Publications > Publication
Holding Russians at bay

Tatarstan is peaceful while Chechnya bleeds because its leaders chose compromise over insults.

Of 89 Russian republics and regions, only Tatarstan and Chechnya dared to declare their sovereignty after the break up of the Soviet Union.

Only these two republics refused to sign Moscow's 1992 federal treaty that spelled out the rights of all republics and regions.

Today Chechnya lies in ruins, while Tatarstan is celebrating the first anniversary of the signing of a bilateral treaty with Russia that gives it more sovereign rights than any other internal Russian republic.

This ancient, lowely city on the Volga River 500 miles from Moscow, from which Tatars and Mongols once ruled Russia, sits peacefully under a snowy blanket while Chechnya bleeds.

How did Tatarstan manage to avoid disaster while Chechnya plunged into war? Part of the answer lies in the different characters of the leaders of Tatarstan and Chechnya.

Chechnya's Dzhokhar Dudayev is a general in a heavily armed border republic for whom compromise seems anathema. Tatarstan's President, Mintimer Shaimiev, is a communist turned shrewd and pragmatic nationalist, who understood the limits imposed on peoples like Tatars and Chechens when they live in the shadow of big powers.

"I can tell you that in Tatarstan in 1991 and '92, I went to great nationalist rallies and they called on me to announce independence," Shaimiev told me during an interview this week at a government guest house. "But I knew that complete independence was totally unrealistic, so I braced myself and never once said this word."

He pointed out the window to a green-roofed dacha on the snowy grounds half hidden by pine trees where the dictator Joseph Stalin had died. I shivered and asked Shaimiev if he afraid of ghosts. He laughed and replied that he had no time to worry about ghosts.

Indeed, Shaimiev has been busy. After the breakeup of the Soviet Union, Tatarstan was the first republic to adopt declaration of sovereignty. It held a local referendum in 1992 which overwhelmingly backed its special status, despite immense pressure from Moscow.

While the referendum was going on, Russian troops were massed on Tatarstan's borders. But no invasion took place.

Shaimiev believes that Tatarstan staved off invasion and bloodshed because, unlike Chechnya, it never called for actual secession from the Russian Federation.

Instead, Shaimiev carried on a dialogue with Russian President Boris Yeltsin for nearly three years, finally concluding a bilateral treaty in 1994. The treaty recognizes Tatarstan's constitution and gives the oil-rich republic greater control over its economy, taxes and foreign trade. It also allows it to elect a president, and set cultural policy.

Tatarstan does not have to send its soldiers to serve in Russian conflict zones (although some Tatar conscripts in the Russian army have been sent to Chechnya after first being stationed in the Far East). Tatarstan flies its own flag and has its own airline.

These gains are far less than full independence. But Shaimiev said that by negotiating, Tatarstan "won time and the conflict didn't turn violent". Unlike Chechnya, which tried to win everything, Tatarstan compromised and never gave Moscow an excuse to make war.

When the Tatarstan treaty was signed, Russian Deputy Premier Segrei Shakhrai called Shaimiev the "locomotive" of federal relations and called for a similar treaty to be worked out with Chechnya.

In a tantalizing account of "what might have been," Shaimiev recalled a conversation he had with Yeltsin at "the beginning of 1994." Despite Yeltsin's expressed reluctance to deal directly with Chechen rebel leader, he told Shaimiev he was contemplating such a move: "He (Yeltsin) told me he felt he had to see Dudayev to solve the Chechen conflict. He said there were different opinions about this in the (Russian) Security Council. Still he was ready (to meet Dudayev)."

But, says Shaimiev, about 10 days after this conversation, the Russian media published some very sharp speeches by Dudayev that including direct insults to President Yeltsin.

"When I meet with Yeltsin in the summer," Shaimiev recounted, "I asked why they never met and he said it was not possible while Dudayev was insulting him so."

Shaimiev thinks Chechnya would have been far better of had Dudayev accepted the Tatarstan model. But he doesn't exempt Russia from blame.

He said Russia should have given Chechnya more time, even if Dudayev was recalcitrant. He recalled that it took decades to create the Soviet Union: "Now we are rebuilding society and the Russian state and it takes time."

Shaimiev also regrets that Boris Yeltsin didn't listen to him, or other republic leaders, or the upper or lower house of parlament, all of whom opposed using force in Chechnya." "I see it as a manifestation of a weak point in the Russian constitution, that there is two much power given to the executive," he said.

But the most pressing question is: What lesson Moscow will draw from the Chechnya disaster? Which model will it follow in the future? The Tatarstan model of negotiations with dissatisfied republics or regions, or the Chechnya model of force?

Shakhrai last week praised the process that produced the Tatarstan treaty - painstaking negotiations - but said that there should be no more bilateral treaties, only practical agreements between Moscow and regions or republics to resolve specific economic or political differences.

For Shaimiev, the operative question is what Moscow is willing to do. Will it listen to its regions and autonomous republics and work out the complex arrangements that make a federation function? Or will it act like an empire, a big unitary state? Or will it try finesse the question?

Shaimiev is worried that Russia's solution to trouble some republics might be to split Russia up into large, centrally controlled districts tat cut across ethnic and regional lines. He said ethnic republics, like his own, "would never tolerate this, so these attempts must be stopped".

To Shaimiev, his treaty with Russia should be the model for creating a new, democratic Russia that negotiates the federal structure with its members rather than dictating it from the top. He said Yeltsin assured him in January that the Tatarstan treaty will stand. But is it unlikely to be duplicated.

Tatarstan model or Chechnya model? On that choice, the future of Russia may depend.

(Trudy Rubin's foreign affairs column runs on Wednesdays and Fridays)

By TRUDY RUBIN. "The Philadelphia Inquirer", February 15,1995