backing the ussr 2.0tests took place in Tatarstan in the spring of 2014. However,
they were, symptomatically, not over the predicament of Crimean
Tatars, but against land development along the Volga River that
infringed on summer cottage (dacha) smallholders. In a twist, the
anti- development protesters compared the allegedly corrupt local
officials to Ukrainian and US governments and asked Putin to
protect them. In formulating their claims, the protesters referred
to the United States ‘fragmenting other countries, while ignoring
the voice of Crimea residents who decided to leave Ukraine’. This
was hardly a sign that the Tatarstan public had lost confidence in
Putin over Ukraine policy (Biktimirova 2014).
Among Tatarstan’s Internet users who search Google, accord-
ing to Google Trends, interest in the term ‘Crimean Tatars’
(‘krymskie tatary’) spiked more so than elsewhere in Russia in
March 2014, but then dropped down to statistically insignificant
numbers – faster, in fact, than it did in Moscow and St Petersburg
(see Figure 6.1).^ Tatarstan residents exhibited no measurable
increase in interest for the term ‘deportation’ that could have indi-
cated rising fears of discrimination and oppression against non-
Russian minorities. The Google search volume for the leading
Tatar nationalist groups – the Azatlyk Union of Tatar Youth,
the Milli Medzhlis and the All- Tatar Public Centre – generally
remained below the level registered by Google Trends. The excep-
tion was a moderate rise in searches for ‘Azatlyk’ in March 2014,
but it was lower than the spike in early 2013 (long before the
Ukraine crisis and the only other measurable spike since the data
became available in 2004).
Theory puzzles
The question of ethnic minority support for ethnic majority
nationalism illuminates important knowledge gaps. Mainstream
theory schools of intergroup relations – the largely instrumentalist
‘group threat’ approach (sociology) and the largely constructiv-
ist ‘social identity’ approach (psychology) – hold that minori-
ties may both support or oppose majority nationalism. In other
words, neither approach is diagnostic outside further specifica-
tion. Instrumentalists could argue, based on the seminal work of