Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Hoover Institution Press Publication) by Azade-Ayse Rorlich

Author:Azade-Ayse Rorlich [Rorlich, Azade-Ayse]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2017-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

MAP 5. THE TATAR AUTONOMOUS REPUBLIC: MAIN URBAN CENTERS

The decade that opened with the formation of the Tatar ASSR was dominated by the political waves made by those who attempted to join Communism and nationalism. In the early 1920s, national communism blossomed in Tatar-stan because its seeds had been planted in the fertile soil of jadid reformism, which had thrived on the double catalysts of secularism and nationalism.

11 National Communism and the Tatar ASSR Before World War II

The winged horse charges and the earth shakes

He is a free soul—Dreams and Hopes!

Kanatlï at chaba jir buylatïp—

Azat jan ul-Khiyal häm Ömet!

(Zöl’fät, Sak bull) [Be careful!].)

The Volga Tatars were among the first Muslims to be subjected to communist rule. As such, their conflicts and cooperation with the Soviet authorities established precedents for other Muslim groups and determined the evolution of future attitudes on all sides. The strength of nationalism and its ability to overwhelm and efface the political differences among the Volga Tatars surfaced many times after February 1917 and was to leave an indelible mark on their political life in the decades to come.

The Soviet declarations of the establishment of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic on March 23,1919, and of the Tatar Autonomous Republic on May 27, 1920, washed away the political and administrative foundations of what could have become the Idel-Ural state of the Tatars and the Bashkirs.1 Yet this political reality, despite the brutality of its consequences, or because of them, was partly responsible for the endurance of the dream of a Tatar state. Paradoxically, the dream was nursed by Tatar Communists whose jadid nationalism had been responsible for their own emergence as national Communists who addressed themselves to the complex issues of the relationships between communism and Islam, communism and colonial nations, and communism and peasant societies.

The most articulate spokesman and original thinker of Tatar national communism was Mirsaid Sultangaliev. A jadid teacher by training, and a sincere Communist by way of a rather late conversion to Marxism in November 1917, Sultangaliev had become the most influential Muslim Communist in the hierarchy of the Bolshevik party by 1920. No matter how sincere his conversion, however, it had not occurred at the expense of his belief in the ideals and national aspirations of his people, and on this issue Sultangaliev stated his position clearly: “It is not to sell my nation, to ‘drink its blood’ that I am marching with the Bolsheviks. No!… No!”2

As a leading figure in the Narkomnats, the president of the Muslim Military Collegium, chairman of the Central Muskom, editor of Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei, and a professor at the University of the Peoples of the East, Sultangaliev reached a wide audience. It was through these various channels that he articulated his own original interpretations of the relationship between communism and Islam, of the dynamics of the revolutionary process, and most importantly, of the relationship between social and national revolution in the economically backward countries of the East, which as a rule, had experienced colonial oppression. Sultangaliev argued that, in

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