A little-noted but interesting aspect of the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 was Vladimir Putin's government's attempt to enlist officials from the Republic of Tatarstan to smooth the transition of Crimea back to Russian rule. It makes sense – the Crimean and Volga Tatars are ethnic, linguistic, and religious kin, and both trace their history of statehood back to the Golden Horde successor khanates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Crimean Khanate maintained its independence far longer than Kazan was able to; while the defeat of Kazan in 1552 marked the beginning of the expansion of the modern Russian Empire under Ivan IV, the Crimean Khanate retained some form of autonomy until nearly the end of the eighteenth century. During the ensuing years, the fortunes of the two peoples and their states reversed yet again; Tatarstan emerged from Soviet rule as a powerful actor determined to make the new Russian Federation truly a federal state in practice as well as on paper (in part by invoking the heritage of the Kazan Khanate). In contrast the Crimean Tatars, never having recovered demographically or politically from their forced exile to Central Asia by Stalin during World War II, struggled to establish some form of cultural and political autonomy as part of a newly independent Ukraine.
The spectacle of Tatarstan's leaders attempting to convince their Crimean brethren that life is indeed joyful under President Putin is a propitious moment for revisiting political developments in Tatarstan, which enjoyed substantial attention from both the international scholarly community and policy-makers in the 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in a visit to Kazan by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in October 2009. However, all of President Putin's main achievements – the recentralization of legal and political power in Moscow, the establishment of a grim Pax Kadyrovicus in the North Caucasus, and the forceful reassertion of the primacy of ethnic Russian religious and cultural sensibilities in Russia – were meant to achieve the cessation and even the repeal of the achievements of Tatarstan's drive for sovereignty in the 1990s, and they seem to have succeeded in that goal.
The five articles in this issue of Nationalities Papers together give the impression, however, that many of the signature elements of Tatarstan's sovereignty project are still alive and well, specifically the reappraisal of Tatar history independent of the political and ideological strictures of the Soviet era, the attempt to preserve and promote the Tatar language as an official state language in the republic, the revival of Islam in a way that serves to amplify Tatarstan's political power in the Russian and international realms, and finally, the insistence that the revival of Tatarstan and the Tatar people's fortunes be accomplished in a resolutely multicultural way that also benefits the ethnic Russian and other non-Russian populations of the republic as well.
Charles J. Halperin discusses the recent works of ethnic Tatar historian Rustem Nabiyev about a “sensitive area of contested history between Russians and Tatars,” namely, the 1380 battle between Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich of Moscow (better known as “Donskoi”) and Emir Mamai of the Golden Horde. Halperin generally finds Nabiyev's critique of the “Russian national school” of historiography persuasive, but warns that Nabiyev's arguments about the superiority of the Golden Horde's economic and military might, and the patent falsity of the traditional narrative of the 1380 battle (which has Donskoi's Russian forces winning), may “provoke ethnic Russian scholars and readers.” However, Halperin concludes that Nabiyev's overall account is more effective as polemic than scholarship. The very fact that Nabiyev publishes and finds an audience for a work that challenges the “ideological, patriotic and religious fantasy” that animates the traditional Russian telling of the events of 1380 demonstrates that the serious effort mounted by the Tatarstani government in recent decades to ensure the production of alternative, Tatar-centric accounts of history continues today.
Similarly, Teresa Wigglesworth-Baker's investigation of the impact of Tatarstan's compulsory Tatar-language instruction law, first put in place in 1997, finds that many ethnic Russian students in Tatarstan have gained competence in the Tatar language, and Tatars and Russians alike consider knowledge of the Tatar language to be useful for conducting business in the republic. Although Russian and English language competence are considered more useful for getting ahead in science and technology, and not enough progress has been made in adapting the Tatar language for use in higher education, the Tatar-language education program, which for now is still in place, has resulted in much more widespread knowledge of Tatar among ethnic Russians in the republic than ever before.
Guzel Yusupova offers a thorough analysis of how Tatarstani elites have attempted to guide the process of Islamic revival in the republic in ways that simultaneously achieve multiple goals: raising the status of ethnic Tatars within Tatarstan (by hosting international Muslim-themed events in the republic), empowering Tatarstan within the Russian Federation (by positioning the republic as the “chief spokesperson” for all the Muslims of Russia and as Russia's “bridge to the Muslim world”), and raising Tatarstan's profile in the international arena (by touting the republic's “peaceful and tolerant” form of “Euro-Islam”). Yusupova notes that Tatarstan's Islamic project has only grown more important as the “official” status of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russian political and social life has increased during Putin's latest presidential term. Yusupova notes that all of these initiatives are undertaken in such a way as to stress the absolute values of inter-confessional and interethnic peace, tolerance, and respect in Tatarstan.
The next two articles address the question of interethnic and multicultural relations in Tatarstan, highlighting the fact that beyond the eponymous Tatars and ethnic Russians, many other ethnic groups reside in the republic as well. Leisan Khalioullina's article examines the phenomenon of ethnic profiling by traffic police in the republic, and provides an interesting perspective on the success or failure of the Tatarstani government's efforts to promote interethnic peace and a common “Tatarstani” civic identity. Khalioullina finds that such a sense of “us-ness” or “we-ness” does exist across Tatars and Russians in Tatarstan, but that this manifests itself most clearly in opposition to the “them” of other ethnic minorities in the republic, namely, people of Central Asian or Caucasian descent.
In the final article, Lilya Nizamova first provides a useful discussion of how the Tatarstan “model” has evolved under the successive Putin regimes, noting that the “new” versions of Tatarstan's sovereignty claims are based on the republic being “an ‘extraordinarily reliable region’ that does not have problems with the federal center” and which seeks only to “diversity and maximize economic benefits” for the whole country. Nizamova focuses on what she calls “pluri-cultural” education in Tatarstan – the effort to improve native language education for all non-Russians in Tatarstan, including groups such as the Mari and Mordvins. Nizamova points out that Tatarstan's success in providing cultural and educational resources to other non-Russians, while strengthening multiculturalism overall in the Russian Federation, has the ironic effect of making it harder to achieve “symmetrical biculturalism” between Tatars and Russians in the republic.
This rich and multifaceted set of articles demonstrates the continued need to supplement dominant narratives about Russian political developments with perspectives from outside of Moscow. Russian revanchism and ethnic Russian resurgence notwithstanding, intriguing and important phenomena continue to evolve in Russia's ethnically diverse republics. Federalism and multiculturalism continue to be significant aspects of Russian political life. With the recent (re)addition of Crimea to this mix, there is more reason than ever to keep our focus on them.