In a Russian Republic, ABCs Are Test of Power

A petite fifth-grader with a smooth ponytail and a shy smile, Alysa is a pint-size recruit in the latest Tatar rebellion. Here in the heart of Russia, in the quasi-independent Muslim republic first conquered by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the goal these days is nothing less than the linguistic overthrow of the Moscow overlords. The Cyrillic alphabet thrust on the Tatars in 1939 at the whim of dictator Joseph Stalin is being abandoned in favor of the Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, of the West.

And children like Alysa are the shock troops; 1,200 of them started last month in an experimental program with the new alphabet. Already, the first teachers have been retrained, the first textbooks rewritten. Soon, new signs will go up. Newspapers and magazines will begin the changeover. This fall, all first-graders in the republic of 4 million people - whether Tatar or Russian -- will be required to learn Tatar in an alphabet their parents don't yet know. Within a decade, the Tatar language will be fully "Latinized."

Alphabet politics are not simply a matter of Tatar preference, however. They are also proving to be an unexpected stumbling block for one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's major projects: regaining control over his sprawling country's 89 regions. Already, the alarm bells are sounding 500 miles west of here as politicians in Moscow wake up to what Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov proclaimed Tatarstan's "open step toward separatism." A Russian parliamentary commission flew here this winter to investigate, filing a report that declared the move a "threat to Russia's security."

It was during a visit to Kazan that Russia's previous president, Boris Yeltsin, urged the regions to take all the independence they could handle. But a year ago, Putin came to power vowing to crack down on wayward regions. In breakaway Chechnya, that fight is being waged with guns and mortars; in more accommodationist Tatarstan, with books and letters.

The first region to negotiate semi-autonomous status when Communism collapsed in the early 1990s, Tatarstan has been seen as a test case of presidential power: Could the strong hand of the new czar in Moscow rein in the Tatars once again?

Just two weeks ago, Putin proclaimed victory, saying in his annual speech to the nation that the "period of disintegration of the state" at the hands of the regions "is behind us." But the emerging contours of Putin's influence in Tatarstan suggest he has yet to fully prevail. Instead, Tatarstan's wily survivor of a president, Mintimer Shaimiev, has wheeled and dealed with federal authorities, making his republic not an exhibit in Putin's trophy case but an example of just how hard it is for even an aspiring authoritarian to impose order on Russia while sitting in Moscow.

For every concession Shaimiev has made, he has held firm on another negotiating point, agreeing to send more money to the central government while pointedly embracing pet causes of Tatar nationalists such as the alphabet change. Shaimiev, himself no democrat, recently laid out a new credo for the Putin era: Tatarstan, he said, "does not lay claim to the rights of the federal center but does not intend to renounce its own rights either."

Three weeks ago, he became the first regional leader elected to a third term in the post-Communist era; Putin agreed to change the federal law to allow third terms in a deal timed just for Shaimiev's campaign.

"There's an imperial spirit arising again in Moscow," said Rafael Khakimov, Shaimiev's top counselor. "It's very popular there right now to believe that empire is right, that we must put an end to the republics like Tatarstan. This is our struggle."

In that struggle with Moscow, the alphabet has unexpectedly taken center stage. A decade ago, Turkic language-speaking relatives of the Tatars from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan celebrated their independence from the Soviets by scrapping Cyrillic. But those are separate countries now; Tatarstan remains physically and politically in the center of Russia, an oil-rich land straddling the mighty Volga River.

To Russian nationalists, Tatar nationalists' rejection of their own country's alphabet is an unacceptable affront. To Tatar nationalists, that's exactly the point.

"If the federal authorities are unhappy about the change, then we must be on the right path," declared Robert Minnullin, a Tatar poet who is deputy chairman of the republic's legislature and who wrote the law on jettisoning Cyrillic.

Activists such as Minnullin have dug in. "Since Putin has come to power, we'll have to live under different conditions," he said. "But the main thing is that we cannot concede those positions that we have won over the last 10 years."

Sitting in his office in Kazan's Kremlin, where Shaimiev is rebuilding the mosque destroyed by Ivan the Terrible's troops in 1552, Khakimov described the state of negotiations with the center. The federal bureaucracy has made encroachments, he said, opening a Justice Ministry office "even though we have our own here" and forcing changes in laws to make them conform to the federal constitution.

But Tatarstan refused to shut down the local Ministry of Ecology when ordered, and many of the unconstitutional laws remain in force. Khakimov is openly derisive of one of Putin's most significant changes: the installation of seven new "supergovernors," each delegated to rule over a vast section of the country.

