If any Russian region could say no to Moscow in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine, it could be none other than the autonomous republic of Tatarstan. Until the last moment, its institutions have refused to comply with the last requirement of submission to the Kremlin: strip their leader of the title of president.
In the end, the local Parliament has had to give in, but has found a solution to maintain its own identity. The next leader of Tatarstan will be called rais, which in the Arab republics comes to represent the same thing as president, but which also has roots in the Tatar tradition itself.
In Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, they have been saying no to Moscow's attempt to abolish the title of president for years. Since the 1990s, a total of 13 regions (so-called republics) had a president as head of the region. But since Bashkortostan left it in 2015, it only remained in Tatarstan.
Last year, Moscow gave a coup law and decided to legally abolish the title with a new norm, bringing a bill to the State Duma (Lower House) in September to unify the name of the highest civil representative of the regions and call him head. The Kremlin supported the initiative. "Of course there can only be one position of president" in Russia, said his spokesman, Dimitri Peskov.
It was then that the Tatar deputies said their first no. The regional parliament organized a vote to reject the project. "Some provisions of the bill contradict the foundations of Russia's constitutional system as a democratic federal rule of law," defended Albert Jabibullin, who chairs the commission for State Construction in the Tatar Parliament. The Duma then passed the law, leaving Kazan little room for manoeuvre.
However, Tatarstan has wanted to make its disagreement clear. Last week, the deputies again said no, but in parliamentary commission. It was clear that later they would have to accept.
The current president of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnijanov, explained to the deputies on December 23 that he was in favor of the forced change, arguing that opposing it could undermine Russia's unity in the midst of the conflict with Ukraine. Minnijanov is part of United Russia, the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which also has an overwhelming majority in the Tatar Parliament, 82 out of 100 deputies.
Political analysts Mikhail Vinográdov and Vitali Ivanov explained in the Védomosti newspaper that Kazan has tried at the same time to show its opposition to Moscow and avoid public protests. "It was the last attribute of sovereignty that Tatarstan had left," stressed the political scientist Alexei Makarkin.
In the past, Tatarstan has lost other privileges. In 2017, she was forced to abandon the compulsory education of Tatar, her second official language and important vehicle of identity.
Regional deputies have found, however, a way to circumvent the rule of the center. The first regional official will be called the head, as Moscow wants. But you also laugh.
“In the 19th century the Tatars had no state, but they did have self-government in the Tatar settlements. His boss was called rais”, explains Radik Salíkhov, director of the Shigabutdin Marzhani Institute of History, in the KazanFirst medium. At the beginning of the 20th century, Tatar intellectuals attributed to the rais the head of the executive branch of the Government. "It was logical that when Soviet Tatarstan was formed, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Sahib-Garey Said-Galiev was called in the chronicles rais of Tartaria."
Located in the Volga region and with a Muslim majority, Tatarstan was for many the last bastion of Russian federalism. At the same time as in Chechnya, the danger of secession also threatened those lands after the end of the USSR. In 1992 he voted to become independent from Russia, but ultimately remained in the country after reaching a power-sharing deal with Moscow.
Moscow and Kazan reached an agreement for the distribution of powers in 1994. That pact expired in 2017 and the Russian government did not renew it, although the Kremlin agreed that Minnijanov would continue to hold it until 2020. In a third no to Moscow, Tatarstan's parliament has decided that its current president will continue to be called that until the end of his current term, in 2025.
