Russia holds up historic Kazan as model of religious harmony

A fortress razed and then rebuilt by a triumphant Ivan the Terrible would seem to be an unlikely symbol of tolerance and inclusivity.

But the snow-white walls of the Kremlin in Kazan, 800km east of Moscow, embrace a historic Orthodox cathedral, one of the biggest mosques in Russia, and this country's official idea of itself as a safe and stable home for all its ethnic groups.

On this bend in the Volga river – where in 1552 Ivan’s troops routed the Kazan khanate, a remnant of Genghis Khan’s empire – live almost equal numbers of mostly Muslim Tatars and predominantly Christian Russians in a city of 1.2 million.

Their peaceful co-existence is a source of pride in Kazan and the surrounding Tatarstan region, and stands in stark contrast to the turmoil that blighted Russia’s North Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when two wars in Chechnya between federal troops and Muslim separatists killed tens of thousands of people.

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The relative prosperity of oil-rich Tatarstan, which is some 1,700km north of the Caucasus, helps underpin stability, while entrenching the rule of a regional elite that opponents say is given carte blanche by Moscow as long as it maintains tight control and total loyalty to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"In the mentality of the Tatar people there is a special national trait laid down by our ancestors: to respect other peoples, their language and culture," Kamil Samigullin, chief mufti of Tatarstan, said on Russia's national unity day this month.

“The Republic of Tatarstan, for all subjects of the multinational Russian Federation and the entire political world, is a unique example of good neighbourly relations between Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Tatars, Russians, Chuvash, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Mari...” he added, listing a few of the region’s ethnic groups.

“In this, it is difficult to overstate the merits of the leadership of the country and the republic, as well as the people of Tatarstan themselves,” declared Samigullin, the religious leader of the region’s Muslims.

Conservative traditions

While crushing resistance in the North Caucasus with massive force and disregard for fundamental human rights, Putin made allies of Tatarstan’s political and religious leaders by spending heavily here and positioning Russia as a defender of conservative traditions against the western liberal mores that they also loathe.

In 2005, when Russia marked 1,000 years since the founding of Kazan, officials from across the Islamic world attended the opening of the Kul Sharif mosque on the presumed site of a predecessor that was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible.

"The Kul Sharif Mosque stands next to the [Orthodox] Annunciation Cathedral," said Mintimer Shaimiev, who was then president of Tatarstan.

“This has a profound meaning that is tied to the aspirations of the multi-ethnic peoples of the republic to live in peace and friendship. They stand next to each other as a symbol of mutual understanding between the country’s two leading faiths.”

There were some concerns that the construction of a completely new and imposing building could jeopardise the Kremlin's Unesco world heritage status, but the UN cultural agency accepted it as "a sign of the continuity of a spiritual dialogue and balance between different cultures".

Rasul, a businessman showing friends around the Kremlin this week, said his city and region were benefiting from their stability and role as a showcase for good communal relations in Russia.

“I think everyone, including the top people in Moscow, appreciate the value of Kazan and Tatarstan. People get on here, there are many mixed families,” he said as his guests rushed into the mosque to escape an icy wind whipping off the Volga.

“Development is going at a good pace, we have lots of cultural and sports events in Kazan, including the football World Cup in 2018, and I think local and national leaders are trying to keep a balance here – a big cathedral has just reopened and Protestants and Catholics and people of other faiths all worship freely here.”

Difficult chapters

In July, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill consecrated the Cathedral of the Our Lady of Kazan Icon, which was rebuilt over five years at the place where its predecessor was blown up on the orders of Josef Stalin in 1932.

The icon – thought to be an 18th-century copy of a missing original that was revered as a protector of Kazan and Russia – spent decades in Fatima, Portugal, before being given as a gift to Pope John Paul II, who in 2004 sent it back to Russia – though the Orthodox hierarchy denied his request to deliver it personally.

“The icon helped save Russia several times in the hardest moments of her history, during invasions and wars ... Now we do not even know if the original still exists,” says Fr Kharalampii (38), standing in the snow outside the cathedral.

“Thank God, we have peaceful relations here and regular dialogue between faiths,” he explains. “That’s the story of Tatarstan and Kazan in particular.”

Yet the official account glosses over many difficult chapters, and continuing tensions, in relations between Tatarstan and the Kremlin, and between the regional authorities and opponents who accuse them of trying to silence critics.

Tatarstan welcomed then Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s call in 1990 for regions to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”, and two years later held a referendum in which more than 61 per cent of voters backed a move to make Tatarstan “a sovereign state”.

The republic’s leaders did not strive for independence, but the vote set the tone for ties in which Moscow has tried not to alienate Tatarstan, and the local elite has sometimes pushed back against Putin’s erosion of regional autonomy.

Now some Tatar activists are angry over Moscow’s plans to abolish the title of “president” for all regional leaders, which they see as another move to downgrade Russia’s republics and elide their distinct identities.

“The president of our republic is not just the head of a subject of the federation ... [but also] establishes balance in the multi-national and multi-confessional society of Tatarstan,” the World Tatar Youth Forum said last month.

“At the same time, the president of Tatarstan is a symbol of the entire seven-million-strong Tatar people, a symbol of spiritual revival and unification of the Tatar nation,” the group argued.

“The wealth of Russia, above all ... is in the different peoples who inhabit our country. Our strength and power are precisely in this diversity. Each region has its own unique characteristics, and an attempt to unify all regions, to make everyone the same, is a blow to the foundations of our Russian state.”

Broad powers

Nationalist and religious violence is rare here, but Tatarstan was shaken in 2012 when its then mufti was injured and his deputy killed in a gun and bomb attack in Kazan that was blamed on an underground network of Islamist radicals.

The authorities are cracking down on movements that they say propound militant Islam – police stormed a Kazan flat and detained three men suspected of extremism this week – but critics accuse them of abusing their increasingly broad powers and sometimes targeting political dissenters who pose no security risk.

Officials insist the threat is real, and report that dozens of Tatarstan residents travelled to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State and other militant groups.

Some in Kazan are uncomfortable with their region's acquiescence to the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, which was fiercely opposed by many Crimean Tatars, who now accuse the Russian security services of widespread abuses in the occupied territory.

Kremlin critics also say Kazan does not reflect the broader situation in Russia, where religious minorities often face major hostility: Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, was listed as an extremist group in 2017, and hundreds of members have since been charged or convicted of extremism and thousands have fled the country.

Catholics in Russia have been more fortunate, and in 2008 the Exaltation of the Holy Cross church was consecrated in central Kazan during a ceremony led by Angelo Sodano, then dean of the College of Cardinals.

"We have about 100 regulars at Sunday Mass ... and we know of about 500 Catholics living around the region," says Fr Andrei Startsev (42), after talking to a group of visiting politicians about the church and the local Catholic community.

“It’s true, undoubtedly, that Kazan is an example of good relations between faiths. I have personal experience of serving elsewhere – I spent time in Omsk in Siberia – and I can say that Kazan is very different.”