CIAO DATE: 08/07

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2006

 

Russia's Islamic Challenge
Eduard Ponarin and Irina Kouznetsova-Morenko

 

Excerpt

Eduard Ponarin is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European University in St. Petersburg.

Irina Kouznetsova-Morenko is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology at Kazan State Medical University.

Two great global dramas—the international struggle against radical Islam and President Vladimir Putin’s strategies for consolidating control in the Russian Federation—are being played out in a place few Westerners have heard of: the autonomous ethnic republic of Tatarstan. With a population of nearly 4 million people, just over half of whom are Muslim ethnic Tatars, it could easily stay under the radar of non-specialists. However, those interested in either of the great global dramas or concerned about the possible threat of ethnic uprisings to the cohesion of the Russian Federation would do well to examine further this tiny republic at the heart of modern Russia’s ideological and geopolitical concerns.

Tatarstan was at the forefront of nationalist mobilization in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Soviet Union came crashing down. From 1990 to 1993, against the background of political rivalries in Moscow (first between Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, then between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament), the republic’s leadership enjoyed virtual independence. It consolidated its position vis-à-vis the federal government to win extraordinary concessions in a power-sharing treaty between the republic and the federal center. The republic’s leadership retained a substantial share of federal taxes for the local budget and ensured that local laws could sometimes supercede federal law. Internally, it privileged those who were ethnically Tatar and proficient in the Tatar language. For instance, until recently, three-quarters of members of the local legislature (gossovet) were ethnic Tatars, even though Tatars formed barely a majority of the republic’s population. During Putin’s tenure, these powers have been slowly but surely eroded. The republic’s laws that contradicted federal law have been abolished, fiscal discipline has been enforced, and the ethnic composition of the legislaturehas been revised in the Moscow headquarters of the ruling party, United Russia.

In fact, the federal center has regained the ground lost to several ethnic republics a dozen years before—Tatarstan being just one of them. While it is quite clear why Russian federal leaders would want to make these changes, it is not immediately obvious how they could do so without encountering substantial resistance from either the republic’s government or the popular leaders of the Tatar nationalist movement. This paper uses the example of Tatarstan to account for the ease with which Moscow has been able to consolidate control. It also examines the history of Islamic renaissance in the North Caucasus and considers the prospects of politicization of Islam in Tatarstan.

Stage One: A game of nationalism and religious authority

In the late 1980s, as the Soviet grip on freedom of speech and political organization was loosening, nationally aware Tatars—and similar groups in autonomous republics such as Chechnya, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia—mobilized to raise the status of the republic and their native culture. Their efforts benefited from the rivalry between Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, in the period between 1989 and 1991. After the Russian declaration of sovereignty on 12 June 1990, Tatarstan tried to elevate its status from that of an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation to that of a union republic within the Soviet Union, which would provide it with greater autonomy and even the possibility of post-Soviet independence. In 1990, in the context of this power struggle, Yeltsin suggested to the leaders of Tatarstan that they take as much independence as possible, keeping in mind that if that meant secession from Russia, the “decision will be final.”1 After the 1991 collapse of the USSR (when Gorbachev had been ousted from power) and until late 1993, Yeltsin still had his hands full as he struggled with the Russian parliament, and was not particularly concerned with the autonomy of other former republics.

Before the conclusion of a power-sharing treaty with Moscow on 15 February 1994, Tatarstan enjoyed virtual independence, which the republic’s government (under the leadership of the experienced Communist bureaucrat Mintemir Shaimiev) used to consolidate its position vis-à-vis Moscow. President Shaimiev played a subtle game with the popular nationalist movement. On the one hand, he used it as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Moscow over a power-sharing treaty to win more concessions by presenting himself as a nationalist leader. On the other hand, he had the vivid warning of Chechnya, where the leaders of the nationalist movement ousted and replaced old Communist elite such as himself.2 Eventually, Shaimiev was able to subdue and marginalize the nationalist movement and secure his grip on political power in the republic. Yet the status of the republic had been elevated; its standing started to resemble that of the union republics within the former USSR—all of which became independent upon the union’s collapse in December 1991...