Volga Tatars - History and Cultural Relations

The Volga Tatars are the descendants of the Kïpchak Turkic peoples who inhabited the western wing of the Mongol Empire, the ulus of Dzhuchi. Despite the fact that the issue of their ethnogenesis is still being hotly debated among scholars, Soviet and Western alike, there is agreement that by the sixteenth century, Volga Tatars were living in the area of the middle Volga River, which included the northern lands of the former Muslim state of the Turkic people called "Bulghar." Displaced from the Azov steppes by frequent Arab campaigns, the Bulghars had penetrated the middle Volga and lower Kama river regions in the first half of the eighth century. When their territory was conquered and devastated by the Mongol army of Batu Khan in 1236, most of the survivors moved north, to the land beyond the Kama River. The Mongol conquerors, who organized their possessions north of the Black and Azov seas into a state that came to be known as the Golden Horde, never aimed at transforming the conquered lands in accordance with a Mongol Weltanschauung. As a result, the area became a veritable melting pot and the ancestors of the Volga Tatars, the Bulghars and the Kïpchak Turkic tribes inhabiting the lands of the Horde, participated in the ethnic and cultural syntheses that emerged.

The people of the khanate of Kazan that emerged in 1445 after the disintegration of the Golden Horde, were the product of these syntheses, and they wrote an important chapter in the history of the Volga Tatars. Despite the brevity of its life as a free political entity, (1445-1552) the khanate of Kazan exhibited socioeconomic dynamism and cultural vitality. It was during this period that the process of the ethnogenesis of the people we identify today as the Volga Tatars entered its final stages, and their language took shape as a distinct branch of the Turkic languages.

Ivan's conquest of Kazan in 1552 brought about the demise of the khanate as an independent political entity. The assimilationist policies imposed by the Russian state on the population of the khanate between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries ranged from forced conversion to economic coercion and cultural assimilation through education. The Tatars responded by fueling the social unrest of their homeland with their discontent, joining peasant rebellions such as those of S. Razin (1667-1771) and E. Pugachev (1773-1775).

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Volga Tatars were articulating new responses to the Russification policies of their government: they embarked upon a multifaceted movement of cultural reform and renewal called jadidism (from usul-u-jadid, "the new method of teaching"). The main goal of the movement was to achieve a harmonious balance between secularism and religion and between isolation and integration in their search for solutions and correctives to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural problems that preoccupied their communities. This movement received an added impetus during the years of political pluralism that followed the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. It was further aided by the emergence of a dynamic Tatar-language press and book-publishing businesses. Journals such as Shura and newspapers such as Vagt were known among the Muslims of the Russian Empire and beyond. Religious reformers such as Sh. Merjani, M. J. Bigi, R. Fahreddin, A. Bubi, and others sought to bring about a renewal from within by returning to the pristine purity of the dogma, whereas poets such as A. Tukay—the national poet of the Volga Tatars—and intellectuals and politicians such as Y. Akchura and S. Maksudi addressed issues concerning Volga Tatar identity and political life. In the brief intermezzo between 1905 and 1917 the Volga Tatars actively participated in the political life of the empire, providing the bulk of the Muslim deputies for the four Russian dumas, becoming the main force behind the emergence of a Muslim political caucus (Ittifak-al-Muslimin), and joining parties that belonged to the entire breadth of the Russian political spectrum.

The revolutions of 1917 brought about hopes of establishing a Volga Tatar state. Their attempt to set up an independent Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state as a federation of the Turkic peoples living in that region failed, however. Instead, on 27 May 1920, the territory at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama—where only approximately 40 percent (1,169,342) of the Volga-Ural Tatars lived—was organized as the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent units of the Russian Federation. The bulk of the remaining Volga Tatars were placed under the jurisdiction of the Bashkir Republic, organized on 23 March 1919, and others under those of the adjoining territories of western Siberia, beyond the Urals and Central Asia.

The demise of the plans for a Volga-Ural federation, as well as the renewal of Russification policies under the guise of proletarian internationalism, contributed to the emergence of national communism in the 1920s. The theoretician of national communism was M. Sulvan Galiev (purged in 1928); one of its most remarkable cultural manifestations was the defense of Tatar national culture (language, Arabic script, religion, traditions).

The purges of the 1930s eliminated national communism as a political issue among the Volga Tatars, but in the post-World War II years its cultural manifestations endured in scholarship, as well as literature and the arts.

Today, the Volga Tatars participate actively in the economic life of their region, which is rich in gas and oil resources and a leader in the heavy machinery and chemical industries. Since 1985 they have been actively using the openness of the Gorbachev era in an attempt to both reclaim their past and participate in the decision-making process that will affect their future. Some of the most spectacular developments since 1985 are an upsurge of interest in Islam, coinciding in 1989 with the celebration of 1,100 years since the adoption of Islam by their ancestors; rehabilitation of major cultural and political figures such as M. J. Bigi, A. Ishaki, and M. Sulvan Galiev; defense of the national language, which unfolded in the campaign to make Tatar the official language of Tatarstan; and sovereignty for Tatarstan.