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Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1229313
FEATURES @Linguist_CIOL APRIL/MAY The Linguist 19 mother is Tatar and the father is Russian? Why do we need to divide people in this way?" Shmakov, who is an ethnic Russian but has long championed Tatar culture, insists that teaching the local language to all is a way to foster unity and guard against inter-ethnic conflict. When regional authorities gathered the heads of schools together at the end of 2017 and told them they would need to sack most of their Tatar language teachers, and reduce teaching of the local language and literature from six hours a week to just two, Shmakov refused. "The worst thing was that they wanted to do it very quickly. Over the New Year, over the winter, they wanted to chuck these teachers out onto the street. If you need to do it, at least do it over the summer, when they have some warning and a couple of months to get ready," he says. Shmakov waited until the end of the academic year to change his courses, and did cut Tatar lessons to three hours a week. However, he managed to keep all three of his Tatar teachers on staff by setting up projects and festivals they could lead outside of class time. Accusations and interrogations His resistance has attracted attention from officials. The school, he says, is subject to "constant" checks, not by educational inspectors but by regional prosecutors. He has personally been fined 20,000 rubles (£240) for failing to adapt to the new rules, a decision he is appealing. In 2018, prosecutors questioned pupils as young as nine during the breaks between classes. "They were asking, 'Do you want to study Tatar? Why?'" recalls Leysan Garaeva, a language teacher at the school. "It felt like they were looking to find someone who said 'I don't want to study this' so they could write a report and say that children were being forced to learn." Ahead of the changes to the law, President Vladimir Putin said it was "unacceptable" that some students were being "forced" to learn languages that were not native to them. Officially, the amendments were brought about so that schools would have more time to dedicate to teaching Russian. Putin has, at the same time, stressed the importance of protecting the country's minority languages, and the Kremlin has established a Fund for Preservation and Research of Russia's Native Languages. But for those working in the field, the situation does not feel very supportive. "The state has tossed me aside. After all of this, teachers discover they are no longer needed by society," says an emotional Garaeva, who has been teaching Tatar for 23 years. "This isn't a one-day process, it has been happening gradually over the last 10 years." She points to the merging of Tatar language departments in local universities and the closing of Tatar newspapers as examples. In the 1990s, President Boris Yeltsin encouraged Russia's republics to take "as much sovereignty as [they] can swallow", which Tatarstan duly did, making particular efforts to promote the local language and culture. But the approach has been reversed under Putin, especially since his return to the Kremlin in 2012 after four years as Prime Minister. CELEBRATING TATAR Clockwise from top left: A monument in Kazan to the Tatar religious figure and scholar Shigabutdin Mardzhani; the headteacher of Shkola Solntse, Pavel Shmakov; Nadezhda Vanyukhina, a parent who is directing a play at the school; and a display for a Tatar language class at Solntse