"It's a mistake," Khakimov said. "Then again, I don't have any idea what they're doing. They don't matter here." He is more circumspect about Shaimiev's biggest concession: a new deal with Putin to send more tax money to the federal center.

For years, Tatarstan has kept the bulk of its revenue, sending little more than 20 percent of its tax collections to Moscow. This year, Tatarstan has pledged to pay more than 60 percent, Khakimov said, in exchange for a new federal program to fund road building, the construction of bridges over the Volga and other projects. "In effect," Khakimov said, "we won't lose that much."

It's precisely that dealmaking that has made the matter of the ABCs a political dispute, according to some of Shaimiev's rivals. "It's clear why they came up with the idea," said Ivan Grachev, a reformist member of parliament. "Shaimiev became vulnerable to criticism from nationalists when he accepted new federal rules, and now he has to resort to making steps in their direction."

Ever since Stalin's 1939 decree changing the Tatar alphabet -- and those of all the Soviet Union's Turkic-language speakers - practically overnight, language has been a rallying cry for Tatar nationalists. Communism almost killed off their language, and even today, after almost 10 years of being an official state language in Tatarstan, less than 50 percent of Tatars speak it.

"This has nothing to do with politics; it's simply a matter of culture," said Indus Tagirov, president of the Tatar World Congress. "There are attempts to regard this as separatism, but for us it's a matter of survival."

It's also a matter of history. Today's Tatars are the modern-day remnants of the Golden Horde that ruled Russia in the Middle Ages, an occupation so bitter the Russians are still celebrating its overthrow.

History is such a sensitive subject that the Tatars literally rewrote theirs a few years ago. Now, Tatarstan's schoolchildren read about the kinder, gentler side of Genghis Khan and the underappreciated cultural gifts the Tatars gave to the Russians, such as an efficient postal system, regular census and paper money. But solving Tatarstan's language problem is not as simple as rewriting the history textbooks.

In fact, the Tatars have never really had an alphabet that worked well with the sounds of their language. Back in 922, they cut their first political deal with the alphabet, accepting the Islamic faith as well as the Arabic letters that came with it. For a thousand years, they kept the Arabic alphabet -- even though its paucity of vowels made transliteration of the vowel-heavy Tatar speech difficult.

By the early 20th century, reformers were already calling for the switch to the Latin alphabet. After the Bolsheviks took power, they, too, embraced the idea, looking to separate the new Soviet Union's Muslim subjects from the rest of the Islamic world. In 1927, the change was official: For the first -- but not the last -- time, the Tatar language was written in Latin letters.

Twelve years later, Stalin reversed course again. "It was a forced transition," Tagirov said. Those who dared to write in the wrong alphabet became "enemies of the people" and were sent to Stalin's gulags.

This latest change will be the third for the Tatars in little more than 75 years. Grachev said that in recent polls conducted for him, even Tatar speakers -- as many as three-quarters of them -- are against the switch. But the change is law now. This year alone, Tatarstan will spend about $700,000 on the change. It is expected to cost more than $7 million overall to make the switch.

Places like School No. 95 in Kazan's Privolzhsky region are the real testing grounds for this latest language change. On the playground here, the lingua franca is still Russian. A majority of the school's 1,100 students are ethnic Russian, mirroring the situation in Tatarstan as a whole, where 48 percent of residents are ethnic Russian and just 43 percent Tatar. "We don't have any illusions," said Kim Minnullin, brother of the politician and himself in charge of the commission on Latinization. "Russian remains the language of interethnic communication." But it's not just the 430 ethnic Tatars who will be learning the new alphabet at School No. 95. All students in the republic are required to learn both Tatar and Russian. Already, children in five grades here are trying out the new letters. And it is proving to be a complicated test. "Cyrillic is easier, of course," said 13-year-old Rezeda. The Tatar eighth-grader has just finished reading out loud a poem in the new Latin alphabet textbook. She'd prefer to keep things as they are, but said her teachers have explained the need for the change: "They told us we must preserve our native language, so we have our own letters."

Four Russian seventh-graders next take turns reading aloud - haltingly -- from the first-grade Tatar textbook. All four girls stumble as they go; even the ABCs are difficult for them to pronounce.

Unsettled, Minnullin leaned over to reassure a visitor, "This is a transition period, of course," he said. "It's always harder."