Petrov-Tinehpi, Mikhail Petrovich

Mikhail Petrovich Petrov was born in 1877 in the village of Munyaly of the Yadrinsky district of Kazan province (now in the Vurnarsky district of Chuvashia ) into a peasant family. The childhood passed in poverty: the family lived in a black hut , had neither a horse, nor a cow.

In 1887, Mikhail Petrov enrolled in a school in the village of Alikovo . After a conflict with a teacher who was little versed in pedagogy and beat students, he fled home and soon transferred to the Yandobinskaya school. Here he was taken under the care of a graduate of the Simbirsk Chuvash school A. I. Ivanov, and "the teaching went great."

In 1890, the teacher took Mikhail Petrov and several other students to enter the Simbirsk Chuvash school. In the journey, according to the memoirs of Michael, he first encountered the humiliation of the Chuvash on a national basis by the Russians and Tatars ; He was even more surprised that his teacher, who was idolized by him, silently carried away all the insults ^[2] .

Michael passed the competition for admission to the school, which he graduated in 1897. While studying in Simbirsk, Petrov mastered the Russian language.

After graduation, Petrov worked for a year as an elementary school teacher in the village of Srednye Timersyan, Simbirsk uyezd . Here he recorded Chuvash folk songs and passed them on to Nikolai Ashmarin . Dreaming of getting a more serious education, Petrov concluded an agreement with the head of the Simbirsk school Ivan Yakovlev : Petrov translated into Psalms not yet translated into Chuvash , and in return, Yakovlev allowed him to leave the teaching and enter the seminary - the only place where Chuvash was allowed to continue his education.

After graduating from the seminary in 1901, Yakovlev sent Petrov to supervise a two-year school in the village of Sikterma of the Spassky district , and in 1903 invited him to teach Russian at the women's school at the Simbirsk school. At this time, Petrov helped Yakovlev in missionary work : he translated books from Russian and Church Slavonic into Chuvash, prayers, chants, and participated in the translation of the New Testament .

In 1905, Petrov published his first scientific work, an ethnographic essay "On the Chuvash of the Yadrinsky district of the Kazan province". In June of the same year, he married Tatiana Pavlova, a graduate of the Simbirsk school, and on July 1 was ordained a priest . Petrova was determined to serve in the village of Raskildino, Kurmyshsky district , but he achieved that he was left in Simbirsk. Here he served as a school teacher at the school and the head of the school church, and since September 1906, he has also been the school teacher at a parish church open at the school.

In January-March 1907, a revolt of students against the Russian teacher Kochurov insulted them in the Simbirsk Chuvash school (as a result, the future classic of Chuvash poetry Konstantin Ivanov was excluded from the school). Mikhail Petrov took the side of the students in the conflict. Yakovlev considered this a betrayal of the interests of the school and, moreover, decided that it was Petrov who "slanted the Chuvash youth" on Kochurov.

Due to the conflict with Yakovlev and shaky health in the second half of 1907, Petrov returned to his homeland, Yadrinsky district, and entered the village of Maloye Karachkino as a parish priest.

At home, Mikhail Petrov contributed to the opening of elementary schools in the villages of Burnashi , Yumaloka , Orba-Pavlovo , and achieved the opening of a public reading room in the Small Karachkino .

In 1911 he was widowed.

As a priest, Petrov led the fight for the introduction of the Chuvash language in worship , which was opposed by the Russian clergy. Apparently, normalization of his relations with Yakovlev, which he even invited to Maloye Karachkino to verify the success of this struggle, dates back to this time.

In 1914, Petrov left Maloye Karachkino and entered the Kazan Theological Academy . In addition to compulsory theological courses, he optionally studied ethnography and the history of Turkic peoples and languages . Petrov's diploma work was devoted to the history of the Simbirsk Chuvash school.

In 1916, a large composition by Petrov was published in Kazan on the situation of the non-Russian population in the Middle Volga region.

In 1917–1918, Mikhail Petrov took an active part in the national movement of the Chuvash people , acting from national democratic positions. He also plays a significant role in the Chuvash religious movement: Petrov participated in holding meetings of the Chuvash clergy, actions for creating a Chuvash diocese , nominated his candidacy for the post of Chuvash bishop ( bishop ).

