ECMI Minorities Blog. The Empire That Never Left: Russia’s Broken Promises to Its Own Peoples

*** The blog posts are prepared by the authors in their personal capacity. The views expressed in the blog posts are the sole responsibility of the authors concerned and do not necessarily reflect the view of the European Centre for Minority Issues. ***

Author: Amir Alecperov

* Amir Alecperov holds an MA in Human Rights Studies in Politics, Law, and Society at Hochschule Fulda, Germany. His research focuses on cultural erasure and linguistic rights of Turkic minorities in post-Soviet contexts, with particular attention to Tatarstan and the South Caucasus. He is of Tatar and Azerbaijani heritage, born in Kazan. He has published analytical articles with The Loop (ECPR) on topics including Soviet-era broken promises to minority peoples, militant democracy, and the political implications of post-2022 Russian emigration. He can be contacted at aalecperov250602@gmail.com.

A note on terminology: throughout this article, “Ichkeria” refers to the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as it existed between 1991 and 2000 – the period of de facto independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The use of this name is deliberate. It reflects the political reality of that period and the self-designation of the Chechen government that negotiated with Moscow. The Russian Federation has consistently refused to use it, preferring “Chechnya” in all contexts, a terminological choice that is itself part of the erasure this article describes.

“Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”

In 1990, Boris Yeltsin made a campaign promise that would echo through the decade. Touring Russia’s restless autonomous republics, he urged regional leaders to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow”. It was a politician’s offer – designed to win support, not to be honoured.

On 30 August 1990, Tatarstan declared its sovereignty. In March 1992, when Yeltsin signed the Federation Treaty with 86 of 88 federal subjects, Tatarstan – alongside only one other republic – refused. In a referendum that same year, 61.4% of voters – both ethnic Tatars and other nationalities – backed Tatarstan’s status as a sovereign state and subject of international law. The will of the population was clear.

Moscow’s response was not to honour it but to negotiate it away. The 1994 Treaty between Russia and Tatarstan left a wide margin of autonomy but did not acknowledge Tatarstan’s sovereign status, a source of deep disappointment to Tatar national movement that had expected more. Tatarstan became “united”, where it had instead asked to be “associated”. The language mattered: the difference between those two words contained the entire future.

The slow dismantling

What followed was not a dramatic reversal but a methodical erosion – powers withdrawn quietly, clause by clause, rather than repealed outright. By 2002, the word “sovereignty” had been removed from Tatarstan’s constitution entirely. The autonomy agreement was renewed in 2007, but with significantly reduced powers. On 24 July 2017, the autonomy agreement expired and was not renewed.

Even the treaty itself became a tool of retribution. When Tatarstan sought a simple extension, Moscow chose to let it expire: a signal that the centre was choosing to exert pressure on the republic for its prior resistance to federal policies.

Language followed the same arc. In the 1990s, both Tatar and Russian were official languages, and Tatar was mandatory in schools – a restoration, however partial, of something that had been suppressed for decades. Then in 2017, a federal law effectively made all regional language instruction optional. Weekly Tatar lessons were cut to almost nothing. The protests that followed – street demonstrations, petitions signed by thousands of parents, opposition from teachers and cultural activists – changed nothing. Moscow held its position.

I remember what that Tatarstan felt like, even as a child. There was something in the air – a language, an identity, a sense that we were a people with a history that was ours. That sense had been quietly, systematically removed. Not with tanks, but with bureaucratic instruments and legal reforms: each individually deniable, but cumulatively devastating.

When the answer to sovereignty was tanks

Chechnya received a different answer to the same question – and received it faster. The key difference was not the strength of the demand but its form. Tatarstan pursued sovereignty within the Russian Federation, framing its claim in the language of federalism. Chechnya went further: in 1991, it declared full independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, invoking the same right to self-determination that Article 1 of the ICCPR guarantees to all peoples. That distinction – autonomy sought versus independence declared – shaped Moscow’s response as much as any political calculation. A republic asking for more room within the federation could be managed bureaucratically; a republic that had formally left it could not.

Boris Yeltsin had incorporated Chechen demands for autonomy into his 1990 election campaign, claiming resolution of the situation was a high priority. The following year, Chechnya declared full independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. On 11 December 1994, Yeltsin launched a military operation deploying over 40,000 troops starting the First Russo-Chechen War started. Between 50,000 and 100,000 Chechen civilians were killed in what followed. Thomas de Waal, a journalist who had worked in Chechnya before the war, later described Yeltsin’s December 1994 decision as “a Rubicon moment – the moment when Russia’s democratic post-Soviet dream ended.”

