Ethnic and Political Nationalism: the Institutional Factors of Tatar Nationalism in the Republics of the Volga-Urals Area

Abstract

Eduard Ponarin — Professor, Chair for Methods and Technologies of Sociological Research, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: ponarin13@gmail.com

Kirill Zhirkov — Senior Research Associate, Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: k.zhirkov@gmail.com

This paper addresses the problem of nationalism, an important factor affecting social and political processes within the Russian Federation. The particular issue analyzed here is the relationship between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism in the Volga-Urals region of Russia. The institutional design of the Russian Federation may affect this relationship; Russia’s ethnic federalism assumes the existence of so-called “titular” and “non-titular” ethnic groups in its autonomous republics. We take the case of ethnic Tatars in the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan to explore the differences in the levels of their nationalist attitudes, as well as in the factors of their development. In the introductory section, we provide an institutional summary of Russia’s current federal design and also highlight various historical factors which could affect it — including the legacy of ideology and practice of solving the “national question” in the Soviet Union. Then we discuss the role of regional separatist movements in post-Soviet Russian politics, with an emphasis on the utility of ethnic and civic nationalism for the elite groups in autonomous republics as an instrument to achieve certain political goals. A whole section of this paper is specifically devoted to the explanation of developments in the Tatar national movement after 1991, the role of political Islam in this process, and the policies of the administration of Tatarstan in their relationships with nationalist activist groups.

We choose the social dominance theory as the main theoretical framework of our research as it fits very well to describe the situation of unequal access to social and economic resources based on membership in ethnic group. In our case, this logic is applied to people of the same ethnic origin, Tatars, who are the titular group in Tatarstan and — at the same time — are considered a non-titular population in the neighboring republic of Bashkortostan. Drawing on this theory, we formulate a number of hypotheses with respect to possible predictors of nationalist attitudes among Tatars within the two republics which are then tested by means of quantitative analysis.

For the empirical part of our analysis, we used data from mass surveys we carried out in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in 2005 and 2011; these data have not yet been published. The main method of our statistical analysis is structural equation modeling; it allows testing of relatively complicated analytical models closely reflecting the theoretical picture of hypothesized associations. Our results indicate a rather stable model of Tatar nationalism in the Volga-Urals region, which, however, can be divided into an ethnic and a political component. The spread of nationalist attitudes among Tatars in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan is generally moderate, but it depends quite substantially on the formulation of the respective question. For instance, more than 70% of our respondents condemn interethnic marriages (which is one of our indicators of ethnic nationalism) whereas only slightly more than 10% of them are ready to fight for their republic’s independence (an indicator of political nationalism). At the same time, we did not find one single factor responsible for the support for nationalist views among the respondents; instead, the magnitude and significance of the explanatory variables in our model differ substantially between the two republics, as well as between the two time points. In the concluding part of the paper, we claim that the potential for radical developments within the national movement of Tatars in the Volga-Urals region is relatively low.