A detailed academic treatise of the history of nationality in Tatarstan. The book demonstrates how state collapse and national revival influenced the divergence of worldviews among ex-Soviet people in Tatarstan, where a political movement for sovereignty (1986-2000) had significant social effects, most saliently, by increasing the domains where people speak the Tatar language and circulating ideas associated with Tatar culture. Also addresses the question of how Russian Muslims experience quotidian life in the post-Soviet period. The only book-length ethnography in English on Tatars, Russia’s second most populous nation, and also the largest Muslim community in the Federation, offers a major contribution to our understanding of how and why nations form and how and why they matter – and the limits of their influence, in the Tatar case.
In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.
A History of Tatarstan: The Russian Yoke and the Vanishing Tatars surveys the history of the Tatar people living along the Volga river. It argues that the Volga Tatars were Russia’s first colonized people and after their subjugation in 1552, the Tatars have been continually mistreated by their Russian rulers, even when the nature of the Russian regime changed over time. For a long period the Tatars managed to evade overly deep Russian intrusion into their lives, after the middle of the 1850s Russian and Soviet authorities obliterated their traditional way of life. Despite efforts at restoring a measure of Tatar independence in the 1990s, russification has led to a marked fall in those identifying as Tatar in the Russian Federation pointing at the possibility of a disappearance altogether of the Volga Tatars.
In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnes Nilufer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region's Krashens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.The traditional view holds that the apostates had really been Muslim all along or that their conversions had been forced by the state or undertaken voluntarily as a matter of convenience. In Kefeli’s view, this argument vastly oversimplifies the complexity of a region where many participated in the religious cultures of both Islam and Orthodox Christianity and where a vibrant Krashen community has survived to the present. By analyzing Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, Kefeli shows how traditional education, with Sufi mystical components, helped to Islamize Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples in the Kama-Volga countryside and set the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia.Of particular interest is Kefeli’s emphasis on the role that Tatar women (both Krashen and Muslim) played as holders and transmitters of Sufi knowledge. Today, she notes, intellectuals and mullahs in Tatarstan seek to revive both Sufi and modernist traditions to counteract new expressions of Islam and promote a purely Tatar Islam aware of its specificity in a post-Christian and secular environment.
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading A history of the Tatar peoples covers a huge expanse of territory, time, and the rise and fall of many Tatar communities. As such, they played a role in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East over several centuries, and from Genghis Khan to Ivan the Terrible and Josef Stalin, some of history's most infamous tyrants have played a key role in this story. Crucially, the history of the Tatars is one that seems to take place at the fringes of the great empires. Geographically the Tatars descend from several parts of Asia, particularly Central Asia, but the Crimean region has been the nexus of several great power rivalries and numerous conflicts. Yet the Crimean Tatars endured through many of these, aligning themselves with a number of larger powers and developing a reputation as fearsome warriors. Today the Tatars are mainly linked with and live in the Volga region of the Russian Federation. Indeed, Tatarstan is a republic in modern Russia. The "Volga Tatars" are perhaps the best known of the peoples known as Tatars and today number about 5 million people. Yet, other Tatars and those descending from Tatars also live in modern Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey and many other countries in Europe and former Soviet republics. What, then, defines a Tatar? Historically, Tatars have been considered ethnically Turkic and related to Central (and North) Asian peoples. In practice, this meant the Turkic and Mongol peoples that were predominantly nomadic or semi-nomadic. Tatars, for the most part, converted to Islam and their lands, once settled, were punctuated by mosques and Islamic religious practices. Perhaps the best example of Tatar culture that survives today is in the Kazan region of Tatarstan around the Volga River, for instance the Kul-Sharif mosque in Kazan. As the centuries progressed, the Tatars came to represent an important group within Russia and its surrounding countries, as not only members of those societies but also sitting slightly outside the establishment. One example would be Ukraine, where the Crimean Tatars were important players in the politics and trade of the region, but who were essentially independent until the Russian Empire came to dominate the Crimean Peninsula. The Tatars represented a unique fusion of Central Asian culture, style and practices and in many ways represent the crossroads between east and west. However, for centuries they also represented the marauding hordes of eastern invaders who remained in the Ukraine and Russia region and appeared to be engaged in perpetual war. Once the Tatars had been incorporated into the Russian Empire and then its successor the Soviet Union, they were often discriminated against. In the case of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's rule, that meant deportation as "suspicious" fifth columnists. The Tatars would fight for repatriation up until the end of the Soviet period and beyond. The Tatars: The History of the Tatar Ethnic Groups and Tatar Confederation looks at the origins of the ethnic groups, their place in medieval times, and their impact on various modern nations. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Tatars like never before.
Katherine E. Graney examines one of the most important, puzzling, and ignored developments of the post-Soviet period: the persistence of the claim to possess state sovereignty by the ethnic republic of Tatarstan, one of the constituent members of the Russian Federation. In the first book by a Western scholar in English to chronicle the efforts made by the leadership of the Russian republic of Tatarstan to build and retain state sovereignty, Graney explores the many different dimensions of Tatarstan's move to become independent. By showing the "sovereignty project" that the Tatarstani people have begun in order to realize their vision of becoming a separate political, social, and economic entity within the Russian Federation, Graney makes the case that this Tatarstani movement will significantly influence Russia's contemporary development in important and heretofore unrecognized ways. This book provides new insight into tackling policy issues regarding inter-ethnic relations and cultural pluralism within Russia, as well as within other European nations currently facing the same policy dilemmas.
Straddling Europe and Asia, the Russian Federation is the largest country in the world and home to a panoply of religious and ethnic groups from the Muslim Tatars to the Buddhist Buryats. Over the past 40 years, Russia has experienced the most dramatic transformation of any modern state. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Russian Federation provides insight into this rapidly developing country. This volume includes coverage of pivotal movements, events, and persons in the late Soviet Union (1985-1991) and contemporary Russia (1991-present), This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Russian Federation contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russia.
Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.
The pearl in the tsar's crown -- Dispossession: the loss of the Crimean homeland -- Dar al Harb: the nineteenth-century Crimean Tatar migrations to the Ottoman Empire -- Vatan: the construction of the Crimean fatherland -- Soviet homeland: the nationalization of the Crimean Tatar identity in the USSR -- Surgun: the Crimean Tatar exile in Central Asia -- Return: the Crimean Tatar migrations from Central Asia to the Crimean Peninsula
