1 CONTENTS ABOUT AUTHORS 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4 INTRODUCTION 10 THE REPUBLIC OF TATARSTAN 15 I. POLITICAL ELITE 15 1. Vertical power structure 19 2. Governance model during the period of the President M. Shaimiev 20 3. Governance model during the period of the President R. Minnikhanov 22 4. Security forces as part of a consolidated project 27 5. Export of elites 28 II. PRESERVATION OF ETHNO-CULTURAL IDENTITY 30 1.The Tatar national movement 30 2. The Russian national movement 34 3. Language policy in Tatarstan 37 4. Results of post-Soviet language policy 47 5. Conclusion 50 THE REPUBLIC OF DAGESTAN 51 I. DAGESTAN ELITES AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT 51 1. Birth of «clans» 53 2. Adaptation to the growing influence of Moscow 56 3. Mukhu Aliev: attempt to be equidistant from clans 58 4. Elite and the Caucasus Emirate 62 5. Return of the «levashintsy» and attempt at a civil dialogue 64 6. First attempt to eliminate clans 66 II. «EXTERNAL GOVERNANCE» 70 III. PRESERVATION OF ETHNO-CULTURAL IDENTITY 79 1. National movements and conflicts 79 2. Preservation of national languages 82 3. Conclusion 91 FINAL CONCLUSIONS 93 2 ABOUT AUTHORS Dr. Ekaterina SOKIRIANSKAIA is the founder and director at Conflict analysis and prevention center. From 2011 to 2017, she served as International Crisis Group’s Russia/North Caucasus Project Director, supervising the organisation’s research and advocacy in the region. From 2008-2011, Sokirianskaia established and supervised the work of Human rights Center Memorial’s regional offices in Kabardino-Balkariya and Dagestan. Before that, from 2003-2008 Sokirianskaia was permanently based in Ingushetia and Chechnya and worked as a researcher and projects director for Memorial and as an assistant professor at Grozny State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Central European University and has authored and co- authored numerous articles and reports on security, human rights and conflict in the North Caucasus and Russia. Dr. Ekaterina KHODZHAEVA holds a kandidatsky degree in sociology, she is an academic researcher at the Institute for the Rule of law at the European University in St Petersburg. She was born in 1976 in Kazan, graduated from sociology department of Kazan State University, in 2003 defended her kandidatsky dissertation there. Prior to 2013 she had worked at Kazan National Research Technical University, and implemented a number of research projects on ethnic and religious identities in Tatarstan, as well as on the issues related to the application of law. She worked on this report as an independent researcher, without affiliation to any institution. Denis SOKOLOV is the senior advisor at CSIS, formerly senior academic researcher at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. In the last 10 years he has been researching rural communities in the North Caucasus, informal economy and migration, forming of trans-border, ethnic, and religious ties. His current main research area is Dagestan’s jamaats and their migration networks. 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia assumed the federal form of government. The choice was due to its vast territories, multiethnic society, pre-existing territorial divisions, and, most importantly, strong centrifugal forces and ethnic separatism. Under the 1993 Constitution, ethnic republics got their statehood attributes, such as their own Constitutions, parliaments, Presidents (later renamed as heads of republics), and Supreme Courts. They were allowed to tailor their regional government bodies to the needs of their population. Federalism as a system of interdependence of various government levels requires alignment of interests, mutual adaptation, and balance seeking, often through tough negotiations, on the ongoing basis. Institutional and legislative flexibilities allow tuning the institutes and political practices to accommodate the changing needs and conditions in the federal centre and regions. Advanced multi-party system, the independent Constitutional Court and genuine political competition are crucial for the federal relations development. However, democratic processes failed to gain momentum in Russia. The weakness of the federalism in Russia in the 1990s also resulted from the weakness of its federal centre. When Vladimir Putin came to power and the federal centre started to grow stronger rapidly, Russia had a chance to build well-balanced federal relations based on “strong federal centre — strong regions” principle. And yet, Russia missed this opportunity. Instead of further building up the federation, the new Russian administration gradually stripped the regions of their sovereignty and formed a hyper-centralised system of government. Since Vladimir Putin’s third