In New Russia, Tatars Plot Revolution - Capitalism
KAZAN, Russia, Spring 2000 -- Every Thursday evening, members of the December 16 Club slip past bank guards and scurry up a stairway to a secret meeting place.
Inside, under the eaves of the bank building, these well-heeled entrepreneurs stoke up the fire, puff cigars, and ponder how to infiltrate the regime with their daring ideology - capitalism.
That's still a tough task here in Tatarstan, a region 500 miles east of Moscow and about three times that of Massachusetts.
For the past ten years, Russia has been, at least nominally a capitalist country. But in Tatarstan bureaucrats control huge sectors of the market, from crude oil to butter. They are not above sending police, sirens blaring, to halt trucks trying to export food from Tartarstan to other parts of Russian.
Nineteen months after squad cars stopped his load of powdered milk, a club member, Marsel Shamsutdinov, was still irate. "Can you imagine? That was my milk!"
Technically, the police roadblock was against Russian law. But so are a lot of things in Tatarstan, where Moscow has granted local officials extraordinary latitude.
This is a situation that the Russian president-elect, Vladimir Putin, has vowed to change.
In Tatarstan, business owners can be fined if they violate state price controls, or even if they insult the president, Mintimer Shaimiyev. In Tatarstan, mayors are not elected, as in most of Russia, but are hand-picked by Shaimiyev.
Shaimiyev is not alone in Russia. He is one of about a dozen regional leaders who amassed enormous power under the former Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin. Because of various deals that regional leaders reached with Yeltsin, the country resembles a patchwork of fiefdoms with widely varying laws, tax systems, and records on human rights and democracy.
But Putin, campaigning last month in Kazan, Tatarstan's capital, vowed to make the regions conform to federal law.
Now, people are watching Tatarstan to see if Putin has the power, and the will, to follow through.
The region's 1.8 million ethnic Tatars, whose ancestors ruled Russia for two centuries before Ivan the Terrible quashed them, have played a key role in more recent events, too. In 1990, Tatarstan, like Chechnya, declared sovereignty.
Shaimiyev essentially used Chechnya's separatist conflict to win more power for his region. He promised to calm separatist feelings in Tatarstan, where the Tatars, predominantly Muslim and making up 48 percent of the population, felt that their language and culture had long been slighted.
In return, Yeltsin allowed Tatarstan to hold onto half its tax revenues and to control its oil reserves.
Shaimiyev says he is using that power to make Tatarstan's transition to free markets and elections slower and less painful than in the rest of Russia. His critics say he has pulled off something even more impressive: making the rest of Russia, with all its problems, look like a haven for business and democracy.
"It's my money, but they control everything - it's Soviet capitalism!" said Andrei Tatyanchikov, leader of the small band of Tatar and ethnic Russian business people who founded the December 16 Club on that date last year.
With $350,000 pitched in by Eric Hake, a retired fireworks dealer from Bangor, Maine, Tat yanchikov, 36, built a tiny milk-products factory in a Tatar village.
But it can function only about one day of three. The reason, Tatyanchikov said, is that collective farms are afraid to sell him milk - even though he pays higher prices, and in cash. Their directors sell to the state-run milk distributor, who pays in butter and tractor parts.
Enforcing election law, Tatyanchikov said, is the key. Local mayors appoint the heads of collective farms. If mayors were elected, he reasoned, maybe they would name directors who would act in farmers' interests. So he heads up the local branch of the Union of Rightist Forces, a pro-capitalist party that backed Putin for president.
Also counting on Putin is a pro-democracy group that joined communists and Tatar nationalists in a hunger strike for election reform last summer in Kazan's Freedom Square. The group endorsed Putin, mainly because they hope he will investigate allegations of election-rigging in Tatarstan.
So does Gabdullah, the imam at Kazan's Haymarket mosque. Like many Tatars, he resents that top posts have gone to Shaimiyev's friends or auto-racing buddies of Shaimiyev's son. "We had this rosy dream of sovereignty," Gabdullah said. "But it turned out to be sovereignty just for Shaimiyev."
In an interview, Shaimiyev heard out such criticism with patience. He pointed to the relatively high living standard that oil and tax revenues have brought. He said he will expand elections and free markets when the people are ready.
Shaimiyev had originally opposed Putin, but he changed his view after December, when Putin's victory looked certain. Shaimiyev delivered 68 percent of the Tatarstan vote in elections last month, way higher than the 52 percent Putin had won nationwide.
Shaimiyev quickly pledged to give up his biggest privilege, Tatarstan's special tax status, if Moscow pays for more services. He insisted that Putin would not be able to make any more changes without his support - and that Putin might not really be so concerned about issues such as local elections.
How such debates are resolved across Russia will determine the country's future, said Midkhat Farukshin, a Shaimiyev critic who is a political scientist at Kazan State University.
Yet Farukshin voiced fear that Tatarstan would get lost in the shuffle. He isn't holding his breath for Putin to push harder on elections and free markets here - particularly if Tatarstan turns over its taxes to Moscow.
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