Introduction
In several basic respects, the Volga Tatars and the
Chechens have much in common. Both Tatars and Chechens have religious
traditions typical of “northern Islam” – that is, they belong to the
Khanafi school of Sunni Islam, embrace a form of “popular” Islam
combining Moslem law (Sharia) with local customary law (adat), and are strongly influenced by Sufi brotherhoods (Islam
1998). Both Chechens and the majority of Volga Tatars were incorporated
into the expanding empire of the tsars against their will as a result
of military conquest. The suffering and humiliation of both peoples
under the tsarist regime led many of their secular intellectuals to
support the Bolsheviks, and it was these individuals who constituted
new indigenous political elites in the early Soviet years. For both
peoples, the Stalin period brought the repression of their new elites
and the horrors of forcible collectivization, but also a certain
measure of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization, with oil
extraction playing an important role in both cases. Finally, the Volga
Tatars and the Chechens occupied similar positions on the second rung
of the formal hierarchy of Soviet peoples. That is, each was the
titular people of an autonomous republic – the Volga Tatars of the
Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (TASSR), less formally
referred to as Tataria, and the Chechens of the Chechen-Ingush
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (CIASSR), also known as
Checheno-Ingushetia.1
Despite these important similarities, the outcome of
the post-Soviet transition has been very different for the two peoples.
In Chechnya, the transition brought to power the radical separatist
regime of General Jokhar Dudayev, whose confrontation with Moscow
culminated in the massive assault that the federal military forces
launched at the end of 1994. In Tataria, by contrast, the late-Soviet
political establishment succeeded, under the leadership of Mintimer
Shaimiev, in retaining power in its hands throughout, and eventually
secured, in the form of the bilateral treaty of February 15, 1994,
Moscow’s recognition of the region’s right to broad autonomy.
How are such sharply divergent outcomes to be
explained? There are various ways in which one might attempt to answer
a question of this kind. On the one hand, a historical determinist
might compare the long-term historical experience of the Volga Tatars
and the Chechens, starting with their pre-conquest societies and the
impact that the tsarist conquest had upon them and ending with the
effects of developments in the Soviet period. On the other hand, a
scholar inclined to place more stress on the roles played by
contingency and by human agency might undertake a comparative
examination of the temporal sequence of political events during the
period of the post-Soviet transition, paying special attention to the
key decisions made by the principal actors.
In this study I use both methods. Section 1
approaches the question from a long-term historical viewpoint, focusing
on the impact upon the Volga Tatars and the Chechens of tsarist
conquest and then of the Soviet experience taken as a whole. Section 2
outlines the most important political developments that occurred in
Tataria and Chechnya between 1985 and 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev was
in power. Section 3 examines what happened in the crucial half-year
from August 1991 to January 1992, the period that saw the final
collapse of the Soviet Union. Section 4 analyzes developments during
the post-Soviet transition up to 1994. In the concluding section, I
review the key factors that affected the respective outcomes.
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Stephen D. Shenfield is currently an independent scholar and translator based in Providence, RI (USA). E-mail address:
sshenfield@verizon.net
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The interviews on which this study was partly based
were conducted jointly with P. Terrence Hopmann, Professor of Political
Science and director of the Program on Global Security at the Watson
Institute. Special thanks are due to Nail Moukhariamov for organizing
our visit to Kazan as well as for his intellectual contribution.
** P. Terrence Hopmann, Dominique Arel (then at the
Watson Institute, now chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of
Ottawa), and Judith Hin (then at the University of Amsterdam). The
project was funded mainly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Arel
investigated the evolution of the conflict situations in Crimea and
Transdniestria. Hin focusd mainly on the evolution of the conflict over
Ajaria in Georgia.