term in the presidential office, the federal authorities have been clearly seeking to further unify regions and minimise the federative features of ethnic republics. They have been increasingly pursuing assimilative policy, including decreasing regional components in school curriculums and passing amendments to the Law on Education that rendered previously mandatory regional language studies optional. The new “vertical of power” has brought under its sway not only financially-dependant elites of the poorer, socially deprived regions, but also the authorities of the leading regions (with Chechnya being an exception from rules). Regional elites have been reluctant to defend the sovereignty of their republics being aware of the fact that this could end their career and personal wealth. We have analysed the cases of Tatarstan, one of the most prosperous ethnic republics, and Dagestan, one of the poorer and socially deprived regions, to illustrate the transformation and the present state of the relations between the federal centre and the regions in today’s Russia. Republic of Tatarstan In the late Soviet era, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic sought to be recognised as the union republic. During the political changes that accompanied the USSR collapse, it managed to obtain economic and political sovereignty within Russia and become the only region that had a separate Treaty on Mutual Delegation of Authority (1994) signed with the Russian Federation. Then political leader and the first president of Tatarstan Mintimer Shaimiev was an influential political figure at the federal level, and his power within Tatarstan was nearly unlimited. He had built an authoritarian government model with non-alternative 4 elections, government-controlled mass media and marginalised opposition long before the federal authorities managed to do the same. Political and business elites in Tatarstan consolidated the former Communist party bureaucracy and executives of large enterprises and partially co-opted moderate nationalist and democratic opposition. Under Shaimiev’s administration, the political elite consisted of people from rural areas recruited for their origin, family relations or nepotic reasons. Later, under Rustam Minnikhanov’s leadership, upward social mobility has been enabled thus creating some career opportunities for the mid-level officials and other social groups. Large businesses, mostly oil, have been controlled by the close-knit political and economic elite, hence the government micromanagement in many industries in Tatarstan. This also creates a specific environment for the relations between the Kremlin and Tatarstan when private interests of the republican elite often factor in significantly to the negotiations on the new treaty conditions for Tatarstan. Many analysts believe that the political elite was guaranteed the immunity of their personal assets in exchange for their acquiescence which resulted in Tatarstan easily and rapidly losing its sovereignty since the mid-2000s and its political elite eagerly following the new federal rules. Since the 2010s, the government model in Tatarstan has been focusing on developing modern bureaucratic culture, on one hand, and on innovative economy and foreign policy success, on the other. Among the Russian regions, Tatarstan is one of the leaders in social and economic development, science and technology sector, and in the investment climate. With Tatarstan being a federal budget donor, Minnikhanov has managed to secure the inflow of financial resources back from the federal level to Tatarstan and, by doing so, gained the support of the local population and elites. This makes him one of the leaders in the Russian administrative and bureaucratic system. Therefore, although Tatarstan’s independence decreased significantly, the federal centre assigns a notable role to Tatarstan and its president in the domestic and foreign policy agenda. Presence of the members of Tatarstan’s government bureaucracy and business elite in the federal government bodies in Moscow and in other regions considerably contributes to that and reinforces Tatarstan’s network of influence. Ethnocultural and language issues remain a hot button after losing the sovereignty. For the outside audiences, Tatarstan poses itself as a Muslim republic; however, in its internal policies it promotes multicultural agenda highlighting the centuries-long co-existence of Islam and Orthodox Christianity and Tatar and Russian cultures. Yet, ethnic tensions continue. Since the 1990s, the revival of Tatar culture and language has been key to restoring and maintaining their status that declined in the Russian Empire and especially during the Soviet era. On the one hand, it helped to eliminate the stigmatisation of the Tatar