EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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important for national minorities that were under political pressure to be assimilated and lose their own
culture, to break down the barriers between them and those fellow countrymen who had to leave the
homeland due to political persecution. Such actions against minorities is impossible in the cyberspace as
the monopoly of the nation-state on information, that is to say, the monopoly of leading nation in the
nation-state that restrains other minorities’ culture from full development has disappeared. It is only the
Internet that ties dispersed national communities around the world together. A national elite can even
create and maintain a whole virtual nation, can declare its own national identity. The author believes
that “the Tatar internet is not the goal, but rather the mean to promote and spread Tatar culture, history
and language over the world by the Internet”. Change the word “Tatar” in this sentence for any other
name of an ethnic group and you get the universal definition of the “internet” as a tool to develop
national culture and language.
The author states that the Tatnet (Tatar internet) was not highly developed segment of the cyberspace
by the end of 2009 when the book was issued. On the one hand, he cites a fair number of the web-pages
on different languages, including Tatar based on Cyrillic and Latin scripts that have been created; there
is even an annual contest “Stars of the Tatnet”, of which the author is the permanent president; readers
are studying Tatar very quickly; the Tatar cultural heritage is presented to the world on a wide scale. In
author’s opinion, the Tatar virtual space seems quite presentable among other Turkic virtual segments,
first of all among those existing in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – Kazakh, Uzbek and
Azeri cyberspaces. On the other hand, as contrasted with these segments that are supported by their
nation-states, the Tatar internet is advancing mainly by the enthusiasm of ordinary users. The author
sees a main problem in the slow development of the Tatnet and, thereupon, consolidation of the nation,
in the lack of request for state support from the national elite. But it is likely that the first edition of the
book will influence the Tatar statesmen. In 2009, for the first time, the government of the Republic of
Tatarstan has started to financially support some cultural Tatar internet-projects. This fact gives the
author and us a hopeful proof that the Tatnet (Tatar internet) is the “most effective mean to consolidate
the Tatar nation and help it to adapt to globalization”.
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