Fewer and fewer Russian Tatars

The minority in the country counts 4.7 million individuals: in 2010 there were 5.3 million. Also declining in the original regions. Ethnic Russians in Tatarstan are growing. Use was made of the pandemic to readjust statistics less liked by the Kremlin. Government: next data will be secret.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - There is a sharp decline in the Tatar population and culture throughout the Russian Federation, as reported by Idel.Realii in an analysis of the latest census. Above all, the Tatars seem to be disappearing from Moscow, where over the past 11 years more than 60,000 citizens, who used to be registered as ethnic Tatars, have renounced defining themselves as such. Even the most original regions of the Volga and Urals have 'lost' 350 thousand Tatars.

In percentage terms, the most significant decrease is in the Siberian Far East, and only in Tatarstan, the official Tatar region, does the ethnicity seem to be holding up with a slightly positive curve. In the republic of Kazan, however, the number of carriers of the Tatar language as a native language has shrunk by 20 per cent, abandoned by over 400,000 inhabitants of Tatarstan.

According to the 2021 census, the Tatar population in Russia stands at 4.7 million and has shrunk by about half a million (11.2%) over the past decade. In the previous statistical survey in 2010, there were 5.3 million. It should be considered that in the last census the authorities also included the Crimean Tatars, annexed in 2014, which added more than 30 thousand people, so the loss is even greater. Native-speaking Tatars dropped by over a million citizens, almost a quarter of the entire ethnic group. Only 2.7 million Tatars speak the idiom, just over half of the total.

The Tatars of Tatarstan are also ceasing to speak their own language, succumbing to the long-standing process of Russification, which has become more intense in recent years, partly to prevent separatist propaganda. The Russian ethnic group itself in Tatarstan has grown by 5%, a higher percentage than the Tatar ethnic group. The other minor peoples in the Volga area are also shrinking significantly.

In the Tatar Republic, the obligation to study Tatar at school has been lifted, although the opportunities to learn it are still widespread throughout the educational and cultural sector, unlike in other regions, including its 'cousin' Bashkortostan. Only 34% of the citizens of Tatarstan can speak Tatar, compared to 98% of the Russian language.

The disappearance of the Tatars is evident in the Volga regions neighbouring Tatarstan, where censorship of Tatar culture is most intense, creating a buffer zone around Kazan itself. The main city in the vicinity, Nizhny Novgorod, has lost over 40% of its Tatars, reduced to just over 20 thousand out of a population of three million. Similar percentages can be seen in the smaller republics, formerly popular with Tatars, such as Mari El, Mordovia, Udmurtia and the Penza region.

Bashkortostan presents itself as a special case, due to the population's opposition to the granting and publication of census data. The Bashkars do not like to have too rigid ethnic definitions applied to them, starting with the Tatar one, which many do not want to recognise despite the obvious physiognomic and linguistic commonality.

All in all, the Tatars of Ufa have declined by 34.8%, although this reduction is not very evident from the other socio-cultural parameters, and from the daily life of the Bashkiri. The Tatar-Baškira language is spoken by about one million people out of a population of four million, second only to Russian.

Apart from Moscow, Tatars are becoming increasingly rare throughout central Russia, and also in the north-western regions of Komi and Novgorod, while the Tatar group in St. Petersburg remains fairly stable, with around 30,000.

According to Tatar ethnologist Damir Iskhakov, 'the Tatars are excluded from the leadership levels of public institutions, and also from those who organised this census, which was done in a contradictory manner during the Covid'. The pandemic has been taken advantage of to readjust statistics that the Kremlin does not like, and the data of the next census will in fact be kept secret, as Moscow has already announced.