Tatarovedenie and the "New Historiography in the Soviet Union: Revising the Interpretation of the Tatar-Russian Relationship (original) (raw)
Related papers
NEW TRENDS IN WORLD HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE HISTORY OF TATARS
The Russian (including Soviet) historiography has been trying for a long time to eliminate the “Tatars” from Russian history. In fact, the Russian historians are unwilling to admit that the Tatars and the states they had formed dominated Russia for almost 300 years (13th-15th centuries). Moreover, nationalist Russian historians deny the real and significant contribution of the Tatars in the formation and development of the Russian state centred on the Grand Duchy of Moscow. For hundreds of years – and still today – Russia has been propagating a negative image of the Tatars with the subsequent aim of justifying the systemic invasion of the territories that once belonged to the Tatars. The chief preoccupation of the Russian historiography is related to the imperial legitimacy, a highly relevant issue for Russia. The Russian rulers have adopted the tile of ‘tsar’ (emperor) in 1547, when Ivan the Terrible ascended to the Muscovite throne. The Russian politics focused on the conquest and destruction of the Tatar states, first the Tatar khanate of Kazan in 1552, then the other Tatars khanates (Astrakhan, Kasim, Siberia, Nogay, and, eventually, Crimea). These politics were dictated by the wish of the self-proclaimed Russian emperor to legitimize his new position in the world and in history. The only imperial justification that the Russian tsars could make was with the inheritance of the great empire of the Golden Horde (1242-1502). To this view, the Russian tsars prioritised the conquest of the abovementioned Tatar states that remained of the Golden Horde so as to present themselves as the upholders of this empire. The Russian tsars appropriated imperial titles and symbols of the Golden Horde, being constantly preoccupied with the recognition of their imperial power by the whole world. Thus, the Eurasia project was put into practice, designed precisely on the immense area once belonging to the Golden Horde. But, as the Golden Horde was a state of Turk-Islamic (Tatar) essence, it did not formally correspond to the plans and pretentions of the pravoslavnic Russian empire. Hence, the obsessive desire to remove the Tatars from history and to mystify the substance of the Golden Horde. Nowadays, with the naïve or biased support of foreign, namely Western, historians, there are attempts to break the organic ties of the Tatar people with the greatest state in its history – the Golden Horde. In many recent works, including under the aegis of renowned publishing houses in the U.S.A., the Mongol appellative is used instead of the Tatar name, even for the khanates that were heirs of the Golden Horde. There is a clear attempt to remove Tatars from history. This study starts from two volumes recently published in the U.S.A. and present the historical and current resources of this new campaign directed against the Tatars, whose historical lands were abducted also by Russia.
Tatars and Imperialist Wars: From the Tsar's Servitors to the Red Warriors
Ab Imperio, 2020
Drawing on the accounts of Tatar soldiers and Muslim chaplains as well as the Tatar press, this article probes the ways in which the Russo-Turkish War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan Wars shaped Volga-Ural Muslim literati discourse concerning citizenship, the nation’s body and soul, and its fates in a growingly violent world order. It concludes that all these elements were crucial to Tatar political workers of the Red Army for finding solutions to their coreligionists’ sufferings from the imperialist wars in Bolshevik class universalism, which drove their fellow soldiers from the Great War to the Civil War.
Russian English history relations.docx
The article is published in http://www.viaevrasia.com/documents/5.%20GALYA%20CLARK.%20THE%20NORFOLK%20ARCHIVES.pdf Maritime mutual relations, from Napoleonic wars to Soviet Russia. Interesting personal stories, hiden in a bunch of old letters.
Saint Petersburg served from the end of the nineteenth century as a transit point for Mishär Tatars moving to the Grand Duchy of Finland. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a small community had already formed in Finland, but its members maintained regular contacts with their relatives and connections in the Sergach district (Nizhny Novgorod province), Saint Petersburg and other regions. Contrary to common belief, these ties were not interrupted even after the October Revolution of 1917. Throughout most of the 1920s, Tatars and others crossed the Soviet-Finnish border illegally. Tatars living in independent Finland also sent considerable financial aid to their contacts in Leningrad with the help of couriers. The nature of the ties between the Tatar emigrants in Finland and the Tatars of Leningrad can be illustrated by the materials of one criminal case. This case was instituted by the Soviet political police against representatives of the Tatar Muslim community in Leningrad in 1931. Only after several arrests and tightening border control was communication between the Tatars in Finland and Leningrad interrupted. I suggest that the Mishär Tatars in Leningrad and Finland constituted a single social and cultural space until the 1930s, when the connections between them were blocked. The ensuing divide had a large impact on the identity of the Tatars living in Finland, who began developing a separate Finnish Tatar identity just a few years after the termination of contacts.
The category of ‘Tatars’ both in Russian socio-political history and in Russian folk and academic taxonomies has never been stable, and has always been a collective appellation, refer-ring to populations of various ethnic backgrounds speaking in languages of Turkic family. At var-ious times in the history of Russia, the category included Azerbaijanis, Karachai and Balkars, Khakass, Shors, some of the peoples of Altai (Western Siberia), Crimean Tatars, Chulyms, and others. Most often these groups were also Moslems, but this never was a rule. There were periods in Russian history when almost any perceptibly ‘oriental’ group within the territory of the state had been assigned the name of Tatars with a regional specification (Chern’ Tatars, Minusinsk Ta-tars, Southern Shore Tatars etc.). Soviet census categorization is taken as a starting point to analyze recognition policies throughout Soviet and post-Soviet periods.