Baltic Peoples Fronts Inspired Tatars to Create VTOTs, Khakimov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 20 – In 1989, the emergence of the peoples fronts in the Baltic countries inspired Tatar activists, in particular people in the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, to crate the All-Tatar Social Center, Rafael Khakimov says. The Baltic fronts achieved their political goals; but VTOTs, while it reached its cultural ones, has now been banned as extremist.

            “For the most part,” the former political advisor to Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaymiyev and head of the Tatar Institute of History recalls, “these were people who were concerned about the fate of Tatarstan. Among the broad population, dissatisfaction with the status of the republic was quite strong and VTOTs was part of that.”

            Khakimov’s recollection about the Tatar movement is one of several the Milliard.Tatar portal has assembled from others part of or closely associated with the Tatar national movement now that VTOTs has been banned (milliard.tatar/news/ot-centristov-k-ekstremistam-dolgii-put-vsetatarskogo-obshhestvennogo-centra-1770).

            Ramzil Valyeyev, the vice president of the Federal National Cultural Autonomy of Tatars, says that VTOTs was “a centrist organization.” It remained so because of participants from government structures; and while there may have been radicals among the Tatars, they weren’t participants in the Social Center.

            Iskander Izmaylov, another Tatar scholar observes that “at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s,” adding that “VTOTs played a more important role in consolidating democratic Tatar forces and supporting sovereignty.” It pushed various cultural measures and since then, many of these have been realized, even if broader political goals have not.

            And Tatar Academician Indus Tagirov says that “at that time, this organization was much needed and carried out major work to attract the popular masses to the idea of achieving sovereignty for Tatarstan under the slogan of transforming it into a union republic.” Because of that, any assessment of its work must be positive.

            But these four suggest that VTOTs became a victim of its own successes. As the government of Tatarstan adopted its more moderate ideas, the movement itself radicalized and lost rather than gained influence on the broader part of society and especially on the Tatar government.

            Over time, they say, “a significant part of the more active and nationally oriented people left VTOTS, and many of them played a definite role in the formation of the World Congress of Tatars,” which took over the centrist part of the political spectrum among Tatars. VTOTs was left with the extreme left, and so it is not surprising that it has been closed down.