Moscow decided to destroy the basis of resistance of the peoples of Russia: at the end of November the deputies of the State Council of Tatarstan unanimously and without discussion decided to use educational plans in schools with voluntary study of the Tatar language. This may mean the end of the long struggle of Russia's largest ethnic minority for the right to preserve not only state autonomy, but also the main sign of statehood - the language. Now, according to the prosecutor of the republic Ildus Nafikov, the Tatar language will be studied "voluntarily, on the basis of the written consent of the parents of students within up to 2 hours per week".
Most likely, this means that in the coming decades the Tatar language will suffer the fate of dozens of other languages ??of ethnic minorities that have lost the language of their ancestors. The imperial policy of language assimilation, started 300 years ago, continues. Its main goal, that all the peoples - and their in Russia more than 190 - finally lost their languages ??and spoke only in Russian. Only in this way, according to the Kremlin, one can achieve agreement, or rather, unanimity in adoring his leader and fulfilling his whims.
To the Tatar language and the Tatar people the Kremlin has always had a wary attitude. First, the Tatars in Russia are more than 5 million - after the Russians the most numerous people of the country. Secondly, it is perhaps the most united people of the Russian Federation, possessing a huge cultural and intellectual potential, which has had a significant impact not only on the newly formed people "Russians" (in comparison with other peoples), but also on other peoples of the Volga and the Urals. To a large extent this was facilitated by the historical memory of the Tatars, which preserved not only respect for national heroes and classics of culture, but also determines the mental attitude of the inhabitants of Tatarstan to the imperial center. There is no Tatar who does not know who Ivan the Terrible was, who destroyed the Kazan Khanate and baptized the Tatars by force.
It so happened that after the disintegration of the Golden Horde in the 15th century, the most powerful state was not the Moscow Principality, but the Kazan Khanate, claiming a territory much larger than the present Tatarstan: the border of the Khanate reached the west of the Sura River Basin, the right tributary of the Volga, up to the Ural ridge, in the north - to Vyatka and Permian land, in the south - to Samara Luke. Ivan the Terrible dreamed of expanding his kingdom, already baptizing himself with numerous titles. Destruction of the Kazan Khanate was a difficult task: his grandfather Ivan III started hiking, the grandson continued his attempts. In 1552, Kazan was taken, most of the population was killed, and the city itself - plundered and burnt. It was in memory of the capture of Kazan and the victory over the Kazan Khanate, on the orders of Ivan the Terrible, that the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed was built on Red Square in Moscow.
Russian philologists explain to the man in the street that the Russian proverb "an uninvited guest is worse than a Tatar" is connected with the events of the 13th century, the times of the so-called Mongol-Tatar yoke, when, quoting the site frazbook. ru, "the Russians hated their invaders and therefore they were accustomed to every Tatar who came into the house, to be considered an imperious guest, always uninvited and always unexpected". On the same site, experts for some reason do not explain that in the 13th century there were still no "Russians", and the population was a motley mix of different tribes, among which there were a significant number of Turkic speakers and speakers of Finno-Ugric languages. Russian language then did not exist in nature.
Another historical absurdity is the so-called "Russian written sources," among which "The Lay of Igor's Host" is considered a masterpiece. However, this work is about events of the 12th century of incomprehensible origin and not preserved in its original form. In addition, according to a large researcher Nikolai Baskakov, the "Word" uses a large number of words of Turkic origin. Therefore, the proverb does not reflect reality - in the territory of the future Russia, the Turkic-speaking peoples not only lived, but also became an essential part of the future people, called "Russians".
With the word "Tatar" in the 19th century, there was a political incident: as an ethnonym, that is, the self-name of the people, it exists long ago among the inhabitants of the Volga region, but in the Russian Empire it was customary to call "Tatars" all Turkic-speaking Azerbaijanis, for example, and other Turkic-speaking peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia. But the basis was the same Turkic language, which later became the main language for independent Gagauz languages ??in Moldova or the Yakuts, Tuvinians or Khakas, and several dozen other nations speaking the languages ??of the Turkic language group.
