Activists Seek Referendum to Shift City of Alatyr from Chuvashia to Mordovia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – Residents in Alatyr, a predominantly ethnic Russian city of 35,000 in Chuvashia, want to hold a referendum that would allow them to join the Mordovian Republic instead, a move prompted by a variety of local grievances but one that has the potential to cast a shadow not only on the Middle Volga as a whole but on all non-Russian republics.

            Alatyr residents have a long list of complaints. They have had five mayors in the last five years, they are upset by the closure of children’s libraries and swimming pools, they have significantly poorer roads than Mordvin towns do, they are angry about trash collection, and they resent that they do not have any new facilities except shopping centers since Soviet times.

            Because their city is near the border of Chuvashia and Mordvinia and thus they are in a position to compare how things are done in the latter republic, residents have been circulating a petition demanding a referendum on shifting the administrative subordination of their city (idel-ural.org/archives/в-чувашии-город-алатырь-заявил-о-желан/).

            Alatyr officials have called in Vitaly Shilov, one of the leaders of the petition drive, and told him that shifting the city would be counterproductive because Mordovia has such a large debt. They were not willing to acknowledge that Chuvashia has an equally large one, making that argument irrelevant. 

            Shilov said he and other activists aren’t planning to try to take the city out of Chuvashia immediately. In fact, their immediate task is to defeat incumbents in the city council because in the view of the population, these deputies aren’t doing their jobs.  The referendum then is really a threat to them if they don’t change their ways.

            According to the last census, 87 percent of the city’s population is ethnic Russian. Of the remainder, the Mordvins outnumber the Chuvash almost three to one, 3044 to 1116. Among the Mordvins are both Erzya and Moksha, the two major subdivisions of the Mordvin nation – and something that the authorities may focus on if the referendum proceeds.

            The Mordvins are Finno-Ugric and historically pagan, while the Chuvash are Christian Turks. Obviously, any change in the borders between them would have an impact on the balance of forces in the Middle Volga region, where playing up ethnicity is one of the means the Russian authorities use to weaken the regional Idel-Ural identity.

            But the situation in Alatyr could have an impact even greater than that. On the one hand, it could open a new round of demands for referenda about border changes in other non-Russian republics. And on the other – and admittedly more speculatively – it could even become a tactic for Moscow to undermine and eventually eliminate the republics as such.

            After all, the Kremlin’s argument will certainly run, if people in one republic want to joi