Window on Eurasia: Who is Trying to Destabilize Tatarstan and Why?
Staunton, December 3 – Developments in Tatarstan and the way they are being reported in the Russian media raise the most troubling of questions: Who is trying to destabilize that Middle Volga republic and toward what ends? None of the answers that have been suggested so far are reassuring.
The most disturbing are suggestions that, as RISI’s Rais Suleymanov has long insisted, “Tatarstan is being transformed into Chechnya” (http://haqqin.az/news/13683) and that, in the words of the Society of Russian Culture of Tatarstan, “the Wahhabis have declared war on Orthodoxy” (regnum.ru/news/fd-volga/1739212.html).
But others reports are almost as distressing: Tatarstan’s economic situation is deteriorating, prompting questions about its leaders (regnum.ru/news/polit/1739774.html), and the situation with regard to ethnic Russian institutions there is so dire that the Cossacks have promised to guard churches (http://www.kp.ru/online/news/1600109/).