Turkic-speaking tribes occupied a significant part not only of the territory beyond the Urals, but also of Central Russia. It is enough to look at the toponymy, the names of the settlements - Saratov (Sary Tau), Orel (Ayrily), Tula (Tuula). They are of Turkic origin and there are thousands of them on the territory of Central Russia.
If the current Russian patriot were moved by a time machine 300-400 years ago, then, firstly, he would be surprised at the scarcity of the life of the ancestors of Russians. Secondly, he would not have understood a word, since people of that time spoke in the wildest mix of languages ??and dialects, in which Slavic words were minimal, but much - from the vocabulary of Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages.
From the end of the 17th century, the Russian Empire, which had been put together from conquered territories, began to speak on an even more diverse mix, when a large number of words from European languages, primarily Dutch and German, were introduced into the official language of the Muscovites, and in the 18th and 19th centuries also French, Italian and other. But the basis is still Turkic - it is enough to look at the "Russian" names of Tatar origin - Nazarov, Kutuzov, Turgenev, Aksenov, Kamolov, Bazarov, Balashov, Baturin, Ermakov, Zhdanov, Kuprin and several hundred others.
Up to now, in modern Russian language, more than two thousand words of Turkic origin are used, which have come pre-eminent from the Tatar language. Surprisingly, many Russians do not know this, believing that the words arshin, calico, bogatyr, watermelon, balalaika, brothel, bayan, bull, cherry, life, raisins, boar, slob, pencil, caftan, chest, male, jackal, cone , soup and even fabulous Baba Yaga - primordial Russian. And this is not so.
These complex relations between the imperial center and Kazan testified only to one thing: Tatarstan always felt itself a self-sufficient republic, and Moscow was always afraid of this. When Boris Yeltsin delivered a textbook phrase "Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow" on August 6, 1990, speaking in Kazan, he did not expect the Tatars to grin, and in three weeks the Supreme Council of the Tatar ASSR would adopt the Declaration on State Sovereignty. Two years later, on March 21, 1992, there was a referendum on the status of the Republic of Tatarstan. And on November 30, a new Constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan was introduced, declaring it a sovereign state. A coat of arms, a hymn, a flag and a passport were printed.
This went on until Putin appeared in the Kremlin, which began a new process of "collecting Russian lands": on April 19, 2001, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation recognized the provisions on the sovereignty of Tatarstan that do not correspond to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Since that time, the countdown of new relations between the imperial center and the republic, the only one in which the post of the president, and not the "head of the region". There is still preserved the principle of electivity of the head of the republic. The last presidential election was held in 2015, four candidates.
But this was not enough for Putin. It seems that now he decided to strangle the Tatars completely, reducing the level of the Tatar language to the kitchen so that people would not dare to speak out about their statehood, let alone sovereignty. There is another reason that pushes Putin to the crime, a frank mental genocide of almost six million people, if we take into account the Tatar population living in other parts of Russia and in other countries, this is the economy.
Tatarstan ranks 6th in terms of production and is one of the most economically developed regions of Russia: oil is extracted and processed in the republic - 127 deposits are discovered here, including more than 3,000 oil deposits, chemical industry and motor industry, machine building and metalworking. In Tatarstan, the most developed agricultural production in Russia.
Over the past 17 years under Putin, recalcitrant territories have been subject to either hard power or economic leverage. To Tatarstan it is impossible to apply neither that, nor another. Remains old tried and tested imperial method - suppression of national spirit, bases of the nation and culture - language.
So it was practically with all the peoples captured by the Russian Empire, and as an example - Georgia, where during the first occupation, since 1801, Georgian language has been ostracized, as the basis connecting the nation. The Georgians fiercely resisted - half a century later insurrections arose, and in Soviet times, in 1978, all Georgia took to the streets when the Communists wanted to add to the Constitution of the Georgian SSR the second state - Russian language. Will Tatarstan stand out?.
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