The Republic of Tatarstan: Reduced to a Common Denominator?

Abstract

For over twenty-five years, from 1992 to 2017, Tatarstan claimed a special place among Russian regions. But its luck changed in late 2016, when a string of banks started to fail. One of the first to fail, in December 2016, was the public joint-stock company Tatfondbank, the second largest bank in the republic, which was headed by Ildar Khalikov, the prime minister of Tatarstan. The second most significant event in the republic’s political life was the termination of a contract on the delimitation of powers with the federal center. This agreement was signed in 2007 for a term of ten years. The ruling elite hoped the agreement would be extended when it expired in the summer of 2017, but their hopes were in vain. In the summer and fall of 2017, a “language crisis” broke out in the republic, after Vladimir Putin stated that no one should be forced to study non-native languages. It is possible that the regional authorities did not initially believe that the federal center seriously intended to force them to change parity in the teaching of the Tatar and Russian languages. But after the procurator’s office started conducting pointed checks of the republic’s schools, even the most stubborn were forced to comply: now in most secondary schools the Tatar language is only taught for two hours a week (sometimes an additional hour is added for the study of Tatar literature) and only with the written consent of parents. Minister of Education and Science of Tatarstan Engel Fattakhov resigned. The online newspaper Business Online (which, as far as we can determine, has close ties to one of Tatarstan’s sub-elite groups) made the case that there was an “undeclared hybrid war” being waged by “federal clans” against Tatarstan and that the goal of this war was to “pillage the republic.” Officials rushed to distance themselves from these statements: “ . . . I don’t