The abolition of compulsory study of the Tatar language, as well as the overall attack of Vladimir Putin on the languages ??of the peoples of Russia, might not seem to be the most important event of his rule in comparison with the adventures of the last few years - from the annexation of the Crimea to attempts to undermine the stability of Western democracies. And, nevertheless, when historians of the future will describe the reasons for the collapse of modern Russian statehood, they will remember about this attack, writes journalist Vitaly Portnikov on the Grani portal.

I will not argue that the Russian people in Russia live well. But the Russian people, at least no one has ever reproached with origin, language, and in non-communist years - with religion. The history of the peoples of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is the history of permanent undeserved humiliation. This is a story of contempt, restrictions on rights, petty nit-picking - and relating to everyone: those who dream that his people get rid of Moscow's power, and those who genuinely want to live in Russia. At the same time, the history of Russia, which several times in the last century ended suicide, does not teach Russian chauvinists. They can repeat.

Fans of conspiracy theories of Russian collapse usually voluptuously list Jewish, Polish, Latvian, Georgian and other foreign names among those who were at the head of the revolutionary parties of the beginning of the last century. Of course, it was a whole foreign legion - from Trotsky to Dzerzhinsky, from Martov to Radek, from Stalin to Peters. But could it be otherwise, if the Russian Empire was built as an organism, rejecting non-Russians. The mockery of the "Pale of Settlement", the constant "experiments" with the languages ??of the peoples of Russia, the prohibitions on teaching, the change of writing, extrusion abroad - all this, coupled with a mediocre policy towards the Russians themselves, could not but lead to an explosion, collapse and the establishment of the dictatorship itself insane from the revolutionary parties.

Then, according to the same scheme, the Soviet Union disintegrated - at first under the guise of Bolshevik "internationalism", and then under the same flags of rampant Russification and the chauvinism that returned to the power corridors. Now the same thing happens with the remnant of the USSR - the Russian Federation. Once again the habitual contempt for "nationalism", the certainty that only a Russian official knows how to live.

And this is manifested not only at the level of Putin. Most recently, journalist Anastasia Mironova in one of the Moscow Internet publications called supporters of preserving the teaching of the languages ??of the peoples of Russia by people from the past, scornfully wrote about "small nations", "small languages" and "small history" - and this is not about wanting to protect Tatars or Buryats from the Russian language, but about the desire to preserve their own native language. And, of course, about Ukraine in this amazing text that was written a hundred years ago, too, was not forgotten: "when Ukraine is told about the transition to Ukrainian, I sometimes wonder if Kiev wants to simply score its citizens in a dark corner. Without Russian Ukrainians will not be able to fully learn. And while they learn English to the level of the second language, they run wild ".

But since there is no way to punish (pardon, civilize) infidel Ukrainians - practice on the Tatars, those are still their own. But the crisis in relations between Moscow and Kazan in the late 80's and early 90's was overcome only through the search for compromises and the new inscription of the Tatarstan elite into the Russian semi-commercial, semi-Chekist nomenklatura. Why, obeying the instinct of Derzhimorda, to break this system of compromises, no one can explain today.

It is clear that Kazan will not now respond to Moscow. Tatars will simply remember this. National minorities show their memory not when the central authority is strong, but when it weakens. The real state remembers that the authorities are not always strong, that at a difficult time, it may need universal support. The state is not a festive toast about the Russian people-winner. But the Russian Federation is only an imitation of the state. In fact, this is an ordinary suicide club.