Paul Goble
Staunton, May 28 – This year marks the 160th anniversary of the birth of Ismail-bey Gasprinsky, the Crimean Tatar leader who sought to unite the Muslims of the Russian Empire on a reformist rather than revolutionary basis in pre-parliamentary times. And some Muslim leaders in the Russian Federation are holding him up as a model for today.
This week, at a Moscow conference on “Ismail Gasprinsky and the Birth of the Unity of Russian Muslims,” academic specialists and Muslim leaders discussed his legacy and argued that Gasprinsky’s ideas can make a significant contribution to “the formation of an all-Russian civic identity” and to “the formation of a legal state” (www.islamrf.ru/news/umma/events/16181/).
Aydar Khabutdinov, a professor at the Kazan branch of the Russian Academy of Jurisprudence, recalled in an article published in advance of the conference that during Soviet times, communist officials did everything they could either to suppress Gasprinsky’s ideas or to blacken his reputation (www.islamrf.ru/news/culture/legacy/15887/).
“Even my generation of 40-year-olds,” Khabutdinov continued, “well remember how the ideas of Gasprinsky about the unity of Russia’s Muslims were denied in the name of regional and tribal divisions” and about how his writings about Koranic justice and legality were simply suppressed altogether.
A major reason for this, the Kazan professor suggested, is that Gasprinsky promoted ideas which represented a serious challenge to the Soviet state. “He taught young people to search and acquire knowledge and to generously devote themselves to the Motherland and the nation,” defining the latter as the Muslim community as a whole.
“Young radicals denounced Gasprinsky for his willingness to work with the powers that be, but [the Crimean Tatar thinker] was convinced that it would be possible to create a better future only by the labor of a free man and not by force” as many of his opponents within the umma and more generally believed.
“Bloody Russian history of the last century went in a different direction” than the one Gasprinsky advocated, Khabutdinov continued. But if the future of Russia and its growing Muslim community are to be better, then it is absolutely necessary to recover and then implement the great reformer’s ideas.
“It was no accident that Ismail-bay Gasprinsky became ‘the father of the epoch’ of the national development of Russia’s Muslims,” the Kazan scholar argues. Born on March 8, 1851, Gasprinsky grew up informed by the liberal ideas which “saved many countries of Europe from revolution.” Unfortunately, Khabutdinov said, “our Motherland was not among them.”
Most of Gasprinsky’s life was spent at a time when there was no parliament in Russia, and consequently, he devoted himself to using the press to advance his ideas. He founded the newspaper “Tercuman” in 1883, “the first stable newspaper in the history of Russia’s Muslims” and an outlet that helped define both the language and ideas of many of them.
His paper was explicitly directed toward “the consolidation around itself of representatives of all groups of the national elite, including the bourgeoisie, the spiritual leadership, the intelligentsia and the nobility,” and “in the absence of the opportunity to form political parties before 1917, it “filled the function of professional politicians and social leaders.”
As Khabutdinov noted, “the idea of the nation was one of the key concepts of the 19th century,” and Gasprinsky “borrowed from the philosophical doctrine of the Slavophiles the idea about ‘nationality as a collective personality having its own special calling” but extended it to argue that all the Muslims of Russia were members of one nation.
By the early years of the 20th century, Gasprinsky had developed a political program for this Turko-Tatar nation, a program that included by “typically bourgeois demands such as political and civic freedoms, a constitutional state and so on as well as legal acts and norms defining it as ‘a millet.’”
In Gasprinsky’s view, the Kazan scholar wrote, this millet would be “a special ethnic structure in the framework of the imperial state, one having a special legal status, a concentration around spiritual assemblies, a nationally-proportional system of the formation of organs of power and so on.” In short, he sought “a single religious autonomy” for the Muslims of Russia.
And he argued that “each nation must be a juridical person, have its own economic institutions (banks, cooperatives, etc.) an autonomous system of education, enlightenment and charitable organizations, and also a political structure,” something that could be achieved by education in a common Turkic language and social efforts rather than revolution.
Gasprinsky, Khabutdinov said, “frequently stressed that the era of medieval khans had passed and that Muslims from subjects of medieval states must be transformed into citizens of a state of Modern Times.” To that end, he called for overcoming “centuries-old fatalism” and a prejudice against re-interpreting the past.
Indeed, in the views of the jadids of that time, Gasprinsky had created their present must as the Tatar thinker Marjani had “returned to the Tatars their past. And when Gasprinsky died in August 1914, Muslims from across the Russian Empire mourned his passing even as Russia headed in a very different direction than the one he wanted.
The question that needs to be addressed today, Khabutdinov concluded, is “will we be able to fulfill the injunctions of ismail-bay and construct a better future for ourselves and for our children?”
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Muscovites Live a Decade Longer than Do Russians beyond the Ring Road
Paul Goble
Staunton, May 28 – Muscovites currently live on average nearly ten years longer than do Russians outside the capital, a reflection of differences in education, income and governmental support and yet another way in which residents of the capital city, on whom so many base their assessment of Russia as a whole, are in fact becoming almost another nation.
