After ten years of intense conflict with the federal centre, Chechnya remains one of the most intractable problems for Russia. Various ideas have been advanced for its solution, some of which draw on comparisons between the rebellious republic and Tatarstan, another republic of the Russian Federation that once proclaimed its desire for independence but has now considerably tempered its demands. Such comparisons are usually based on a number of incidents during 1991–2, when tensions between Tatarstan and the federal centre ran high. During the same period, the media reported that ethnic relations within Tatarstan had also deteriorated considerably. On this basis a number of authors have argued that there are grounds for drawing direct parallels between Tatarstan and events in Chechnya.

Context and Comparisons

Edward W. Walker describes Tatarstan as ‘the ethnic republic within Russia that, along with Chechnya, seemed the most likely to secede in late 1991’. This is the mildest perspective on the situation in the republic; others characterized it in much stronger terms. For instance, Radio Liberty reported in 1997 that on the eve of the 21 March 1992 referendum on Tatarstan's status ‘it seemed that Tatarstan was on the verge of bloodshed. The situation was no less heated than in Chechnya two years later’. While suggesting that ‘in the beginning, the nationalist stances of Chechnya and Tatarstan were similar’, Ravil Bukharaev poses the following question: ‘Why then has Tatarstan avoided war with Moscow, while being so close to it at the second stage of obtaining state sovereignty?’