Idel-Ural State

On 22 July 1917 a joint session of three All-Russian Muslim congresses in Kazan proclaimed the “national-cultural autonomy of the Muslim Turko-Tatars of Inner Russia and Siberia”, and a national assembly, the Millet Mejlis, was set up in Ufa as its coordinating body. In January 1918 the Mejlis laid down the procedure for founding the state and entrusted an eight-member Ural-Volga State commission with a draft constitution, the borders and the economy. Sadri Maksudi became chairman of the national administration, the Milli Idare, on 5 January; the English-language source calls him the president of Idel-Ural. Three plans competed over the borders. With all Tatars, Chuvash and Mari the state would have been 44 per cent Muslim; with all of Kazan and Ufa provinces and parts of Perm, Orenburg, Samara and Simbirsk, 51 per cent; with all of Samara province and the Bukey Horde, 29 per cent. The Turkist faction wanted a “Greater Idel-Ural” with an outlet via the Caspian to the Caucasus, Iran and Turkestan. Whether the Bashkirs belonged to the “Tatar nation” was also disputed, and the English-language source holds that Zaki Validi’s Bashkir autonomy and Bolshevik opposition weakened the project. The Second All-Russian Muslim Military Congress, sitting in Kazan from 8 January to 3 March 1918, resolved to create, within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, a state of the whole of Ufa province and parts of Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Orenburg, Perm and Vyatka provinces, but split over whether to accept the Constituent Assembly or the soviets. The Russian-language source sees the project’s basic weakness in the Tatars’ near-absence from the soviets and national party organisations and the very low self-organisation of Tatar workers and peasants.

When Kazan’s Muslim organisations decided on 26 February to proclaim the state and posters went up the next day, the Kazan Soviet declared martial law on 28 February and arrested the leaders of the military congress and its military council, the Harbi Shuro. Released that evening, they moved across the Bulak, proclaimed the state on 1 March and set up their own council of people’s commissars and a revolutionary staff that raised armed squads. On 22 March, however, the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities decided on a Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic as the soviet alternative, and on 24 March a decree signed by Stalin and Mullanur Vakhitov dissolved the Harbi Shuro. On 27 March the Red Army cordoned off the Tatar quarter and issued an ultimatum to surrender all weapons, and the “Trans-Bulak army” gave in without serious fighting; on 28 March the members of its council and staff were arrested. Kazan Red Guards, sailors sent from Moscow at Vakhitov’s request and an armed band of the Vaisov sect took part. The national assembly was dissolved in April and the Milli Idare banned on 1 May, while remaining deputies carried on as a “Little Mejlis” in areas free of the Bolsheviks. The national administration was partly restored in July with the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, but at the end of 1918 the remnants of the Harbi Shuro’s troops joined Kolchak’s army as the 16th Tatar Regiment. Maksudi fled to Finland, where Foreign Minister Carl Enckell received him well, and in 1919 pleaded the rights of the peoples of Idel-Ural at the Paris Peace Conference. Émigrés carried on anti-Soviet propaganda, and in 1959 Idel-Ural was listed among the “Captive Nations” in a United States public law. During the Second World War an anti-Nazi underground worked inside the Idel-Ural Legion raised by Germany.