Shaimiev presents himself, credibly, as the father of the Tatar father-land, an enlightened ruler. In Moscow he is credited with having prevented major bloodshed at the time of the first post-Soviet Chechen uprising, possibly even the secession of the oil-rich republic. He did this with a combination of financial appeasement, remarkable powers of persuasion and a firm hand. Therefore, he will be irreplaceable for a long time to come. It does help that Tatarstan produces a neat 18 per cent of Russian oil. The reserves untapped so far are estimated to last for at least another thirty years or so. It hurts local pride and egotism, of course, that the Moscow overlord demands close to 90 per cent of the revenue.
The Caucasus and the Chechen capital Grozny – named after Ivan Grozny, also known as Ivan the Terrible – are far away to the south, almost a thousand kilometres, even further away than Moscow to the west. But ideas travel fast. The old Orthodox archbishop and the young Mufti, the latter educated in Medina, assured their visitors at a joint meeting in the mosque that everything was all right, that people were listening to each other, that there was no risk of Islamist contagion and that everybody was happy. The Americans, however, much to the chagrin of the local dignitaries, had captured some young Tatars in Afghanistan who reemerged at Guantánamo Bay, America’s notorious prison where Islamist fighters are kept in legal limbo. Caution was advised.
The number of mosques throughout Tatarstan, in Soviet times fewer than a dozen, has grown to many hundreds. The Tatar language, closely related to Turkish, has come out of hiding and is now the second official language.
More mosques
The green night-sleeper train from Kazan to Moscow’s Kazan station takes eight hours, slowly rumbling over creaking tracks, while matrons in green uniforms serve tea and vodka in ample quantities. From Moscow the east and south are seen with ill-concealed concern. Even in its reduced post-Soviet form Russia, with about 20 million Muslims, still has a much higher percentage of Muslim population than Germany with three million Turks, but comes close to France with an estimated number of seven million, mostly of Arab origin.
In Chechnya there is a sort of peace, uneasy and unpredictable. The local president Ramzan Kadyrov, an opaque character if ever there was one, for the time being collaborates with the Russians, their special forces and administrators, but has also seen to it that women wear the veil, that a mosque of enormous proportions is being built, and that Moscow does not interfere too much. Nobody can tell what his designs may be on the day after tomorrow. Muscovites do not like to imagine what Russia’s Muslim population is dreaming about for its destiny in the years and decades to come. The Muslim future will be decided less under the crosses and eagles of Moscow and more through what happens in the lands under the rising crescent. Meanwhile, everything is quiet in and around Kazan.
Putin has never made a secret of his belief that the decline and fall of the late Soviet Union was an unmitigated disaster of the twentieth century, and four out of five Russians seem to be of the same opinion. But, on reflection, the demise of the vast Soviet Union can also be seen as a kind of liberation for Russia and the Russians. Much as France, in restrospect, has to thank General de Gaulle for cutting the umbilical cord to Algeria in 1962, the Russians got rid, without major revolts and uprisings, of many millions of Muslims living in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. When those republics left the sinking ship in 1991, they took with them vast amounts of mineral resources, imperial glories and military installations like the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – but they also put an end to the Soviet illusion of a peaceful multi-racial and multi-religious empire, happy and at peace with itself. The wars of succession within or between those newly invented states were cruel, notably between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The surgical separation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the Georgian republic – not without a little help from neighbouring Russia – was mercifully brief. It became a frozen conflict on the dividing line between Russia and Georgia – only to unfreeze in the brief brutal war of August 2008.
Shedding what Rudyard Kipling in the heyday of British imperialism had called the ‘white man’s burden’ was a blessing in disguise for the overextended motherland. The Soviet Union took its leave from history, quite unexpectedly, not with a bang but with a whimper. The wars over Chechnya and along the Northern Caucasus could have been the rule, but have been the exception – so far. There may be disasters waiting to happen, in neighbouring Ingushetia or multi-national Daghestan, for example. But so far they have failed to materialize.
Things could indeed have gone very wrong, certainly at a time of Islamic reawakening all over Asia, and especially along the southern borders of Russia, defined only haphazardly by tsarist generals and, following the reconquest by the Red Army’s commissars after 1920, by the new Soviet rulers. What they imposed upon the vanquished was a mental map designed by communist ideology and Russian expansionism.
‘My home is not the house and the street, my home is the Soviet Union’ – a favourite song of the Sixties that still remains popular. Soviet man could not replace ordinary people, and Soviet ideology could not wipe out the longing for nationhood, the tribe, the clan. Indeed, throughout the Central Asian republics as much as in Ukraine it was never forgotten, until the end of the Soviet Union, that they had been the first nations to be victimized. The brutality of the civil war continued in the korenizacija, i.e. suppressing traditional elites and creating new ones from local red commissars. As a matter of course, the traditions of nomad people had to be broken. This civilizing ‘mission’ put an end to centuries or indeed millennia of ethnic tradition.
The Soviet inheritance
While under the tsars the people of the steppe had been largely left out of central control, the Caucasus mountains were too important to be left to themselves or the designs of local tribes. Protest was born together with Russian rule, and the Soviets inherited a legacy of bitterness and rebellion. The Chechen people never forgot the endless wars they had been subjected to through three centuries. When the German Wehrmacht approached in 1942 they finally hoped to be redeemed from Soviet rule, and in 1944 they paid a horrendous price, being shipped in open wagons into the Kazak steppe, the survivors to be brought back only under Khrushchev in the 1950s. Georgians in many ways shared their fate. Not even the existence of a Georgian socialist party could bridge the gulf; the socialists of Georgia happened to be firebrand nationalists, or like Stalin and Beria; the bolsheviks from Georgia, the worst executioners.
The seventy years of Soviet rule, however, at least kept ethnic tensions under an iron lid. Even before the Soviet Union finally dissolved, the nations around the Caucasus, sensing the impending end, did not wait for the exodus but started their own wars of the Soviet succession. What happened throughout most of Yugoslavia after 1989 had its close parallel when Soviet rule collapsed in the south. While vast areas were redistributed, ‘ethnic cleansing’ accentuated the horror and the butchery. To the present day most of the conflicts have not found a lasting answer. The natives of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Abkhazia, Ossetia and many others recall their founding myths and claim all the land that they remember. At worst, mass murder was the answer, at best frozen conflicts.