An Unpublished Commentary by Fuad Tuktarov

This article includes the text of an unpublished commentary by Fuad Tuktarov, a prominent Tatar political and public figure of the beginning of the 20th century. The author of the article found the document in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Tuktarov wrote this commentary in January 1925 in Berlin. It was intended to be published in the Russian immigrant newspaper Dni. In his commentary, Tuktarov considers the issue of the system of parliamentary elections and underlines the deficiencies of the proportional system. The commentory was not published, supposedly because of the critique Tuktarov directed against some prominent Russian political figures,who then were in charge of the newspaper. The text of the commentary is accompanied with biographical information on Fuad Tuktarov and the author’s comments on the content of the document and its significance in shedding light on peculiarities of Tuktarov’s world-view and his journalistic activities in Europe. In the author’s opinion, the originality of Tuktarov’s thougts comes to light in the fact that at the very beginning of the Bolshevik rule hewas able to makeshrewd assessment of political realities in new Russia, describing the character of its power-holding structures as ‘monarchic-communist’