Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev


Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, also known as Mirza Sultan-Galiev, was a Tatar Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s. He was the architect of Muslim "national communism". His views were a direct threat to the policies of the Comintern; he was imprisoned briefly in 1923 and expelled from the Communist Party. He was rearrested in 1928 and imprisoned for six years. He was then arrested again in 1937 and executed in 1940 during the Stalin period.

Early life and family

Sultan-Galiev, the son of a teacher, was born on July 13, 1892 in the village of Elembet'evo, Ufa Guberniya, Bashkiria, then part of the Russian Empire. He had a difficult and impoverished childhood. His father made very little money as a school teacher, not nearly enough to support his wife and 12 children, and was frequently transferred from place to place. In addition, there was considerable, lasting tension between his parents, because they came from very different layers of Tatar society. Sultan-Galiev later wrote, "My mother was the daughter of a princea noblewoman, while my father was a simple "Mishar," and this quite often stung the eyes of my father."
Though his parents could not afford to send him to a private school, Sultan-Galiev was able to learn a great deal from his father and at the latter's maktab, which followed the "New Method" of maktab teaching founded by Ismail Gasprinski. From a young age Sultan-Galiev studied the Russian language and read many of the Russian classics from his father's library. At his father's school, he studied from age 8 to 15, learning Tatar and Arabic, history, geography, and mathematics, while also receiving a basic understanding of the Qur'an and Sharia. All this, especially his knowledge of Russian, greatly helped him to gain entrance to the Kazan Teachers College in 1907.
An avid reader of Russian Literature, he translated works by Tolstoy and Pushkin into the Tatar language. In 1913, he married Rauza Chanysheva, who became a leading figure in the women's movement. They separated after personal problems in 1918.

Political activity

Sultan-Galiev was first drawn to revolutionary ideas during the abortive 1905 revolution. Following the revolution's defeat he moved to Baku, where he came to the attention of Nariman Narimanov. He was further drawn to revolutionary ideas while studying to become a teacher at the Tatar Teachers College in Kazan. At this time, he also received his first lessons in socialism. The future bolshevik A. Nasybullin and the future Basmachi A. Ishmurzin gave him books on the theory of socialism and conversed with him about the books.
Graduating from the Teacher's College in 1911, Sultan-Galiev began his career as a "half-starved village school teacher and librarian." In 1912 he also started to publish articles in various newspapers in Russian and Tatar, initially under various pseudonyms, such as "Sukhoi ," Syn naroda ," "Uchitel'-tatarin ," "Karamas-kalinets," and then from 1914 under his own name. Over the same period, he also "secretly distributed anti-government proclamations in the Muslim villages of Ufa province and spoke out against the installation of Russian or Christianized Tatar teachers in Muslim schools.

World War I and the Bolsheviks

As with most people of his generation, World War I played a large role in his personal transformation. With the war's outbreak, Sultan-Galiev and his wife Rauza Chanysheva moved to Baku, where Sultan-Galiev began to write for a variety of newspapers. He seems to have absorbed amongst the city's diverse population of Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Russians, Tatars, and Iranians, a deep and growing dissatisfaction with the tsarist autocracy, its resistance to reform, and handling of the war effort. Baku's political climate in combination with the 1916 anti-conscription uprising of Muslims in Central Asia led him to break with the reform-minded Jadidism of his youth and move towards revolutionary socialism.
In May 1917, Sultan-Galiev 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, with a program close to that of the Bolsheviks. In November 1917 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Following the establishment of Narkomnats in June 1917, Sultan-Galiev was asked to become head of the Muslim section. In January 1918 the Central Commissariat of Muslim affairs in Inner Russia and Siberia, was set up under the chairmanship of Waxitov, with Sultan-Galiev 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. Mustafa Suphi acted as his secretary.
In December 1917, in response to some Tatars' accusations that he was betraying his own people to the Bolsheviks, Sultan-Galiev wrote a revealing explanation for his decision to join the Bolsheviks:

I now move to my cooperation with the Bolsheviks. I will say the following: I associate with them not from sycophancy. The love for my people, which lies inherently inside me, draws me to them. I go to them not with a goal to betray our nation, not in order to drink its blood. No! No! I go there because with my whole spirit I believe in the rightness of the Bolsheviks’ cause. I know this; it is my conviction. Thus, nothing will remove it from my soul. I realize that only some of the bolsheviks were able to implement what was promised at the beginning of the revolution. only they stopped the war. Only they are striving to pass the nationalities’ fates into their own hands. Only they revealed who started the world war. What does not lead me to them? They also declared war on English imperialism, which oppresses India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia. They are also the ones who raised arms against French imperialism, which enslaves Morocco, Algiers, and other Arab states of Africa. How could I not go to them? You see, they proclaimed the words, which have never been voiced since creation of the world in the history of the Russian state. Appealing to all Muslims of Russia and the East, they announced that Istanbul must be in Muslims’ hands. They did this while English troops, seizing Jerusalem, appealed to Jews with the words: ‘Gather together quickly in Palestine, we will create for you a European state.’

Revolution

During the Civil War he was active in organising the defence of Kazan against the Whites in August 1918 and liquidating opposition after they had been driven out. He was also instrumental in ensuring that the Bashkir people, led by Zeki Velidi Togan, joined the Bolshevik side which weakened the military potential of Kolchak's army. His knowledge of national movements in the East won him the trust of Stalin and other highly placed Party and government figures. Sultan-Galiev carried out many tasks on the personal orders of Stalin. In April 1919 he again was rushed to the Eastern Front to help shore up the morale of the Tatar 21st division at Malmyzh after Kolchak's spring offensive had forced the Red Army to abandon Izhevsk to the Whites. In June 1919 he was sent to Kazan at request of the local Bolshevik administration to help resolve the national question among the Tatars, but he was soon recalled to Moscow by Lenin to work on the nationality issue in the Narkomnats until 1922.

Theory

Sultan-Galiev was a proponent of what is today seen as part of the economic and political school revolving around dependency theory. His view that the proletariat of the imperialist core, together with its bourgeoisie, would continue oppressing the "toilers of the East" after a socialist revolution in the core would have been carried out can be seen in a speech of his during the ninth conference of the Tatar Oblast party committee:
The above "quotation" is an excerpt of the speech attributed to Sultan-Galeyev, she was voiced at a conference in which Sultan-Galiyev himself did not participate.

Fallout with the Bolsheviks

Sultan-Galiev wanted to give Marxism an Islamic face. He argued that the Russian Empire had oppressed Muslim society apart from a few big landowners and bourgeois. He was, despite this attempt at synthesis, thought of by the Bolsheviks as being excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion and, in 1923, he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviations and he was arrested and expelled from the party.
He was freed, but with Lenin's death in 1924, he lost his only protector, and remained a political outcast, constantly watched by state security. In these years he spent his time travelling for the Hunting Union and writing occasional reviews and translations. He was accompanied by his second wife Fatima Yerzina, whom he had married in 1918, and their two children.
In 1928, he was arrested a second time and sentenced to be shot in July 1930. However, in January 1931 his sentence was commuted to ten years of hard labour for nationalism and anti-Soviet activity. In 1934 he was released and given permission to live in the Saratov Oblast. At the beginning of 1937 he was again arrested, and was forced to make a confession; he was 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." In December 1939, he received the death sentence which was carried out on 28 January 1940 in Moscow.