The case of the inventory of the Ministry of Interior of Tatarstan, religious schoolgirls and families in the republic has rightly caused a wide resonance in the Muslim community. But only a few dared to think about what all this could lead to…
Let’s recall that last week Muslim human rights activists received a document distributed to schools instructing their management to collect information about children whose families adhere to Islamic norms. The Ministry of Interior of Tatarstan and the press service of the President of Tatarstan did not deny the authenticity of this document, but stated that it was the «personal initiative of a certain employee».
The Muslim community, as always, rightly perceived what happened as another episode in the routine of state-sponsored Islamophobia in Russia. However, some Tatar commentators with a long historical memory and understanding of the processes taking place in the republic, in Russia, and around it, raised much more radical questions.
Those who know how the collapse of the USSR and the inter-ethnic massacres on its fringes began know that in some cases they were preceded by the compilation of similar lists of undesirable nationalities by government authorities, which were then handed over to pogromists supervised by special services.
It is no secret that the question of preserving or liquidating Tatarstan has been on the agenda for a long time. But the key issue is not the preservation of the name and symbolic attributes of the Republic of Tatarstan — for example, in China there is also formally the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but no one needs to tell anyone today about the situation of the Uyghurs there.
The key is to preserve Tatarstan as a republic — the stronghold of the largest Muslim population in Russia, which stands in the way of the «Russian world» of the Russian Orthodox Church. And from this point of view, neutralizing the religiously observant part of the Tatars, which today is essentially the core of the Tatar ethnicity and an obstacle to its final assimilation, can be the key to solving the «Tatar question».
If this layer is removed, the «secular Tatars» will not be a problem, especially in view of the development of the «Orthodox Tatar» project, whose transfer to the territory of the republic is clearly planned by its initiators. In other words, formally Tatarstan can still be preserved, but its actual content will be «Russian world-oriented»: Russian Orthodox, Russian-speaking, secular Tatars, and Orthodox Tatars.
In such a case, religiously observant Muslims can either be sent to re-education camps, following the Chinese Uighur model, or simply «evacuated» outside the republic’s major cities under the pretext of «terrorism prevention» and «security enforcement,» or alternatively in the conditions of «wartime» that Putin’s Russia is currently balancing on the brink of.
Of course, all this may seem like unscientific fiction and fear-mongering. But on the other hand, let’s ask ourselves: how many Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Crimean Tatars would have believed that they would be deported by the «native Soviet authorities»? Or how many Crimean Tatars would have believed in 2013 if they had been told that just one year later Crimea would be taken over by «polite people» and repressed against Muslims, their expulsion from the peninsula would begin, and it would be actively populated by settlers from the Russian mainland?