Kazan Federal University, who are calling in the most servile fashion for Tatars to take the lead in promoting not Tatar but Russian.

            Such people are seeking to curry favor with Moscow; but any victories they have will be short-lived, the Idel.Real observer says, because they forget that Moscow will be willing to use them only as long as it has to to achieve its goals – and then they will be disposed of just as the center has disposed of Tatar institutions and individuals in the past.