Постсоветская культурная трансформация: медиа и этнич-ность в Татарстане 1990-х гг ред. по С. А. Ерофеева и Л. П. Низамовой (review)

377 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 For historians, another troubling issue of Khabenskaia’s work is her outdated classification of nationalism as a psychological condition, which ignores all contemporary Western scholarship on nationalism and ethnic identity. Recent works on Tatarstan such as Sergei Kondrashov’s Nationalism and the Drive for Sovereignty in Tatarstan, 1988-92 (2000) or Dmitry P. Gorenburg ’s Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (2003) provide a more rigorous analysis of Tatarstan’s nationalist movements. Political scientists and sociologists , however, should not neglect Khabenskaia’s work, as it provides extensive material on self-identified Tatar nationalists’ understanding of their own political struggle, largely in their own words. Many issues of Tatarstan’s potential independence are laid bare. The reaction of the political nationalists to the “emotional” nationalism of those living outside of Tatarstan, for example, suggests a more ominous future for Tatarstan than Khabenskaia hopes. While she praises Tatarstan for its tolerance of diverse cultures and people, it seems Tatars with an appreciation for their own history and culture may not be among them. Sebastian CWIKLINSKI Постсоветская культурная трансформация: медиа и этнич- ность в Татарстане 1990-х гг. / Под ред. С. А. Ерофеева и Л. П. Низамовой. Казань, 2001. 292 с. ISBN: 5-7464-0998-7. The unique fate of Tatarstan in the post-Soviet era has attracted a fair amount of scholarly interest. Given that political developments have dominated the agenda, scholars have focused on political events and subjects like center-periphery relations, while research on Russian federalism has mainly dwelled on the Tatarstan case. Accordingly, there has not been much research on the cultural aspects of post-Soviet changes in Tatarstan. Only the renewed use of ancient historical discourses has triggered discussion,1 and a lot of gaps remain. The authors of Post-Soviet Cultural Transformation try to fill some of them from a sociological perspective. Prepared by a project at the Center for the Sociology of Culture at Kazan State University, the book seeks to analyze cultural developments in several fields. Its first part is centered on the theoretical framework of the analysis of 1 For discussion of the historiographical disputes in Tatarstan in the 1990s see: Sebastian Cwiklinski. Tatarism vs. bulgarism. “Pervyi spor” v tatarskoi istoriografii //Ab Imperio. 2003. No. 3. Pp. 361-392. 378 Рецензии/Reviews cultural processes: the first two articles focus on theoretical issues and examine the possibility of applying qualitative methods to the analysis of cultural processes in Tatarstan, which is innovative as this is still far from the norm in Russian sociology. The third article sheds some light on a more concrete issue, namely, the connection between language policy and media in Tatarstan. As the article was originally published in English,2 I will content myself with just naming its main subjects: the development of Tatar-language media and the attempts to change the Tatar alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.3 The second part of the book switches to applied analysis: Svetlana Shaikhitdinova examines the ethno-national orientations of leading representatives of Tatarstan’s cultural elite. In free interviews, she sorts out the conditions under which respondents acquire a national identity: apparently, Tatar-language interviewees cling to it more often than Russian-language or bilingual ones,4 whereas the attachment to “national” values varies, depending on the occupational statuses of the respondents within the cultural sector. Alexander Kudriavtsev dwells in his analysis on Tatar music in the 1980s and 1990s. In a theoretical introduction, he asks how (Western) European artists started to develop “national languages” in their artistic expressive discourses: while in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries images like the Turk, the Saracen, and the Italian were used and understood by the public as caricatures, in the nineteenth century the Romanticists started to use and to develop these stereotypes further by integrating folklore elements, and in time they acquired features of a “national language.” From this time on, European artists could and did make use of a repertoire of national items, which consisted mainly of decorative elements shaped by professional and modern composers. As Kudriavtsev states, Soviet nationalities policy was founded on the same assumption that underlay European artistic discourse since the nine2 H. Davis, Ph. Hammond, and L. Nizamova. Media, Language Policy and Cultural Change in Tatarstan. Historic vs. Pragmatic Claims to Nationhood // Nations and Nationalism. 2000. No. 6(2...