Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev

Mirsaid Chaidargalijewitsch Sultan Galiyev ( Tatar Мирсәет Хәйдәргали улы Солтангалиев Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev , *  13. July 1892 in Ufa ; † 28. January 1940 in Moscow ) was a Tatar politicians of Russia and in the meantime the highest ranking Muslim in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU ).

Initially a supporter of Panturan Jadidism , Galiev joined the Communist Party in 1917 before the October Revolution , supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War with their own Muslim militias and in 1918 became chairman of the Muslim Military College of Soviet Russia . The Volga Tatars supported under his leadership the Red Army against anti-communist Bashkirs , Kazak-Kyrgyz , Azerbaijanis and Crimean Tatars . He is considered a pioneer of Muslim national communism and was persecuted for years after Lenin's death .

Life

Sultan-Galijew was born the son of a teacher who lived with his wife and 12 children in poor conditions that were characterized by frequent changes of location. He became an eager student in his father's mekteb ( Islamic elementary school), where İsmail Gazprinski was teaching according to the “new method” , and he also familiarized himself with the Russian language and literature in his father's library. After the revolution of 1905 he moved to Baku , where he made contact with Nəriman Nərimanov . After seven years of schooling, he was able to enter the Kazan University of Education in 1907 , from which he graduated as a teacher in 1911. He was an avid reader of Russian literature and translated works by Tolstoy and Pushkin into the Tatar language . His first wife, Rausa Chanyschewa, whom he married in 1913, took on a leading role in the women's movement. The couple divorced in 1918. He had two children with his second wife, Fatima Jersina, whom he married in 1918.

Political activities

Instead of the western proletarian communism of the Bolsheviks, Galiev campaigned for the introduction of an Islamic socialism among the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union, which was to be achieved through gradual “defanatization” and secularization . He saw the Comintern model as unsuitable for colonial peoples. Galiev therefore campaigned for a separate Muslim CP alongside the Bolsheviks and his own Muslim divisions in the Red Army. From 1919 to 1922 he worked for Lenin in Moscow in the Narkomnaz .

Galiev became one of the first proponents of a proto-dependency class analysis, which he presented in his article Social Revolution and the East , among others . In it he describes his view that the peoples of the west are in a dependent relationship with the peoples of the east.

“If a revolution succeeds in England, the proletariat will continue oppressing the colonies and pursuing the policy of the existing bourgeois government; for it is interested in the exploitation of these colonies. In order to prevent the oppression of the toiler of the East we must unite the Muslim masses in a communist movement that will be our own and autonomous. "

“If a revolution in England is successful, its proletariat will continue to live off the exploitation of the colonies and pursue a colonial policy similar to that of the previous bourgeois government, for it is naturally interested in prolonging the dependency relationship with the colonies. In order to prevent the exploitation of the workers of the east, we must unite the Muslim masses in a communist movement that will be ours and autonomous. "

- Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev : at the Ninth Conference of the Tatar Oblast Party Committee, 1923

The long-term goal was a “socialist Turan ” that was only federally connected to Soviet Russia , which was to encompass the Tatar Volga-Ural region as well as all of Turkestan and which could later be joined by other oriental peoples and states. As a short-term goal, Galiev wanted at least with his "Tatar-Bashkir Committee " to establish a joint Tatar-Bashkir republic instead of the later two republics.

However, Stalin only allowed him to form a Tatar Soviet Republic in Kazan in 1920 , the previously formed Bashkir Soviet Republic was not affiliated, Galiev expelled from the Communist Party in 1923 because of “bourgeois nationalist deviations” and Tatarstan was transformed into an ASSR . In 1924 the ASSR Turkestan was divided into numerous smaller Soviet republics or ASSR. After Lenin's death that year, Galiev lost his only protector and was arrested for the first time. Arrested again since 1928, he was sentenced to death and then to ten years in a camp , from which he was released in 1934 and subsequently received a residence permit in Saratov Oblast . In 1937, in the course of the Stalinist purges , he was arrested again by the NKVD and forced to admit guilt. His goals were denigrated and banned as "Sultangalievism". After he was sentenced to death in December 1939, he was executed in January 1940.

literature

• Halit Kakınç: (Mirseyid) Sultangaliyev. Ankara 2011
• Gabriele Bucher-Dinc: The Middle Volga in the Controversy of Soviet and National Ideologies - An investigation based on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of the Volga tartar Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev. Wiesbaden 1997
• Erhard Stölting: A world power is falling apart - nationalities and religions of the USSR. Frankfurt 1990

Web links

• Literature by and about Mir S. Sultan-Galiev in the catalog of the German National Library
• Stalin's "Speech on the Sultan-Galiev case" ( Memento from July 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
• "Drops in the Sea of ​​Revolution": Mirsaid Sultan-Galiew

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Maxime Rodinson: Sultan Galiev - a forgotten precursor
2. ↑ IG Gissatullin & DR Sharafutdinow (eds.), Мирсаид Султан-Галиев: избранные трдуы . P. 198ff. (Russian)
3. ↑ Quoted by SI Gimranov at the ninth conference of the Tatar Oblast Party Committee , 1923, from the Стенографический отчет IX областной конференции Танференции Татаренции Татарской Танференции Татарской Татарской организ , 1930, Soviet . Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. P. 231