Kazan Gateway

05 Chapter 04 T (Eng):13 Chapter OJ 8/9/06 13:58 Page 71 CHAPTER 4 KAZAN GATEWAY For a city consists in men, and not in walls nor in ships empty of men. Nicias (c. 470–413 BC) Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) rom the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia always presented two Ffaces to the outside world, which corresponded to the culture and way of life of her two capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg. Depending on circumstances, the historical emphasis shifted from one to the other, which in turn engendered a certain sense of rivalry between these two great cities. Thus, Moscow, today, is now perceived as the Russian state capital of power and wealth, whereas St Petersburg, the northern capital, is acknowledged as Russia’s capital of cultural enlightenment and reformist traditions. At the onset of the third millennium of Russian history, however, it is the city of Kazan that increasingly is being called the third, Oriental capital of Russia. Historically, it was, of course, the ancient Russian gateway to the East, yet since the 1990s it has become a new, ever more widening gateway to the less evident, but immensely important multi-ethnic reality of Russian life. Try as I must to remain neutral in assessing the Tatarstan model in the tran- sitional phase of her centuries-long history, I am bound to say it is particularly difficult for me to offer a truly dispassionate view of Kazan’s history. This is partly because I am myself a Kazanian – an example of the flesh and blood of this city, the significance of which for Russian and world history is much higher and considerably deeper than it is usually presumed. Certainly, however, it is much less to do with me as a person, than with realities of history. In my conscious life, I have witnessed only half a century of the millen- nial life of Kazan, but even that has been enough to realize her extraordinary capacity for change, whilst retaining the inner core of her traditional values, and immense creative drive enabling her to survive the vicissitudes of history and address the challenges of the future. I recently wrote a book which traces the story of Kazan as a city with a heart and soul of her own.1 Her heart is, of course, the ancient Kazan Kremlin, yet her soul is, in my view, the soul of an emancipated, modest, hard-working, 05 Chapter 04 T (Eng):13 Chapter OJ 8/9/06 13:58 Page 72 72 TATARSTAN: A ‘CAN-DO’ CULTURE compassionate, beautiful, and at the same time naturally imperious and proud Tatar woman, whose common sense is always there when it comes to keeping peace in the family. The true story of Kazan may be an unexpected eye-opener for anyone seeking to understand the history of Russia. In fact, Kazan’s standing in Russian history is best described with the suggestion that, given other circumstances, she could have become the capital of Russia rather than Moscow – an assumption, which is actually not so far-fetched. Indeed, Kazan was first identified in the middle of the tenth century as a trading post on the Kazanka river, close to its confluence with the Volga, and soon became a bulwark against the persistent Viking drive down the medieval Great Volga Waterway. During the eleventh and twelth centuries Kazan became a northern frontier town of Volga Bulgaria – a prosperous and peaceful Islamic polity located on the borders of present-day Tatarstan from the ninth until the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, when, as we have seen, it fell prey to the Mongol onslaught from the Far East. The Turkic tribes of the Volga Bulgars, whose direct progeny Kazan Tatars are, built a great civilization which is easily discernible in the cultural and economic features of the Kazan Tatar nation, and there is a bitter irony of history insofar as the Mongol assault, which ruined the growing Volga Bulgar economic and cultural dominance in the region, subse- quently came to be called the Tatar invasion in both Russian and foreign annals and chronicles. Be that as it may, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Kazan, having embraced the flow of refugees from the burnt-down and destroyed Volga Bulgar cities, became the capital of a separate princedom within the framework of the Golden Horde. Her favourable geopolitical location made Kazan a rightful heir to the Volga Bulgaria markets and, after becoming in the middle of the fifteenth century the capital of the Kazan khanate, Kazan soon prospered economically and culturally, thus becoming a formidable political rival and economic competitor to the growing Moscow princedom. With this continuing economic and political rivalry, at the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the historical fate of today’s Russia long hung in the balance, but was finally shifted towards Moscow after the bloody conquest of Kazan in 1552. History has no ‘ifs’, but in the middle of the sixteenth century Kazan was indeed much larger and more economically prosperous than Moscow, and the influence of the Kazan khanate reached much further to the east and south of today’s Russian Federation than Moscow’s influence to the north and west of it. However, with the conquest of Kazan, the Great Duke of Muscovy assumed the crown of Kazan khans and, with it, the kingly title and status of the Russian tsar. Thus, Kazan and its khanate had formed the historical nucleus of the Russian empire and today’s Russian Federation. Despite being called ‘the Gateway to the Orient’ by its conqueror Ivan the Terrible, and then by a succession of Russian emperors, including Peter the Great and Katherine the Great in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth and twentienth centuries Kazan was reduced to the status of a Russian provincial town, even if during the Soviet period it bore the not-so-meaningful title of ‘the capital of the Tatar.

Load more