Tatarstan

Where the Volga meets the Kama

Tatarstan lies in the middle Volga basin, around the point where the Kama, the Volga’s biggest tributary, joins it. Most of it is rolling forest-steppe on black earth.^[1] Oil has been pumped there since 1943, and trucks are built at Naberezhnye Chelny.^[1]

The Tatars are a Turkic people who settled here in the mid-13th century with the Mongols of the Golden Horde. When the Horde broke up, the Khanate of Kazan became its northernmost state, until Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan in 1552 and Russian settlement began.^[1] Tatars are Russia’s largest national minority, and many live outside Tatarstan.^[2]

“All the autonomy you can handle”

The Soviet Tatar republic was formed in 1920.^[1] In August 1990 Boris Yeltsin told Russia’s autonomous republics to take “all the autonomy you can handle”, and later that month Tatarstan’s parliament declared it a full Soviet republic, equal to Russia itself.^[2]

In March 1992 a referendum asked whether Tatarstan was “a sovereign state and a subject of international law” building relations with Russia on the basis of equal treaties. Its president, Mintimer Shaimiev, said it did not want to leave Russia but wanted a treaty with Moscow.^[2] That year every Russian region except Tatarstan and Chechnya signed agreements with Moscow on Russia’s federal structure.^[4]

“Do you agree that Tatarstan is a sovereign state and a subject of international law that builds relations with Russia and other republics and states on the basis of equal treaties?”^[2]

The 1994 treaty

In February 1994 Tatarstan and Russia signed a treaty dividing their powers: 15 areas for Tatarstan, 17 for Moscow and 22 shared. Foreign, defence and monetary policy stayed with Moscow, but Tatarstan could build ties with foreign states, had tax and budget powers, and owned its natural resources.^[2] It had its own laws and its own republic citizenship alongside Russian citizenship.^[4][2]

The deal gave Tatarstan more autonomy than any other Russian republic, and 45 more regions later signed treaties of their own.^[2][4]

Taken back

After Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the regions’ special privileges were removed one by one. In 2002 Tatarstan’s parliament began rewriting its constitution to call the republic a “full subject of the Russian Federation”.^[4][2] By 2007 Putin had renegotiated Tatarstan’s treaty, leaving little more than the right to add a page in Tatar to Russian passports.^[4] When it expired on 24 July 2017 it was not renewed, and Tatarstan, the last region with such a treaty, lost its special status.^[4]

A federal law then required every republic’s leader to be called “head” rather than “president”. Tatarstan’s parliament first rejected it in 2021, but in January 2023 it gave in. From 6 February 2023 Rustam Minnikhanov, the last regional president in Russia, became the rais, or head.^[3]