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CHAPTER 4. Cultural Difference and Political Ideologies
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CHAPTER 4 CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES “Before, there was one language—the Russian language. Before, there was Soviet history. Now what kind of history is there?” Äminä xanym, Kazan, 8 June 1998 Äminä xanym is a working-class käräshen (Christian) Tatar pensioner married to a Muslim. She gave up speaking Tatar in early adulthood in part because her son used to chide her for “saying curse words”—a Russian speech genre taboo for women. Her statement above reflects attitudes common among Tatarstan people and inhabitants of provincial Russia. She misses the Soviet days when there was stability and enough to eat. She is angry at Americans for ruining her life and she hates the shitbag democrats [srannye demokraty] in the Russian government for their inability to provide for the people. Äminä xanym’s statement reveals that, for many former Soviets, Russian is the Soviet language. Moreover, her words lay bare how language and history are intricately intertwined as symbolic repositories of meaning integral to how people understand their national identities. They demonstrate that even working-class ex-Soviets are self-reflexive about this relationship and cognizant of the fact that they look to these icons of national identity for clues to understanding their place in the world. Äminä xanym sees no use for Tatar national politics, viewing them as chicanery that unnecessarily alienates Russians. She supported Vladimir Putin because she believed his iron-fistedness would bring social order and return Russia’s dignity. From her working-class perspective, Äminä xanym’s obduracy is as logical as it is prevalent. Attitudes like hers were precisely what the Tatarstan government would have had to change for sovereignty to enjoy enduring popularity. In 1998, when I arrived in Kazan, sovereignty was generally unpopular among Russian-speakers. Its lack of popularity was part of a general mood of cynicism in Russia resulting from the 1997 economic collapse, in which large numbers of people suddenly lost their carefully accumulated 144 Nation, Language, Islam savings. Russian-speakers expressed their discontent with Tatarstan nation -building variously: by speaking over Tatar-language activities, as with the Russian woman who sabotaged the interview mentioned in Chapter 1, by welcoming Putin’s ascension to power for the “order” it would bring, by employing orientalist tropes to depict Muslims as authoritarian or simple-minded, or through passive aggressive behaviors, such as not forwarding subscription requests for Tatar-language publications. At best, Russian-speakers have a complicated relationship to Tatar cultural difference . On the one hand, out of a kind of imperialist politeness they often overlook any dissimilarity from themselves, unless discussing the magnanimity of Tatar hospitality. On the other, they can sometimes assert that Muslims engage in the worst kinds of barbaric behavior. Even if Russian-speakers had wholeheartedly embraced Tatarstan sovereignty and everything it entailed, it couldn’t have succeeded, for the simple reason that Tatarstan is part of the Russian Federation and hence, victim to the imperial arbitrariness of Russia’s rule. For Russia to release Tatarstan a general breakdown in the country’s infrastructure involving widespread violence would have to occur. Having observed with their own eyes the raw discord and life-taking hostilities that overwhelmed numerous other ex-Soviet regions during the USSR’s disintegration, Tatarstan people, with the exception of a few extremists, only wish to lessen the chaos that they and their neighbors endure. In spite of the futility of attaining independence—apparent since Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiev signed a power-sharing treaty with Boris Yeltsin in 1994—Tatar nation-builders have persisted in trying to advance their claims to Lenin’s principle of self-determination, slippery in meaning even in the 1920s. This chapter concerns Tatarstan efforts to build a nation in the absence of a state. It addresses the question of what Tatar nation-builders consider the essential ingredients of the nation, as it is variously defined, and points out the inherent problems in implementing sovereignty. The groundwork for addressing this question emerges from an exploration of the particularly Tatar thought systems that inform Tatar national ideologies. This exploration begins by revisiting the question of cultural difference, touched upon in Chapter 1. As their migration stories demonstrate, Tatars often view the world radically differently from how Russian monolinguals see it. This difference is not just a product of knowing a language other than Russian or the exponentially increased dimensionality in the perceived world that bilingualism affords. It is a question of culture—of the ways in which shared [3.236...