RUSSIA The future of the Tatars in Russia

As pressure mounts from Moscow for the sole “official and patriotic language” – Russian – Tatar intellectuals are debating the ethnic perspectives of their own people and other “minor peoples” within the Federation.

Moscow () – In the debate on the prospects of Russia’s minor peoples, a prominent Tatar-Russian scholar, Robert Nigmatullin, a member of the national council of the World Tatar Congress, spoke on the Intertat portal in an optimistic tone on the subject “Even if the language disappears, the Tatars will never disappear.” His optimistic predictions were answered on Idel.Realii by another expert on federal relations, Kharun Sidorov, who considers “the ethnic prospects of the Tatars and other peoples to be important,” but with a much less positive view.

The thesis of the physicist and oceanologist Nigmatullin, in his dialogue with journalists, compares the survival of the forced “Russian-speaking” Tatars with the fate of peoples such as the Peruvians in Latin America, forced to adopt the Spanish language without completely losing their identity. However, Sidorov points out that “Peruvians are a political rather than an ethnic definition, like Russians more than Tatars. The true indigenous people or “Indians”, a term banned in Peru because it is offensive, try to speak in their original language, while Spanish defines the “mestizos” and “creoles”, mixed peoples who do not preserve historical memory.”

Nigmatullin’s vision seems to lean more towards fusion than towards preserving indigenous traditions. Only “names and surnames, the memory of partial Tatar roots” would remain, quoting Vladimir Putin’s “unofficial” wife, Alina Kabaeva, who during the millennium celebrations in Kazan boasted of her “half-Tatar” origins, despite not knowing a word of Tatar. Some of this will also remain with the president’s children, whose existence has only come to light in recent days.

Sidorov also recalls the experience of Israel, which, with its repatriation agency Sokhnut, brings together all those who have second- or third-generation Jewish ancestors or close relatives, especially spouses, to settle in their homeland. In this case, the aim is to “reabsorb these people into the Jewish ethnic community, restoring knowledge of the language and culture up to citizenship and permanent relocation, or at least regular presence in the country.”

The core of ethnic sociality thus presupposes a basic “integral identity,” which allows for the reabsorption into it of those who have lost it or, indeed, never had it. While this may be the optimistic dimension of Nigmatullin’s vision, for Sidorov and other commentators “the ethnopolitical and ethnocultural reality of present-day Russia does not permit such a positive conclusion. Jews at least have their own sovereign state, while the ambitions of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, Russia’s two Tatar republics, are continually thwarted by the restrictions imposed by Moscow.”

Sidorov points out that even the autonomous regions of a number of countries, such as Catalonia, Quebec or South Tyrol, respect local languages ​​on the same level as the national language, while in Russia there is increasing pressure in favour of the sole “official and patriotic language”, Russian, despite the fact that both the regional and federal constitutions recognise Tatar as a national language on the same level as Russian. Thus, the slogan that “the people do not die with the language” appears as an attempt to save the ethnic spirit by submitting to colonial rule, assigning to the Tatars of Russia the future of “Creole-Russian mestizos”.

Nigmatullin goes so far as to say that “without the Tatars, the Jews, the Caucasians and others, one cannot understand Russia itself,” seen as an “all-encompassing civilization” and not monoethnic, as China can be considered in part, despite having many different nationalities within it. Sidorov insists on comparing Russia “with Peru rather than with China,” seeing it as a return to the colonial policies of the past, when it seemed that after the end of the USSR all peoples had regained consciousness of themselves, inside or outside the Russian Federation.

Photo: Jaimerimummi