In September 1918 - March 1919, Petrov taught the Chuvash language , history and ethnography at the Shikhran Teacher Training Seminary, then served as a priest in the village of Ishaki, Kozmoemyansky County . Here he married for the second time, again with a graduate of the Simbirsk Chuvash school.

In 1919, Petrov published two articles in the Kanash newspaper about the principles of adaptation of Russian borrowings and the neologisms of the Chuvash language. September 12 of the same year was elected a member of the Society of Archeology, History and Ethnography at Kazan University .

At the beginning of 1921, Mikhail Petrov refused to serve as a priest and went to work, and then headed the Translation Commission at the Department of Public Education of the Chuvash Autonomous Region . At the same time, in 1921–1923, he taught Chuvashevik disciplines at the Central Chuvash Pedagogical Courses, which were later transformed into the Pedagogical Technical School, and at the Chuvash Rabfak.

In the years 1922-1926, Mikhail Petrov worked in the Chuvash State Publishing House. In particular, he translated into a Chuvash series of stories by Anton Chekhov , published several popular science books for children in the Chuvash language. In 1925 he published his important work "On the origin of the Chuvash."

In parallel, in the 1920s, Petrov worked in the Central Chuvash Museum , in 1926-1930 he was its director. In this post, he actively replenished the museum with exhibits, collected written sources. In the same years, Petrov worked a lot for the Society for the Study of the Local Territory , was a member of the Central Bureau of Kravedology at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . In 1926, he participated in the work of the First Congress of Turkologists in Baku; in 1929 he was elected a corresponding member of the Council of Science and Culture of the Chuvash ASSR . In 1931-1936 he worked in the Chuvash Republican Scientific Library.

In the pre-revolutionary works and in the first years after the revolution, Mikhail Petrov appears, on the one hand, as a champion of the Chuvash language , but on the other, as a herald of the peaceful Russification of the peoples of the Volga region. In the spirit of Ivan Yakovlev, he sees the meaning of the history of the Chuvash in that “in the coming times finally merge with the great sovereign people” ^[3] .

However, by the mid-1920s, Petrov-Tinehpi formulated the concept of Chuvash history on opposing, national democratic grounds. In the historical and journalistic writings of this period, the “golden age” of the Chuvash history proclaims the period of Volga Bulgaria - the national state of the Chuvash. Petrov-Tinehpi played a significant role in popularizing the idea of ​​a Hunno - Bulgaro - Chuvash continuity, developed earlier in the scientific context by the Russian turkologist Nikolai Ashmarin ^[4] . The fall of the Itil Bulgaria in 1236 was announced by him as a Chuvash national catastrophe, and the following year - “the year of the Chuvash-Bulgarians political death”.

The whole subsequent period up to 1917, Petrov-Tinehpi considered the era of "deadly alien yoke." The accompanying "material and moral impoverishment of the Chuvash" was directly associated with the loss of independence. At the same time, Petrov-Tinehpi equally negatively assessed the Tatar ( Golden Horde , Kazan Khanate ) and Russian domination, believing that the second is "the natural continuation and development of the first."

“Started by wild immigrants from Asia ... completed the pre-revolutionary Russian statehood, barbarically predatory and stupid to cruelty. She brought the Chuvash, these descendants of the once distinguished and cultural people, almost to the grave with her colonization and obrusive policy. ”

- M.P. Petrov. On the origin of the Chuvash. Pp. 58-59

Petrov-Tinehpi interpreted the annexation of the Chuvash Territory to Russia as a forced surrender: "the Chuvash, not wanting to obey, fought for a long time ... But when they were surrounded by fortresses, they had to accept". The Cheremis Wars of the second half of the XVI century Petrov-Tinehpi considered the national liberation movement of the peoples of the Volga region, including the Chuvash people: "... On the banks of the Middle Volga, you can say, there was no people who would defend freedom so much as the Chuvash."

In a similar vein, Petrov-Tinehpi considered and the uprising of the Chuvash peasants in the XVII-XVIII centuries. According to him, the resilience and perseverance of the rebels cannot be comprehended beyond their memory of their own (Bulgarian) statehood, since the “Chuvash never forgot their former independence and freedom”.

A similar interpretation of the Chuvash history was followed in his writings by the writer and political figure Metri Yuman .

