Building on earlier works that examined Tatars in the Volga region based primarily on materials in Russian, scholars more recently have taken us deeper into that community using Tatar sources. Tatar Empire, an exploration of Kazan Tatars’ role in the making of imperial Russia, is a particularly compelling example. Emphasizing the agency of Tatars over their victimhood, Danielle Ross provocatively asserts that the Russian Empire was in part a Tatar project.
As Kazan’s Muslim aristocrats were pressured with conversion starting in the late seventeenth century, other figures—imams, shaykhs, and merchants—emerged to assume leadership in the community. As the empire expanded eastward, they left their homeland around Kazan to found fortresses, towns, trading posts, and villages and thus became “the vanguard of Russia's colonial expansion” (2) and “the eyes and the ears of the Russian forces” (31). Over time, as merchant activity brought greater wealth into the community, Muslim scholars—the ulama—transitioned from “rough-and-tumble frontier preachers and part-time imperial agents into an urbane and learned elite” (83). Literacy and education expanded. Networks of patronage like the one centered on the madrasa in Machkara (Viatka province) prospered. New conceptions of Volga-Ural geography naturalized the joint Russian and Tatar conquest of the south Urals, positing “a homogenously Muslim space” rather than “an invasion of one group by another” (84). Tatars thus proved central to St. Petersburg's success in the east.
That is not to say Tatars were blind servitors of the state; they always had their own interests. By the mid-nineteenth century Petersburg began to discern in Tatars a rival more than a partner, and after 1905 statesmen cast any Muslim challenge to the government's authority as “pan-Islamism.” European conquests meanwhile induced Tatars to regard the broader Islamic world, with which they identified, as being under siege. All of this unleashed intense conflicts within Kazan ulama society. At issue were big questions about the purpose of Islamic education and its relationship to the Russian state, as well as ways of conceptualizing history and claims to authority among different generations. By World War I the ulama and the tsarist state had parted ways, in large measure because the former “persisted in carrying out an enlightenment and empire-building project that interfered with the Russians’ own” (230).
Yet in important ways the Tatar and Russian imperial projects remained intertwined throughout. “Islamic revival in the Volga-Ural region,” writes Ross, “was a result of the imperial government's success in using Kazan Tatars to settle the eastern provinces and to pursue Asiatic trade” (90). The continued Russian advance eastward furthermore allowed Tatars to imagine themselves guiding a much larger Muslim community that included the Kazakh steppe and Central Asia. For example, Kazan Muslims soon viewed Bukhara, long considered a source of true Muslim learning uncorrupted by nonbelievers, with disdain and as needing enlightenment. Ross even posits the appearance of “Kazan Tatar chauvinism” (162). As the empire collapsed in 1917, the Kazan ulama rushed to fill the vacuum but ultimately antagonized the country's other Muslims, who had no desire to see one form of imperialism replace another.
Several attributes distinguish this work, starting with the book's chronological breadth. Especially refreshing is Ross's sustained attention to the early-modern period: key elements of the story emerge precisely because she takes a long view that reveals deeper undercurrents. Noteworthy also is Ross's unusually extensive reliance on Tatar sources, which allow her to identify networks and to comprehend the place of prominent Tatars within them. “Interpersonal relationships trumped institutions (53),” writes Ross, and her account therefore pays particular attention to individuals (it can be hard at times to keep track of them all). Ross furthermore reveals that the reform movement known as jadidism represented less of a break with the past than we have previously supposed and instead reflected dynamics of change internal to the Tatar community, many extending back to the eighteenth century. Ross questions the proposition that Volga-Ural Muslim culture was secularizing as the twentieth century approached. Rather, she insists, Islam remained central to the nation's future for almost everyone, and was something “evolving and expanding rather than retreating” (11). Above all, she shows that Tatars in Russia could be both objects and agents of imperialism.
This is a thoughtful and informative book that offers numerous fresh insights. For scholars of Islam in Russia and Russian imperial rule, Tatar Empire represents essential reading.
