Tatarstan: Adjusting to life in Putin's Russia

Abstract

A little-noted but interesting aspect of the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 was Vladimir Putin's government's attempt to enlist officials from the Republic of Tatarstan to smooth the transition of Crimea back to Russian rule. It makes sense — the Crimean and Volga Tatars are ethnic, linguistic, and religious kin, and both trace their history of statehood back to the Golden Horde successor khanates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Crimean Khanate maintained its independence far longer than Kazan was able to; while the defeat of Kazan in 1552 marked the beginning of the expansion of the modern Russian Empire under Ivan IV, the Crimean Khanate retained some form of autonomy until nearly the end of the eighteenth century. During the ensuing years, the fortunes of the two peoples and their states reversed yet again; Tatarstan emerged from Soviet rule as a powerful actor determined to make the new Russian Federation truly a federal state in practice as well as on paper (in part by invoking the heritage of the Kazan Khanate). In contrast the Crimean Tatars, never having recovered demographically or politically from their forced exile to Central Asia by Stalin during World War II, struggled to establish some form of cultural and political autonomy as part of a newly independent Ukraine.