‘Tatars have had Dozens of Independent States,’ Bayramova Reminds on Her 70th Birthday

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 5 – In an interview on her 70^th birthday, Tatar activist Fauziya Bayramova points out that over the course of history “Tatars have had dozens of independent states” and therefore it was not and is not something absurd that they should want to have such independence again.

            A writer who has celebrated her people in more than 50 books and who has been a central figure in the Tatar national movement since the 1980s, Bayramova says she recognized the need to defend her nation when she was in Mongolia 40 years ago and saw how Russians acted toward that independent people (business-gazeta.ru/article/491142).

            The Russians treated the Mongols with contempt, but the Mongols responded by standing up for themselves, their history and their rights, she says; and from that she recognized that Tatars should respond to Russian oppression in the same way because preserving their status as a nation is “the main task for Tatars.”

            Despite Russian oppression and the comprador attitudes of some Tatars, the Tatars as a whole have never lost their desire for freedom and independent life; and that will not change as long as there are any Tatars left, even if the powers that be are able to restrict the public manifestations of that commitment.

            Some Tatars believe that they must accept Russia as their common home, but they fail to see that for Moscow, only the Russians are a state-forming people and that we Tatars “live in this home only as renters. If all the rights of Tatars were observed in this country, I would not be concerned. But that isn’t the case.”

            If current trends continue and aren’t resisted and reversed, Tatars will soon be swallowed up by the Russian nation. The first step is the inclusion of the nation within Russia, then within the Russian nation, and finally becoming Russians. To be sure, “Tatars will not disappear physically in the Russian nation, but they will disappear as a nation.”

            The peoples of Russia need to decide what system they live in. “Is Russia an empire or a federation? Or is in a federation based on imperial thinking? But that can’t be!” Bayramova says.

            “A nation must not be transformed into mankurts. If it knows its past and doesn’t forget it, then it will return to its roots. We are not Tat-Russians, not Tataro-Ruses, not mankurts, but Tatars. And we must keep that for the future.” But tragically and to her regret, she continues, “the state is not interested in our future or the preservation of the Tatar nation.”

            Because it isn’t, the Tatar intelligentsia of which she is a lifetime member must take up that task; and Tatars as members of families must do the same. Bayramova says that she and her husband have raised two children who know Tatar and Islam, and she says she continues to write about Tatars so that no one will forget them.

            Right now, she points out, she is finishing a new book on the Tatar who became mufti in Japan, an individual about whom few in Tatarstan or elsewhere know but one more sign of the vitality of the Tatar nation under any and all circumstances.