Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan's Sovereignty Movement

Introduction

Introduction “In Germany I have a son. He has been living there with his children for two years,” the old woman explained to me in Russian, smiling broadly. She turned her head back towards the postal clerk sitting behind her window. The clerk, a Tatar woman in her twenties, took the pens and pencils out of the old woman’s package and passed them back to her through the narrow opening. “Only printed matter,” the clerk pronounced grimly from her seated position. The old woman bent over, putting her face close to the opening, and tried to catch the clerk’s eye. She beseeched her, “Just one? It’s good. It’s ours. It’s Soviet.” The postal clerk kept her eyes averted and shook her head. Field notes, Kazan’s Central Post Office, 14 August 2000 This exchange demonstrates one of the central paradoxes of living in postSoviet Russia, which is that while Soviet bureaucratic institutions are still in place, Soviet ideology has lost its persuasive appeal. The highly regulated bureaucracies the Soviet government created—the postal system, mass transit, banking, long distance trains, the passport regime—still operate according to strict Soviet-period rules. However, Soviet things possess little perceived merit and are especially unimportant to people of the postal clerk’s generation, who came of age during perestroika. Calling something “good” because it is “ours” and “Soviet” can no longer change circumstances or be employed to bend rigid rules towards felicitous outcomes .1 This book is about the unmaking of Soviet people. It takes as its example a movement for political sovereignty (1990–2000) in the Russian autonomous republic of Tatarstan and examines its continuing social effects . Accepting the local interpretation that the post-Soviet revival of Tatar—a Turkic language—and Tatar culture in Tatarstan constitute part of a decolonization process, it illustrates how Tatar-speakers’ reality has changed since Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of Communist Party of the Soviet Union, initiated his liberalizing reforms— perestroika or restructuring (1986–2001) and glasnost or openness (1985– 1990).2 It accepts as a truism that when colonized peoples engage in processes of decolonization, they draw their initial demands—which largely 2 Introduction concern reified aspects of their culture, such as national language, institutionalized religion, and genres of art—from within colonial frames of reference.3 Decolonization changes their subjective identities in ways they do not expect, with consequences they do not intend, illustrating Marx’s precept that men (and women) cannot make history just as they please, haunted as they are by the spirits of the past, and reinforcing Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, according to which every word is populated by someone else’s intentions.4 Literature on the failed “transition” of socialist states demonstrates that, while the inhabitants of formerly socialist states can unmake previous social and political orders, they have been unable to transform their societies into the free market, capitalist states imagined by western advocates of neoliberalism.5 Thus, although the Tatarstan sovereignty movement neutralized much of the Russian cultural hegemony once prevalent in the Republic of Tatarstan, it was nonetheless constrained by social and political structures that prevented it from realizing its nation-building ambitions . Since 1986, Tatarstan’s Tatar-speakers have undergone a revolutionary transformation that has caused them to view the world in ways profoundly different from Russian-speakers. Communication within Tatar social networks means that this transformation has affected even Tatars who don’t have functional ability in the Tatar language, as well as Tatars who live outside Tatarstan. While nation-building failed to produce a sovereign state, it has had the unintended consequence of estranging Tatarspeaking Tatars from their Russian-speaking neighbors, colleagues, friends, and relatives. Drawing upon terminology anthropologist Richard Handler used to analyze nationalism in Quebec, I describe the loosely defined group of sovereignty activists seeking to create change in Tatarstan and more broadly in the Russian Federation as “nation-builders.”6 Perestroika provided Tatar-speakers an opportunity to openly oppose what they perceived as institutionalized discrimination against their national language and culture and to advocate for its end. The Soviet Union’s subsequent collapse gave them a chance to create a society for their children more equitable than the one in which they grew up. Tatarstan’s nation-builders are educators, politicians, students, journalists , artists, and intellectuals. They constitute the Tatar élite of Kazan. Many are former communists, but like other ex-Soviets, decolonization has fundamentally transformed them in ways they didn’t expect...