RUSSIA There are fewer and fewer Russian Tatars

The minority has 4.7 million individuals in the country: in 2010 there were 5.3 million. They have also decreased in the regions of origin. Russian ethnicity grows in Tatarstan. The pandemic was used to readjust the statistics less to the liking of the Kremlin. Government: the next data will be kept confidential.

Moscow () – There is a sharp decline in the Tatar population and culture throughout the Russian Federation, explains Idel.Realii in an analysis of the latest census. Tatars in particular seem to be disappearing from Moscow, where in the last 11 years more than 60,000 citizens who were registered as ethnic Tatars have given up defining themselves as such. Even the Volga and Ural regions of origin have “lost” 350 thousand Tatars.

In percentage terms, the most significant decrease is verified in the Siberian Far East, and only in Tatarstan, the official region of the Tatars, does the ethnic group seem to maintain a slightly positive curve. In the Republic of Kazan, for its part, the number of speakers of the Tatar language as their mother tongue has been reduced by 20%, abandoned by more than 400,000 inhabitants of Tatarstan.

According to the 2021 census, the Tatar population in Russia is 4.7 million, and in the last decade it has decreased by about half a million (11.2%). In the previous statistical survey of 2010 there were 5.3 million. It should be considered that in the last census the authorities also included the Crimean Tatars, annexed in 2014, who numbered more than 30,000 people, and therefore the loss is even greater. The mother-tongue Tatars lost more than a million citizens, almost a quarter of the entire ethnos. Only 2.7 million Tatars speak the language, just over half of the total.

Tatars in Tatarstan are also ceasing to speak their language, giving in to the ongoing process of Russification that has become more intense in recent years, especially to avoid separatist propaganda. Even the Russian ethnicity in Tatarstan has grown by 5%, a higher percentage than the Tatar ethnicity. The other smaller towns in the Volga area are also shrinking significantly.

In the Tatar Republic, the obligation to study Tatar in school has been removed, although the possibilities of learning it are still widespread in the educational and cultural sector, unlike in other regions, including its “cousin” Bashkortostan. Only 34% of the citizens of Tatarstan can speak Tatar, compared to 98% of Russian speakers.

The disappearance of the Tatars is evident in the Volga regions close to Tatarstan, where censorship of Tatar culture is most intense to create a buffer zone around Kazan. The main surrounding city, Nizhny Novgorod, has lost more than 40% of the Tatars, reduced to just over 20,000 in a population of 3 million. Similar percentages are revealed in the minor republics, formerly very frequented by the Tatars, such as Mari El, Mordovia, Udmurtia and the Penza region.

Bashkortostan is presented as a particular case, due to the opposition of the population to grant and publish census data. The Bashkirs do not like too rigid ethnic definitions applied to them, starting with the Tatar, which many do not want to recognize despite the obvious physiognomic and linguistic similarity. In total, the Ufa Tatars have decreased by 34.8%, although this reduction is not very evident in the other sociocultural parameters or in the daily life of the Bashkirs. The Tatar-Bashkir language is spoken by about a million people out of a population of 4 million, the second after Russian.

Not only in Moscow, Tatars are also becoming rarer throughout central Russia and in the northwestern Komi and Novgorod regions, while the St. Petersburg Tatar group remains fairly stable at around 30,000 individuals. According to the Tatar ethnologist Damir Iskhakov, “Tatars are excluded from the managerial levels of public institutions, and also from those who organized this census, carried out in a contradictory way during Covid.” The pandemic was used to readjust the statistics that the Kremlin likes the least, and indeed the data from the next census will be kept secret, as already announced in Moscow.