Volga Tatars: Continuing Resilience in the Age of Uncertainty 18

Volga Tatars: Continuing Resilience in the Age of Uncertainty 18 Renat Shaykhutdinov Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 316 Historical Background: The Origins of People and Name ..................................... 317 Early Contacts with the Muscovy/Russia ....................................................... 319 Tatars and the Imperial Russia: Suppression, Resilience, and Reform . ...................... 320 Transition from Communism: New Hopes and Regrets ........................................ 322 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 327 Cross-References ................................................................................ 328 References ....................................................................................... 328 Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to trace social and political processes of Volga, or Kazan, Tatars – the largest ethnic minority in the Russian Federation and one of the largest stateless ethnonational groups of Europe and the world. In doing so, some of the major developments concerning Tatar history, traditions, and their interaction with the Russian state will be surveyed. In addition to some of the key scholarship on Tatars published in English, several Russian- and Tatar-language sources will be employed. Following the introductory remarks, the origins of the people and their name will be examined alongside their early history. Competition with the Russian lands and the consequences of the loss of statehood will then be discussed. These include strategies of resilience, especially efforts at reforming culture, tradition, and the way of thinking. Post-communist struggle for greater self-governance, achievement of the power-sharing treaty with Moscow, and the post-Yeltsin policies will also be investigated. Brief assessment of the prospect of Tatar survival will be offered in the concluding section. R. Shaykhutdinov (*) Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 315 S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2898-5_148 316 R. Shaykhutdinov Keywords Volga (Kazan) Tatars · Russian Federation · Tatarstan · Idel-Ural · Volga-Urals region Introduction Volga, or Kazan, Tatars are a nation autochthonous to the Volga–Urals region located in the eastern part of the East European Plain at the confluence of the Volga (İdel) and Kama (Çulman) rivers “whose current republic of Tatarstan (one of 21 within the Russian Federation), ranks among Russia’s most prosperous, highly developed and industrialized regions” (Daulet 2003, 3). Tatars boast rich political tradition; they speak a version of the Kypchak Turkic language and culturally and linguistically are close to the neighboring Bashkirs and Chuvash (Tanrısever 2001, 46). According to the ranking of top 100 most spoken languages in the world compiled by the Ethnologue in 1996 and updated in 1999, the Tatar language with its 8 million speakers occupied the 95th position globally; was among top 21 European languages (including Turkish), ahead of several official EU languages; and was the second most commonly spoken minority language of Europe (after Lombard) (Grimes 1996). The demographic attrition of the Tatar-speaking population is now counted in millions in just a handful of years between two Russian censuses. As such, the Tatar language has likely ceded its positions drastically. In fact, by 2009 the Ethnologue would exclude Tatar from the global top 100, downgrading the language to a still close 101st position (6.5 mln speakers) (Lewis 2009). Nevertheless, the language, culture, and legacy of Volga Tatars do remain an important phenomenon on a global ethnonational landscape. Tatars are still widely considered to be “Russia’s biggest minority” (Massimo 2015). They are currently one of the largest, if not the largest, stateless ethnonational groups in Europe. Following a rich history of independent statehood, people that came to be known Volga Tatars were the first non-Slavic and non-Christian people to be fused into the Muscovy, paving the way for that (proto-)Russian state to eventually become a conti- nental empire. Alongside the history of conflict with Russia, Tatars were nevertheless instrumental in Moscow’s expansion to Central Asia in a later period of czarist rule. Experiencing periodical campaigns, targeting their identity and very existence, and masterminded or condoned by the Russian state, Tatars nevertheless benefitted immensely from brief periods of Russia’s liberalization and cooling off of its imperial and “civilizing” zeal. Short-lived political opportunities coupled with growing concerns about their existence within the Russian state led to the formation of a reform movement among Volga Tatars that aimed at reevaluating their values, culture, and thought system and has been widely considered among the most far-reaching reformist endeavors in the Islamic world. Among their major aspiration was greater self-governance, which included a maximal desire for the formation of their own state, during the czarist, communist, and post-communist periods. During much of their history, and perhaps most tellingly, at present, these aspirations have been fueled and undercut by 18 Volga Tatars: Continuing Resilience in the Age of Uncertainty 317 assimilationist policies of the Russian state. These developments will be expanded on in the rest of the chapter. The title of this chapter draws on two important books, one published at the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1986 – The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience – by historian Azade-Ayşe Rorlich was the “first Western-language study of the history of the Volga Tatars” (1986, xv) and for a long time perhaps the most authoritative study on that nation. Another is by Alan-G. Gagnon (2014) – a renowned scholar of ethnicity and federalism – who recently published a study that examines minorities at “the age of uncertainty.” Resilience and uncertainty inform and set a tone for the rest of this chapter where, from this author’s perspec- tive, a brief but comprehensive account of historical and contemporary developments will be provided. Both terms of resilience and uncertainty, however, should be qualified for space and time, in which Volga Tatars find themselves. Resilience provides a positive outlook suggesting that Tatars are able and willing to recover from stresses placed upon them in history and perhaps even more so by contemporary challenges. Whether Tatars’ resilience has limits or will help them survive as a distinct collectivity is nevertheless an open question as their resilience is tested hard by the current “age of uncertainty” in which many ethnonational minorities are faced with adverse state policies having little hope for redress and justice. State actors often act in subtle manner, engaging in ethnocide, cultural, and linguistic genocide, but stopping short of outright ethnic cleansing. Such instances, including one in which Volga Tatars find themselves, may even be dubbed as hybrid ethnocide. The age of uncertainty at the level of general dominant discourse spells an uncertain future driven by “objective” forces of history, and is supposed to result in “neutral,” “natural,” and even favorable outcomes for these groups. However, alternative views suggest that such future is far from uncertain and will bring about unfavorable, if not ominous, consequences to ethnic groups pushed by the actions of their “host” states. This contradiction of the new age is perhaps illustrated well by Valery Tishkov, a former Russian cabinet minister for nationality affairs and ex-head of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, in a recent interview: “no peoples [in Russia] have disappeared” in the last 20 years. Yet, “if the 20th century was the century of minorities, the 21st will be the century of majorities.” In Russia, “Assim- ilation is also helping the ethnic Russians [...P]eople who live in Orthodox culture are making a voluntary choice in favor of Russian culture and the Russian language” (Goble 2016a). At one level, this quote gives hope for the survival of Russia’s ethnic minorities, but at another points to their hybrid disappearance. Historical Background: The Origins of People and Name Volga Tatars have also been called Kazanis (Qazanlılar), Bulgars (Bolğarilär), Mishars (Mişärlär), and Tatars (Tatarlar). However well into the mid-nineteenth century, they were called and favored to be called as Muslims (Rorlich 1986, 3), perhaps not unlike the Bosniaks. Both the ethnonym (name) and ethnogenesis 318 R. Shaykhutdinov (origins and subsequent development) of Volga Tatars are subject to scholarly and popular debates which bear major political and even individual psychological implications. As Shafiga Daulet (Şafiğa Däwlät) points out, the ethnonym Tatar is associated with massive brutality and all things negative. Consequently, many in Russia and elsewhere think that violence and repression, past and present, directed against the Volga Kazani population is well-justified. Daulet counters this reasoning suggesting that the indigenous people of Volga-Urals have long professed a tradition of peace and nonviolence and suffered immensely from both the Mongol and Russian brutality. She also claims that they have been ashamed and reluctant to own and use Tatar as their ethnonym

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