From 1929, articles and brochures began to appear in print, in which Petrov-Tinehpi was subjected to harsh criticism for his nationalist views. In 1935, the historian Ivan Kuznetsov attributed it to the number of Chuvash "national-chauvinists" ^[5] . In 1936, Tinehpi was dismissed from the library "as he did not cope with his work as head of the Chuvashev studies cabinet."

In 1937, Chairman of the Board of the Union of Writers of Chuvashia, Uip Mishi, spoke in the journal “ Sunthal ” with a critical article about the leaders of the Chuvash national movement. Uip claimed that as early as 1917, "counter-revolutionaries", including Mikhail Petrov-Tinehpi, had established a "bourgeois Chuvash government". The concept of the Bulgaro-Chuvash continuity, which Petrov-Tinekhpi consistently defended, was declared a manifestation of “bourgeois nationalism” ^[6] .

April 30, 1937, Mikhail Petrov-Tinehpi was arrested. The accusatory documents reconstruct his "secret life" after the revolution. According to the staff of the NKVD CHASSR, as early as 1918-1919, he negotiated with Catholic priests in Kazan , wishing to establish a connection between the Chuvash , Mari and Udmurts with the Western capitalist world, to fight with Bolshevism together with him. During the Civil War, Petrov-Tinehpi, according to investigators, participated in the " kulak " uprising, for which he was sentenced to death; he managed to escape thanks to the intercession of Daniel Elmen .

It was alleged that Petrov-Tinehpi was a member of the group of "counter-revolutionary nationalists" along with Nikolai Shubossinni and a number of other leaders. The group was accused of denying the class struggle in Chuvashia, the intention to “tear off” Chuvashia from the Soviet Union , and also the propaganda of the idea of ​​the Bulgaro-Chuvash continuity . The scientific correspondent Petrova-Tinehpi, linguist Nikolai Poppe ^{[7] was} checked for involvement in the organization of the Chuvash nationalists.

On December 5, 1937, Mikhail Petrov-Tinehpi was sentenced to 10 years in a forced labor camp. July 30, 1938, according to historian E.P. Pogodin, unable to withstand the interrogations ^[8] , Petrov-Tinehpi died in Tsivilsk prison.

Ivan Yakovlev , despite difficult relationships, sympathetically described Mikhail Petrov as an educated and hardworking person, “whom he is promoting to the Chuvash affair, but whom the enemies of this cause do not miss” ^[2] .

In 1955, while preparing for rehabilitation, Marxist workers investigated the historical works of Petrov. In particular, it was stated that they lacked a class approach, and the concept of the Bulgaro-Chuvash continuity was compared with the German racial theory ^[7] . However, in 1956, Mikhail Petrov-Tinehpi was rehabilitated.

The historian Vasily Dimitriev , a supporter of the concept of voluntary accession of the Chuvash Territory to Russia, criticizes the works of Petrov-Tinehpi, in particular, for the sharply negative attitude of the latter to the Russian state . At the same time, Dimitriev positively responds about the personal qualities of a scientific opponent, regarding him as a “highly moral person” who lived a “difficult life” ^[2] .

Philosopher Yury Yakovlev draws attention to the radical changes in Tinehpi’s views after 1917. Before the revolution, he was a church minister, advocating for the Russification of the Chuvash, after that - a Chuvash nationalist and an atheist. This is seen as a special pattern of behavior, "Jesuitism." According to the philosopher, Chuvash enlightener Ivan Yakovlev and his most prominent spiritual students, Mikhail Petrov-Tinehpi and Metri Yuman , tried to go through the vicissitudes of the first half of the 20th century by copying the strategy of modern Jewry ( Ilya Erenburg is given as an example), but they all suffered on this path fails ^[3] .

Since 2001, annual Peter's readings ^[9] have been held in Cheboksary, dedicated to history and museology. The Union of Chuvash ethnographers established a diploma named after M. P. Tinehpi.

• “About Chuvash of Yadrinsky district of Kazan province” (1905)
• "The position of foreigners in the Volga-Kama region and the educational system of N. I. Ilminsky" (1916)
• "On the origin of the Chuvash" (1925)
• “Brief essays from Chuvash history. Part 1 Traces of ancient history "(1928)
• "Simbirsk Chuvash School and Ivan Yakovlevich Yakovlev" (1928)

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