In an article posted on the “Svobodnaya pressa” portal yesterday, Svetlana Gomzikova points out that residents of the Russian capital and especially the most senior members of the elite have life expectancies equal to those in Switzerland and the US while other Russians have life expectancies typical of the developing world (svpressa.ru/society/article/43699/).
For the Russian Federation as a whole, United Nations statistics say, life expectancy for men is now 58.7 years and for women 71.8 years. These figures are 16 years lower than life expectancy for men in the United States and nine years lower than that for women in the US, and the Russian numbers are lower than all of the former Soviet republics, except Kazakhstan.
But these global Russian figures conceal as much as they reveal, Gomzikova suggests. Men living in Moscow have a life expectancy of 67.3 years, and Russian men living in the Central Administrative District of the Russian capital have a still longer live expectancy, 70.4 years. Women living there can expect to live 78.8 years.
The reason for that, demographers say, is in people there have “a high level of education and income [and] have greater possibilities to concern themselves with health.” Their conclusion, Gomzikova says, is “partially confirmed” by the fact that men in the south and southeastern parts of the capital have live expectancies two to three years less than for the city as a whole.
In addition, the “Svobodnaya pressa” journalist says, there are “significant differences in the mortality of the adult population depending on the level of education and the character of work: the level of mortality among workers and peasants is higher than among those who are engaged in mental work.”
Russian sociologists calculate that “mortality in Russia falls for men by nine percent and for women by seven percent for each additional year of schooling.” And that allows one to conclude, Gomrikova suggests, that “the growth of Russian mortality is the result of the growth of mortality in the less educated strata of the population.”
That has prompted demographers to argue that the Russian authorities now very concerned about demography should focus their efforts not so much on boosting the birth rate than on improving behavior and solving social problems – despite all the difficulties such a shift in approach would entail.
But despite the relatively low life expectancies among Russians, experts like Vladimir Khavinson, the head of the St. Petersburg Institute of Bio-Regulation and Gerontology say, Russia increasingly faces a problem that other countries are having to confront as well: the aging of the population and the increasing share of pensioners relative to workers.
That problem is all the greater in Russia because it has one of the lowest pension ages in the world. Given that the more educated and urbanized population lives longer, that in turn means that less educated workers are going to be forced to support larger numbers of older but more educated Russians, a situation that could generate new political conflicts.
Staunton, May 28 – Muscovites currently live on average nearly ten years longer than do Russians outside the capital, a reflection of differences in education, income and governmental support and yet another way in which residents of the capital city, on whom so many base their assessment of Russia as a whole, are in fact becoming almost another nation.
In an article posted on the “Svobodnaya pressa” portal yesterday, Svetlana Gomzikova points out that residents of the Russian capital and especially the most senior members of the elite have life expectancies equal to those in Switzerland and the US while other Russians have life expectancies typical of the developing world (svpressa.ru/society/article/43699/).
For the Russian Federation as a whole, United Nations statistics say, life expectancy for men is now 58.7 years and for women 71.8 years. These figures are 16 years lower than life expectancy for men in the United States and nine years lower than that for women in the US, and the Russian numbers are lower than all of the former Soviet republics, except Kazakhstan.
But these global Russian figures conceal as much as they reveal, Gomzikova suggests. Men living in Moscow have a life expectancy of 67.3 years, and Russian men living in the Central Administrative District of the Russian capital have a still longer live expectancy, 70.4 years. Women living there can expect to live 78.8 years.
The reason for that, demographers say, is in people there have “a high level of education and income [and] have greater possibilities to concern themselves with health.” Their conclusion, Gomzikova says, is “partially confirmed” by the fact that men in the south and southeastern parts of the capital have live expectancies two to three years less than for the city as a whole.
In addition, the “Svobodnaya pressa” journalist says, there are “significant differences in the mortality of the adult population depending on the level of education and the character of work: the level of mortality among workers and peasants is higher than among those who are engaged in mental work.”
Russian sociologists calculate that “mortality in Russia falls for men by nine percent and for women by seven percent for each additional year of schooling.” And that allows one to conclude, Gomrikova suggests, that “the growth of Russian mortality is the result of the growth of mortality in the less educated strata of the population.”
That has prompted demographers to argue that the Russian authorities now very concerned about demography should focus their efforts not so much on boosting the birth rate than on improving behavior and solving social problems – despite all the difficulties such a shift in approach would entail.
But despite the relatively low life expectancies among Russians, experts like Vladimir Khavinson, the head of the St. Petersburg Institute of Bio-Regulation and Gerontology say, Russia increasingly faces a problem that other countries are having to confront as well: the aging of the population and the increasing share of pensioners relative to workers.
That problem is all the greater in Russia because it has one of the lowest pension ages in the world. Given that the more educated and urbanized population lives longer, that in turn means that less educated workers are going to be forced to support larger numbers of older but more educated Russians, a situation that could generate new political conflicts.
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