Ichkeria sought negotiated arrangements – on its borders, on oil, on economic cooperation. Moscow’s response was aerial bombardment of civilian areas, filtration camps, and the systematic destruction of Grozny. After the First Russo-Chechen War ended in Russian defeat, Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed an agreement. To a degree, the Russian government recognised the independence of Ichkeria and promised to end the use of violence. Three years later, the Second Russo-Chechen War began. The promise evaporated.

The scale of what followed has been documented by human rights organisations including Memorial – before its forced liquidation by Russian authorities in 2021 – and Human Rights Watch. Filtration camps, through which hundreds of thousands of Chechen civilians passed, were used to screen, detain, and in many cases torture individuals suspected of links to resistance. The destruction of Grozny was described by the United Nations as one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the late twentieth century. These were not the actions of a state that had promised to end the use of violence; they were the actions of a state that had made that promise precisely to buy time before resuming it.

The liquidation of Memorial itself is instructive. Founded in the late Soviet period to document the crimes of the Gulag, Memorial had become the most important independent archive of Soviet and Russian state violence – including in Chechnya. Its forced closure, ordered by Russian courts in December 2021, was not incidental. It was the removal of institutional memory – the same impulse that drives the erasure of Tatar from schools and Ichkerian history from public discourse. You do not need to destroy a people if you can destroy the record of what was done to them.

A pattern, not an exception

It is tempting to treat Tatarstan and Ichkeria as separate stories – one of quiet erosion, one of violent suppression. But they are chapters of the same text. In both cases, Russia made promises of autonomy when it was politically weak and needed stability. In both cases, those promises were dismantled once the centre had consolidated power. The method differed – bureaucratic in Tatarstan, military in Chechnya – but the destination was identical: the erasure of meaningful self-determination.

The severity of Moscow’s response tracked not the scale of the demand but its perceived threat: Tatarstan’s claim to sovereignty, however serious, stopped short of secession, while Chechnya’s declared independence registered as an existential threat to the federation itself. Threat perception, not the demand’s intensity, determined the method.

The pattern did not end in the 1990s. In 2022, Tatarstan’s regional lawmakers voted to strip the republic’s leader of the title “president” – the last remaining symbol of federalism following Putin’s centralization reforms. By February 2024, the change was complete. By 2017, the entire independence of the republic had become so symbolic that a new treaty was not even signed. The Kremlin’s relationship with its minority peoples had never been one of partnership. It has always been one of management – and when management becomes inconvenient, of suppression.

What endures

Russia changes its leaders and its rhetoric: the logic does not change. Yeltsin told its peoples to take sovereignty; then sent troops when they did. Putin simply dropped the pretence. Whatever comes next will likely inherit the same imperial reflex – the conviction that the peoples within Russia’s borders exist to serve the state, not to govern themselves.

For Tatars, Chechens, and the dozens of other peoples living under this system, this is not history, it is the present tense. The responsibility for that begins, first and foremost, with the Russian state itself – an actor that has never, in any of its post-Soviet incarnations, treated its minority peoples as anything other than subjects to be managed. But the international community’s continued willingness to treat Russia’s internal policies as internal matters compounds that responsibility. It is not neutrality: it is complicity dressed as diplomacy.

What mechanisms were designed to do – and why they failed

These mechanisms were tested directly. In October 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee reviewed Russia’s compliance with the ICCPR – notably without a Russian delegation present. Moscow refused to attend three consecutive sessions before the Committee proceeded regardless. The resulting Concluding Observations raised concerns about the suppression of minority languages, restrictions on cultural expression, and the erosion of regional autonomy. Russia was asked to report back on its implementation by 2025; it has not done so in any meaningful sense.

The international framework for protecting minority peoples within states is not absent, it exists on paper in considerable detail. The ICCPR, the FCNM, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the OSCE commitments on minority rights – in principle, all of these apply to Russia’s treatment of Tatars, Chechens, Bashkirs, and others. The problem is not a gap in the law, it is a gap in enforcement.

The UN Human Rights Committee can issue Concluding Observations; it cannot compel compliance. The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities can raise concerns: Russia ignored them. The Council of Europe’s advisory committee on the Framework Convention produced detailed reports documenting the erosion of Tatar language rights. Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022, removing even the limited accountability that membership had provided.

What this means in practice is that the peoples of Tatarstan and Ichkeria were – and are – protected by instruments that have no coercive force against a state determined to disregard them. The monitoring bodies documented the erosion. They issued recommendations. Russia filed its reports, made its assurances, and continued dismantling what it had promised to protect.

This is not a failure of international law as such. It is a failure of political will – the unwillingness of the international community to treat the cultural and political rights of minority peoples within Russia as a matter requiring the same urgency as other human rights violations. The slow erasure of a language from schools does not generate headlines. The aerial bombardment of Grozny eventually did – but even then, the frameworks designed to prevent such outcomes had already failed long before the first bomb fell.