Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 29 – As a result of
the ground-breaking work by Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush 40 years
ago, many in Russia and around the world know about one aspect of the legacy of
Mirsaid Sultan-Galiyev, his commitment to the idea that Bolshevism and Islam
have many things in common and could combine in Muslim national communism.
Bennigsen and Wimbush documented the
ways in which Sultan-Galiyev’s ideas on this point were developed and spread
throughout the Muslim borderlands of Soviet Russia and the Middle East in Muslim
National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the
Colonial World (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
But Sultan Galiyev was a protean
figure who offered more than that, even if his ideas about Muslim national
communism were what Stalin was most horrified by and why the Soviet dictator
hounded him for two decades and finally had him killed in the GULAG. And those other ideas, long ignored, are now
making a comeback.
Two weeks ago, the author of these
lines discussed the new research a Kazakh scholar has done in Kazan about
Sultan-Galiyev’s central role as a defender of federalism and his warning that
the USSR would fail if it adopted Stalin’s pseudo-federalism Stalin instead of the
real thing (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/08/sultan-galiyev-warned-ussr-would.html).
Today, on the eve of the centenary
of the formation of the Tatar ASSR, the predecessor of the Republic of
Tatarstan, Bulat Sultanbekov, one of the most senior scholars in that republic,
extends this discussion and most
importantly discusses some of the work that has already been done on
Sultan-Galiyev’s federalist ideas (business-gazeta.ru/article/479208).
In the course of his interview,
Sultanbekov recounts the clash between Sultan-Galiyev and Stalin over
federalism, providing many new details not only about the Bolshevik leaders but
about his own role in helping to recover the ideological richness of
Sultan-Galiyev’s thought. In the course of this, he offers a list of
publications for researchers to draw on now.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect
of his interview is his discussion of Sultan-Galiyev’s prophecies about the
future of Eurasia made in the mid-1920s. In his 2015 book, Red Prophet. Rebirth
(in Russian, Kazan), Sultanbekov recounts that his subject made four remarkably
prescient predictions:
·
“The
inevitable disintegration of the USSR in the absence of real federalism”
leading to a country with borders which “almost correspond to those which arose
after the coup in 1991.”
·
“Migration
tsunamis that would change the national face of Europe” and lead to “the rule
of the colonies over the metropolitan centers.”
·
The
amazing rise of China and its transformation from a war-torn country into a
world power.
·
A
warning that the world would be threatened by environmental disaster.
It is not surprising then that this
brilliant activist and thinker is being rediscovered and helping to shape a new
generation of leaders among the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation
and more generally. Sultan-Galiyev was a
Muslim national communist although not what Stalin meant when he denounced him
for that.
He was much more than that and consequently
even more of a threat to the Soviet dictator and those who rejected federalism
then and now.
No comments:
Post a Comment