In A History of Tatarstan, Kees Boterbloem brings his masterful understanding of empire to the history of the Volga Tatars, a people whose unique identity emerged in the tenth century and persists through this day. The book is divided into seven parts consisting of twenty-seven chapters. With the exception of the first five chapters in Part I, which lays out historiography and major concepts, the book is chronologically organized. Periods concentrate around conventional milestones of Slavic history: pre-Mongolian emergence, identity formation following Mongol collapse, Russian imperialism, and Sovietization.
According to Boterbloem, Volga Tatars emerged into the historic record alongside the Eastern Slavs. Their histories have been intertwined ever since. Boterbloem parallels the Bolghar Tatar conversion to Islam in 922 with the Slavic adoption of Christianity. Both peoples, he suggests, adopted religions of their more powerful political and military allies to combat each other. Drawing upon Serhii Plokhy’s discussion of national emergence of the Eastern Slavs (71), Boterbloem points to the formation of a proto-Volga Tatar state in the decades between Mongol collapse and the ascendance of Muscovy.
Rather than consolidating their position as a powerful independent khanate, however, the Volga Tatars fell to Ivan IV’s brutalizing campaign characterized by holy war and ethnic cleansing. The invading force massacred and expelled Tatars from Kazan with a goal of transforming the khanate capital into a Christian city. Thereafter, the Russian empire vacillated between policies of assimilation and persecution. Ivan IV and subsequent Russian rulers styled themselves as khans to make themselves more palatable to their Muslim subjects. They also incorporated Volga Tatars into the warrior elite. Intermittently and over long stretches of time, Russian rulers permitted cultural autonomy. Meanwhile, imperial projects carefully curated a pro-Russian version of Volga Tatar identity, and eroded or destroyed monuments to Tatars’ pre-Russian past.
Some Volga Tatars actively took part in the project of empire. Still others resisted by joining sporadic rebellions or migrating into more remote areas beyond easy penetration of imperial bureaucracy. By the late nineteenth century, Volga Tatar politicians emerged with programs featuring self-determination, as well as the project of a greater Tatar-Bashkir-Chuvash republic, the Idel-Ural state. Other movements, whether pan-Islam, Ismail Gaspirali’s Jadidism, or Bolghar nationalism, gained traction among Tatar intellectuals. Mostly, however, the majority of Volga Tatars adapted to Russian imperial rule in something of a truce based on their expectations of cultural autonomy. With the onset of the twentieth century, however, industrialization, war, Revolution, and Stalinization obliterated terms of the unspoken truce, and the imperial remnants of Tatar autonomy disintegrated.
The Bolsheviks established Tatarstan in 1920. Truncated borders sliced out one-third of those who identified as Tatars. Citing multiple studies, Boterbloem argues the new borders reflected a thin compromise between state allegiance to the principle of self-determination on one hand, and real-politik aims to crush dreams of an Idel-Ural Republic on the other. Furthermore, the Soviets actively reinforced historic divisions among Tatars, Chuvash, and Bashkirs.
Taken as a whole, the Soviet period proved catastrophic for the Volga Tatars. Ten percent of the population perished during the famine of the early 1920s; Tatar leaders like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, were imprisoned and/or executed. Death estimates during collectivization and the 1930s famine range upwards to one-third of the approximately 3 million people who lived in Tatarstan. Stalinism further assaulted Tatar religious practices and cultural identity through censorship and suppression, and later through Terror, arrests, and execution. It is no wonder that the Volga Tatars declared sovereignty August 30, 1990. Equally, it is not surprising that the Russian Federation’s war with Chechnya a few years later quickly dampened aspirations for independence. Capitalism did what compulsion could not, when young Tatars consciously adopted the language and culture of economic security as the 1990s wore on.
As Boterbloem points out, the Volga Tatars are among the earliest colonized subjects of the Russian empire. Their long-term preservation of religious autonomy demonstrated an ability to influence the Russian imperial system, even in the face of intensive waves of persecution. By the epilogue, however, Boterbloem argues that the Tatar culture that barely survived Stalinism is now in danger of vanishing. After 500 years, through coercion and compulsion, the imperial project has nearly achieved its goal. In his historical narrative of the Volga Tatars, Boterbloem highlights an important European people, and provides a valuable addition to the field.
