Window on Eurasia

Is Kazan Playing the Religious Card Back Against Moscow?

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 28, 2006 – Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiyev says his
government will provide funds for the reconstruction of an Old Believer
Church in Kazan, a step many Tatars and Russians are certain to view as
Kazan’s response to increasing Russian Orthodox efforts to play up
distinctions between the Kryashens and Muslim Tatars.

After meeting Metropolitan Kornilii, head of the Old Believer Church in
the Russian Federation, Shaimiyev said that his government will provide
assistance to the reconstruction of the Old Believer cathedral in Kazan
in advance of its centennial in 2009, “Vremya i den’gi” reports

[http://www.e-vid.ru/print.jsp?id=24153].

The Old Believer community had hoped to restore two churches in Kazan
in advance of the millenium celebration of the Tatar capital, but they
lacked the funds to do so. Consequently, they have turned directly to
Shaimiyev for help. And he has met them more than half way.

“We have definite moral obligations,” the Tatarstan president said,
noting that the leadership of the Russian Old Believer Church has firm
“roots in Kazan.” Both Kornelii and Andrian, his predecessor as
head of that branch of Christianity, served in the Kazan-Vyatka eparchate
before their elevation to leadership of the church.

Shaimiyev suggested that what he was doing simply reflected the fact
that “everything that in the new conditions of the development of
society is directed to the service of the people and the strengtehning
of mutual understanding and tolerance is something we welcome.”

But few Tatars and even fewer Russians are likely to view his actions
as purely a matter of charity. Instead, they – and especially the Muslim
leadership in Tatarstan and the hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate of
the Russian Orthodox Church with which the Old Believers remain at odds
– are certain to see this contribution as a political act.

For the last decade, the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox
Church have sought to promote the independent status of the Kryashens,
who most people in Tatarstan view as Christian Tatars but who
themselves with Moscow’s support argue are a distinct nationality.

The Russian government has taken this step as part of its effort to
minimize the size of the Kazan Tatar community, the second largest
nationality in the Russian Federation and one that now forms a majority
of the population in Tatarstan if the Kryashens are included within it
but doesn’t if they are treated separately.

And the Moscow Patriarchate has played up the Kryashen issue for at
least two reasons. On the one hand, the Kryashens are a symbol of the
Church’s special role in projecting the power of the Russian state
and the Russian nation over non-Russian groups like the Tatars.

On the other, this Christian community is routinely pointed to by
hierarchs of the Patriarchate as well as by Russian Orthodox lay
leaders as definitive evidence that Orthodox Christianity is attracting Muslims
to its fold rather than losing members to the Islamic community.

Given that recent history, Shaimiyev’s action will almost certainly
be viewed in Tatarstan as a defense of Muslim and Tatar interests against
the challenges posed by Moscow and Russian Orthodoxy and in Moscow as
an indirect attack on the Patriarchate and the Kremlin.

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