Is Putin about to Reverse Stalin’s First Act of Ethnic Engineering – the Division of Tatars and Bashkirs into Separate Republics – to Save His Own Power?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 3 – Seventy years ago, Richard Pipes described Stalin’s formation of two republics in the Middle Volga, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, as “the first experiment in Soviet nationality policy,” a policy he aptly characterized as one of “divide and rule” (The Russian Review 9: 4 (Oct., 1950): 303-319).

            Separating the Tatars and Bashkirs weakened the Muslim national communists, kept the Bashkirs in a numerically subordinate way in their republic and reduced the ability of the Tatars to act as leaders of the non-Russian nationalities remained an axiom of Soviet nationality policy right to the end, despite repeated attempts by some in both nations to come together.

            Even after 1991, occasional efforts to unite the two were actively opposed by Moscow as well as by most officials in Tatarstan and even more in Bashkortostan. The former feared a united Muslim Turkic republic, and the latter felt this was a stratagem to destroy both  (idelreal.org/a/moskva-boitsa-obyedineniya-tatarstana-i-bashkortostana/28897826.html).

            But in April 2021, the idea of combining the two received unexpected support from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, himself an ethnic Tatar, who called for combining the two republics as part of a broader regional agglomeration effort (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/04/deputy-prime-minister-wants-to-replace.html).

            Khusnullin’s suggestion was widely attacked, especially by Ufa and Moscow, who saw this as an effort to keep the Tatars silent if the Russian government revived Putin’s regional amalgamation campaign and moved to destroy more of the non-Russian autonomous republics by folding them into larger and predominantly ethnic Russian krays.

            But despite that, it may have a future, according to the leaders of the Forum of Free Peoples of Post-Russia. In a post today, they argue what Khusnullin is really about is creating conflicts on the territory of Russia so that when it collapses, the security agencies will be in a position to pick up the pieces as they did in Russia after 1991 (t.me/freenationsrussia/1164).

            According to the Forum, the Kremlin is well aware that the Russian Federation is headed toward collapse just as the KGB was well aware that the USSR was going to fall apart long before 1991; and that as a result, the Kremlin and its security agencies are seeking to create conditions that will allow them to control things even if the country does.

            That may sound far-fetched but not if one remembers how the KGB acted in the lead up to 1991 and how it moved to put its own people or their closest allies in positions of power. As such, the Forum’s suggestion should be kept in mind as one analyzes what Putin’s regime is doing at a time when many see it as having entered is final agony.