Abstract: This article explores developments in center-region relations between the Russian federal government and the Republic of Tatarstan, a federal subject of the Russian Federation. I argue that instrumentalist accounts are unable to satisfactorily explain several key moments in Tatarstan’s relations with the federal center, and that a focus on symbolic politics provides important analytical leverage. I examine three such episodes: aborted plans to introduce a Latin script for the Tatar language in 1999, the expiration of treaty-based relations and the assault on the region’s Tatar-language education policy in 2017, and the institution of the presidency – which exists to this day. In all three cases, interest-based explanations alone fail to account for what actually happened, whereas ideational explanations can help explain and interpret regional leaders’ actions. This has important implications for how we understand regional political dynamics in Russia amidst conditions of centralization.
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Drawing upon recent official data on Russian war deaths, I find that ethnic minorities from poor regions feature disproportionately in the official casualty figures. Why is this the case? Using regression analysis, I found that whilst both regional economic poverty and the ethnic minority population were strong and statistically significant predictors of regional war deaths, the effect of ethnicity is much larger — even when controlling for wealth. In other words, poverty alone is unable to account for these disparities. I suggest that there may be an informational logic at work here, insofar as authorities in regular oblasts may be more willing to disclose ethnic minority casualties.
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Policy memo based on a recent 2021 bill “on the unified system of public power” passed in the Russian parliament that requires Tatarstan to liquidate its presidency - itself the only remaining such institution among Russian republics as of 2021.
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