Window on Eurasia: Is Tatarstan Going to Become the next Ukraine?

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 1 – On this, the 23^rd anniversary of the day on which Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly to become an independent state, a Marxist analyst is asking whether the Republic of Tatarstan, now an autonomous formation within the Russian Federation, is on its way to becoming a second Ukraine or a second Scotland.

 

            In an essay on Forum-MSK.org, Sergey Gupalo says that December 1, 1991, was a key date in the disintegration of the USSR but notes that “the process of the collapse of the USSR did not begin or end then.” It had roots in earlier Soviet policies, and it is continuing thanks to those of the Kremlin now (forum-msk.org/material/region/10601961.html).

 

            According to Gupalo who writes regularly about ethnic issues from a Marxist perspective, the collapse of the USSR began with Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20^th CPSU Congress in 1956. That both undermined the authority of “bureaucratic socialism” and buried “delayed action mines under the idea of socialism in general.”

 

            In 1991, part of those mines exploded and with them the USSR and its “so-called sphere of geopolitical influence.” But not all the mines went off then, and some of them are about to explode now because of the state capitalist approach of Vladimir Putin which is not in a position to deal with the sharpening of ethnic issues in the capitalist world.

 

            The “highly developed multi-national countries of Western Europe,” Gupalo says, are simultaneously pursuing supra-national integration projects and facing sub-national challenges from separatists be they Scotland in Great Britain, Catalonia and Basque in Spain, and “in prospect” Bavaria in Germany.

 

            Putin is in the same position as his Western counterparts: he is pursuing supra-national integration projects even as he faces increasing separatist challenges from within, challenges that he is simply not able to cope with in an adequate way, according to the analyst.

 

            “Tatarstan,” Gupalo writes, “is one of the knotty points of the approaching objective disintegration of the part of the USSR still legally regarded as not having fallen apart – the Russian Federation.” 

 

            In the early 1990s, he points out, that Middle Volga republic “almost became one of the variants of Chechnya.” There was a massive growth of Tatar nationalism, and there were not especially clever efforts by the federal center “to cut the Gordian know of problems in that region by force.”

 

            Fortunately, he continues, cooler heads prevailed and things did not get out of hand. But now, “given the growth in the inadequacy of various parts” of the elite, the situation in Tatarstan and elsewhere is approaching again a revolutionary one. The only thing missing so far is the subjective pre-condition of effective leadership in the non-Russian areas.

 

            But there is every reason to think it will emerge given the economic crisis in which the republics as well as the Russian Federation as a whole find themselves and given the inability of Moscow under Putin to take the kind of decisions that would prevent or at least delay another round of disintegration.

 

            Gupalo suggests that only “the development of the forces of a new socialism” will be able to prevent Tatarstan from following the path of Ukraine, but he provides no indication of where such “forces” might come from and thus no reason to expect that the challenge Kazan presents Moscow is going to do anything but grow.