Volga Tatars - Orientation

Identification. The Volga Tatars are the westernmost of all Turkic ethnic groups living in the former Soviet Union. Among them, there are two major groups, the Kazan Tatars and the Mishars, who share a common literary language and culture despite ethnogenetic and linguistic particularities. The Volga Tatars live mainly in Tatarstan and Bashkirstan in Russia, but they can also be found in large numbers in other areas of Russia as well as in the republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in particular. As late as the second half of the nineteenth century, Volga Tatars preferred to identify themselves and to be identified by others as "Mösälman" (Muslims), in addition to using ethnonyms such as "Kazanlï," "Bulghar," and "Mishär." The Russians and other peoples identified them simply as "Tatars," a practice which often led to confusion, since Russians used the ethnonym to designate any Muslim of Turkic ethnic background living in European Russia and the Caucasus. The ethnonym "Tatar" was less than universally embraced because the popular as well as official identification of the Volga Tatars with the Mongol Tatars of the thirteenth century was at the root of the stigma attached to it. The ethnonym "Tatar" was controversial then, a quality it retained into the 1990s, when glasnost and perestroika made possible the renewal of the ethnonymic debates. The name of their homeland has changed since the tenth century from "Bulghar" to "Kazan," "Idel-Ural," and "Tatarstan" or "Tataria." In the Soviet system, their titular republic was called Tatarstan Avtonomiyale Sovet Sotsialistik Respublikase. Tatarstan is presently part of the Russian Federation formed in 1992.

Location. Most Volga Tatars live in the middle Volga's forest and forest-steppe zone (Tatarstan) and in the southern Ural Mountains (Bashkirstan), an area encompassing 211,600 square kilometers. The ecology, economy, culture, and history of the region have been shaped to a great extent by the rivers that cross it: Volga, Kama, Viatka, Sura, Sviaga, Belaia, and Samara.

Demography. According to the 1989 census data, there were some 6,645,588 Volga Tatars in the Soviet Union, a 7.4 percent increase compared to their numerical strength in 1979. Of these, less than 50 percent live in their historic homeland, the middle Volga-Ural region. The average population density per square kilometer is approximately 50.5 in the middle Volga region and 26.8 in the southern Ural area. Volga Tatars are one of the most urbanized ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union: 62.1 of those Volga Tatars who live in Tatarstan proper live in cities, compared to 50.3 of those Volga Tatars who live in other parts of Russia. Those who live in the republics of Central Asia enjoy levels of urbanization below 30 percent.

linguistic Affiliation. Volga Tatars speak a language belonging to the West Turkic, Kipchak, or Kïpchak-Bulghar Group. Volga Tatars have a single literary language, based on the Kazan dialect, but there are three main dialectal divisions based on lexical, phonetic, and morphological differences: Central (around Kazan), Western or Mishar (spoken by Tatars outside Tatarstan), and Eastern or Siberian. Regardless of dialect, Volga Tatar retains a Persian and Arabic influence in its vocabulary, in addition to the strong influence of Russian. The Arabic script, which the ancestors of the Volga Tatars adopted when they chose Islam as their religion in 922, was for more than a millennium the vehicle for the development of a rich literature, and indeed, the backbone of Tatar culture and civilization. In 1927, in the aftermath of the decision of the 1926 Turcological Congress held in Baku, it was replaced with a Latin script, which was, in turn, replaced with a Cyrillic script in 1939. Today Volga Tatars still use the Cyrillic script, but recent debates in the press have challenged the wisdom of the two previous alphabet changes.