The unique fate of Tatarstan in the post-Soviet era has attracted a fair amount of scholarly interest. Given that political developments have dominated the agenda, scholars have focused on political events and subjects like center-periphery relations, while research on Russian federalism has mainly dwelled on the Tatarstan case.
Accordingly, there has not been much research on the cultural aspects of post-Soviet changes in Tatarstan. Only the renewed use of ancient historical discourses has triggered discussion,^[1] and a lot of gaps remain. The authors of Post-Soviet Cultural Transformation try to fill some of them from a sociological perspective. Prepared by a project at the Center for the Sociology of Culture at Kazan State University, the book seeks to analyze cultural developments in several fields.
Its first part is centered on the theoretical framework of the analysis of cultural processes: the first two articles focus on theoretical issues and examine the possibility of applying qualitative methods to the analysis of cultural processes in Tatarstan, which is innovative as this is still far from the norm in Russian sociology. The third article sheds some light on a more concrete issue, namely, the connection between language policy and media in Tatarstan. As the article was originally published in English,^[2] I will content myself with just naming its main subjects: the development of Tatar-language media and the attempts to change the Tatar alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.^[3]
The second part of the book switches to applied analysis: Svetlana Shaikhitdinova examines the ethno-national orientations of leading representatives of Tatarstan’s cultural elite. In free interviews, she sorts out the conditions under which respondents acquire a national identity: apparently, Tatar-language interviewees cling to it more often than Russian-language or bilingual ones,^[4] whereas the attachment to “national” values varies, depending on the occupational statuses of the respondents within the cultural sector.
Alexander Kudriavtsev dwells in his analysis on Tatar music in the 1980s and 1990s. In a theoretical introduction, he asks how (Western) European artists started to develop “national languages” in their artistic expressive discourses: while in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries images like the Turk, the Saracen, and the Italian were used and understood by the public as caricatures, in the nineteenth century the Romanticists started to use and to develop these stereotypes further by integrating folklore elements, and in time they acquired features of a “national language.” From this time on, European artists could and did make use of a repertoire of national items, which consisted mainly of decorative elements shaped by professional and modern composers. As Kudriavtsev states, Soviet nationalities policy was founded on the same assumption that underlay European artistic discourse since the nineteenth century: specific “national artistic languages” really do exist. The Soviet formula that cultures be “national in their form, but socialist in their content” referred directly to this assumption. The growth of a national Tatar musical tradition in the 1990s was built upon this new academically supported concept, and it was marked by the development of a musical language independent from the applied music forms that had dominated earlier.
Yet parallel to this, an all-European development in the arts since the beginning of the twentieth century began to matter: composers started to liberate themselves from “national languages” in their artistic expression – a development that was observed with mistrust by the Soviet authorities and condemned as “formalism.” As Kudriavtsev maintains, these two developments – the question of developing and preserving the national language and the opposite tendency to overcome it – could still be observed in Tatar cultural life in the 1990s. To support his assumption, he gives the example of two festivals held in Kazan in 1992 and 1993: while the Festival of Tatar and Japanese music in 1992 had the typical features of a national platform and focused almost entirely on the classical and folkloristic forms of national culture, the chamber music festival Europe-Asia, which was held in 1993 and again in 1997, looked more like a Western European cultural workshop, and obviously the latter development was beginning to dominate. In the final analysis, Kudriavtsev concludes, one might observe the “death of the national” in the modern arts.
Mikhail Rudenko investigates the development of new FM radio stations in Kazan, which have to navigate between commercial and artistic interests. Right from the beginning of commercial broadcasting in Tatarstan in the early 1990s, the development of Kazan radio stations quickly followed the course of commercial stations in other countries, but within a few years began to adapt themselves to the specific conditions in Tatarstan. First, it was necessary to take into account the importance of commercial interests – the audience had to be chosen according to the possibility of attracting as many advertisers as possible. Not surprisingly, all the radio stations officially state that they have and prefer a financially powerful audience, although the real picture looks different. The second aspect Rudenko dwells on is the question of how the broadcasters relate to “national issues”: while in the first years broadcasters could play international pop music without taking “national” (i.e. Russian and/or Tatar) music into account, they then became aware of the listeners’ wish to hear (as some broadcasters put it) Soviet heritage. “Music from Russia” comprises both Russian and Tatar traditions. Thus broadcasters have had to take the bicultural situation of Tatarstan into account: even Russkoe Radio (Russian Radio), which Rudenko places at the forefront of Russian cultural nationalism in Tatarstan, has a special Tatarstan news feature. In the end Rudenko concludes that FM radio stations might be regarded not only as a means to satisfy the cultural needs of the audience under market conditions, but also as a way to develop civil society.
The third part of the book consists of Lilia Nizamova’s lengthy case study on the World Tatar Congresses (WTC) and the coverage they received in the mass media. On the one hand, Nizamova confines herself to quantitative methods characterized by the editors of the book themselves as traditional and somehow old-fashioned; still her detailed analysis goes far beyond quantitative methodology. As she compares the reaction of the mass media to the first and second congresses, the reader can trace the development of the WTC over five years. Nizamova demonstrates that the representation in the media depended heavily on political and social developments not only in Tatarstan itself, but also in Russia, especially the relationship between Moscow and Tatarstan. In her conclusion, Nizamova refers to three major developments within the WTC. First, she observes its central role in the development of trans-regional and even trans-national Tatar and pan-Turkic solidarities. The claim to a central role in establishing these relationships was fostered by the organization of a Turkological conference during the first congress.^[5] Apart from this, the continued presentation of Azerbaijanis, Crimean Tatars, and Bashkirs as “brother peoples” and the idea of switching to the Latin alphabet may be regarded as indicators of the WTC’s wish to unite with the Turkic world outside Tatarstan. Secondly, the WTC was a catalyst in making Tatarstan an actor on the international stage. Both President Shaimiev’s address to the UN and persistent attempts to underline Tatarstan’s economic and political successes sought to enhance Tatarstan’s position in the world. The third development Nizamova observes concerns Tatarstan’s reconciliatory attitude toward the Russian leadership in Moscow, which for example found its expression in Tatarstan’s participation in the festivities of Moscow’s 850th anniversary. Underlying all these tendencies, concludes Nizamova, was the idea of Eurasianism, which was actively promoted by the Tatar elite in the course of the 1990s.
Post-Soviet Cultural Transformation might be evaluated in a twofold perspective: on the one hand, it is confined to the applied study of cultural developments in just one region in Russia, but, on the other hand, the theoretical approaches go far beyond the presented case studies. As the editors themselves state in the English-language summary, “issues of cultural creativity, ethnic identity, political change and conceptualisation of culture and media […] have implications for the study of culture and media on a wider scale.” Furthermore, the book demonstrates the importance and usefulness of investigating those areas of cultural production that usually do not get studied: even research on seemingly marginal issues like broadcasting may shed light on the development of ethnicity discourses in transitional societies.
Application of the suggested methods might be transferred toward an analysis of the representation of the “national” in Tatar fictional literature. In addition, sociologists with a special interest in Tatarstan are provided with interesting material for further research, as the book’s appendices offer detailed data drawn from a survey on the ethno-national identity of the population. The book may receive its due interest among scholars of the transformation processes that encompass not only the territory of the former Soviet Union, but also other parts of the world.