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CHAPTER 2 WHAT TATARSTAN LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (1990–1993) REVEAL ABOUT THE UNMAKING OF SOVIET PEOPLE “In a word, the people voiced their opinion quite strongly in the referendum. Let us not give in to those who have sold their souls, to chauvinists or to adventurers!” Letter to the Editor, Vatanym Tatarstan: Alai tügel, bolai ul, April 28, 1993, page 2. These lines, from a letter to the editor written by a Tatar living in Moscow and published in Tatarstan’s Tatar-language former Communist Party newspaper, reveal a passion for Tatarstan sovereignty during its heyday in the early 1990s that the newspapers’ editors and Tatarstan government officials wished to have circulated among readers. Prior to glasnost and perestroika the Tatar- and Russian-language press in Tatarstan was effectively one. Indeed, Tatar-language articles were often translations of pieces published in the Russian-language press. However, by 1990—the year Tatarstan declared sovereignty—Tatar-language letters to the editor evoked an imagined political order based upon a particularly Tatar discursive world. Certainly, differences between Tatar and Russian discursive worlds didn’t suddenly spring into existence in the late 1980s. Tatarspeakers and Russian-speakers constituted different, if overlapping, speech communities prior to the social and political turmoil caused by Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempted reforms. But, by and large, people in Tatarstan and other regions of the Soviet Union shared, or at least thought they shared, discourse in common. Perestroika had negligible political impact.1 However, glasnost— which means “openness”—profoundly affected Soviet order. By encouraging ordinary people to suggest improvements to the Soviet system and to air their dissatisfactions, glasnost opened floodgates of complaint, which—once unleashed—became unstoppable. These complaints often concerned environmental degradation, public health, Stalin-period repressions , religious freedom, and the status of the Soviet Union’s hundreds of recognized national languages and cultures. Tatars in Tatarstan complained of the impending death of Tatar language, the sorry state of Tatar 76 Nation, Language, Islam national culture, and the need to revive Islam. They also took concrete steps to change society. Among other things, these changes resulted in the creation of a new Tatar public sphere that has acted as a catalyst for its own growth, development, and differentiation in ways that could not have been predicted at the outset. The sum of these developments gave rise to an accelerated differentiation in the discursive worlds produced by Tatarstan ’s speech communities, which resulted in the splitting of a single, albeit ethnically diverse, Soviet people into multiple publics. While sovereignty did not endure as a mass movement, many thoughts expressed during those critical years of relative freedom continue to undergird life in Tatarstan. The letters analyzed in this chapter were published in the early 1990s in Tatarstan’s two Communist Party organ newspapers, Vatanym Tatarstan and Respublika Tatarstan, as they came to be called shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, printed in Tatar and Russian, respectively .2 While letters to the editor can’t act as an unmediated barometer of public opinion, they may open the door to understanding what kinds of ideas are floating around in a disjointed and variegated public sphere. Because these letters appeared in Communist Party organ newspapers, the range of this public sphere was constrained by what the political establishment considered fit to print.3 Without a doubt, the letters served government interests by legitimating the existence of certain kinds of public opinion, and perhaps even brought those opinions into existence through presenting readers with ideas they may not have previously encountered.4 Though institutionally equivalent and housed in the same building, the two newspapers do not appeal to equivalent readerships—the Russian -language one tends to be urban, while the Tatar-language readership is predominantly rural. Reflecting a common Soviet division of language domains, during late socialism Tatarstan’s capital city, Kazan, was almost exclusively Russophone, while Tatar language survived in small cities and villages.5 The locations from which writers sent their letters to the two newspapers’ editors reflect this division.6 Additionally, both newspapers served, albeit in unequal measure, as beacons from the homeland for Tatars living beyond Tatarstan’s borders.7 Both newspapers continued to act as government organs into the 21st century—each has a fax machine in its office where directives arrive from the office of the Tatarstan president. This means, among other things, that the papers’ employees depend upon the Tatarstan government for both their salaries and apartments. [18.223.172.252] Project...

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