Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 29 – Tatars and
other non-Russian peoples of the post-Soviet space, just like the Russians,
have not had time to form their respective “deep states” consisting of
self-conscious elites who are capable of shaping and guiding the peoples under
them, Shamil Sultanov says.
That process takes a minimum of two
generations, the president of the Russia-Islamic World Center for Strategic
Research and member of the Izborsky Club says; and no one of these peoples has
had sufficient time to allow for such a deep state to emerge (business-gazeta.ru/article/452131).
Some
republic leaders have tried to maintain the Soviet-era “deep state” with more
or less success, Sultanov says. Tatarstan was among the most successful in this
under Mintimir Shaymiyev. Others have thrown caution to the wind and tried to create
something entirely new. There successes so far have been few (business-gazeta.ru/article/452131).
“The Tatar people
has many outstanding people,” he says, “but it doesn’t have an elite as a
special group with its own self-consciousness … Everywhere and always the deep
state is the foundation. There is a stat with its formal institutions and
within it a deep state which carries its own ideas about eh future, and the deep
values which unite and bears responsibility for all this.”
“A Soviet elite was established, but
mechanisms for the transformation of this elite did not exist.” As a result,
when the USSR disintegrated, “no new elite appeared.” And that has left the population
at loose ends. “For a people, the key thing is the elite” understood as the
deep state.
In the course of his 6500-word
interview, Sultanov makes a number of other observations, perhaps the most
interesting of which is this: He says that “Putin himself when he came to
office did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Ignorance in the
upper reaches of the bureaucracy in Moscow sometimes is simply shocking.”
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