Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
Mirsäyet Xäydärğäli ulı Soltanğäliev ([ˌmirsæˈjet xæɪˌdærɣæˈli ulɯ sɔlˌtɑnɣæˈliəf], Cyrillic Tatar: Мирсәет Хәйдәргали улы Солтангалиев; Russian: Мирсаид Хайдаргалиевич Султан-Галиев, Mirsaid Khaydargalievich Sultan-Galiev; 1892 - 1940), usually known in English as Mirza Sultan-Galiev, was a Tatar Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s. He was later executed for being an independent Muslim leader as part of the purges of former bolsheviks in the Soviet Union.
Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev was the son of a teacher, born in the village of Elembet'evo, Ufa Guberniya, Bashkiria, then part of the Russian Empire on 13 July 1892.[1] At base, he had a difficult and impoverished childhood: first, as a school teacher, his father made very little money (not nearly enough to support his wife and 12 children) and was frequently transferred from place to place; second, there was considerable, lasting tension between his parents, because they came from very different layers of Tatar society. Mirsäyet later wrote, "My mother was the daughter of a prince -- a noblewoman, while my father was a simple "mishar," and this quite often stung the eyes of my father."[2]
He was first drawn to revolutionary ideas while studying to become a teacher at the Tatar teachers school in Kazan.[3] He was drawn further to revolutionary ideas during the abortive 1905 revolution. Following this defeat he moved to Baku, where he came to the attention of Nariman Narimanov.
In May 1917 Soltanğäliev participated in the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow and was elected to the All-Russia Muslim Council created by it. In July that year he went to Kazan, where he met Mullanur Waxitov, with whom he helped set up the Muslim Socialist Committee (MSC), with a program close to that of the Bolsheviks. In November 1917 he joined the Russian Communist Party. Following the establishment of Narkomnats in June 1917, Soltanğäliev was asked to become head of the Muslim section. In January 1918 the Central Commissariat of Muslim affairs in Inner Russia and Siberia (Muskom), was set up under the chairmanship of Waxitov, with Soltangaliev as representative of the Russian Communist Party. He was appointed the chair of the Central Muslim Military Collegium when it was established in June 1918. He wrote for Zhizn' Natsional'nostei (Life of the Nationalities).
He was a great reader of the Russian Literature. He translated works by Tolstoy and Pushkin into the Tatar language.
- “Love for my nation which burdened my heart led me to socialism” he wrote in 1917.
Mirsaid wanted to give Marxism an Islamic face. He argued that Tsarist Russians had oppressed Muslim society apart from a few big landowners and bourgeois. Then, in 1923, he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviations and he was arrested and ejected from the party. Stalin was not sympathetic to his attempt to synthesise Islam, nationalism and communism for a revolution in the East in general and the Muslim in particular. Stalin, therefore, had Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev imprisoned and later executed (in Moscow on 28 January 1940) for being an independent ‘Muslim’ leader.[4]
References
- ^ In a very long, autobiographical letter written shortly after his arrest (around 23 May 1923), Soltanğäliev wrote, "I was born in Bashkiria in the Bashkir village of Shipaevo (in Russian it is called, I think, Belembeevo, Sterlitamakskii canton)." Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev: stati, vystupleniia, dokumenty, comp. by I.G. Gizzatullin, D.R. Sharafutdinov (Kazan:Tatarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1992), p. 386.
- ^ R. G. Landa, “Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev,” Voprosy Istoriia KPSS 1999 (8): 56. Mishar Tatars were an ethnic group speaking a Turkic language and living in Bashkiria; see Tatars
- ^ I.R. Tagirov (ed.), Neizvestnyi Sultan-Galiev: Rassekrechennye dokumenty i materialy (Kazan': Tatarskoe knyzhnoe izdatel'stvo, 2002), p. 11.
- ^ I.R. Tagirov (ed.), Neizvestnyi Sultan-Galiev: Rassekrechennye dokumenty i materialy (Kazan': Tatarskoe knyzhnoe izdatel'stvo, 2002), doc. 112, p. 384. Document 110 is the actual judgement, in which Sultan-Galiev is convicted of being the "organizer and factual leader of an anti-soviet nationalistic group," who led an "active struggle against soviet power" and the party "on the basis of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism, with the goal of tearing away from Soviet Russia Turkic-Tatar regions and establishing in them a bourgeois-democratic Turan state" (pp. 382-383).