Since the beginning of perestroika, the peoples of the former Soviet Union have been rewriting their histories, and in the almost twenty years since then, much has changed in the historiography. This holds true not only for the member states of the CIS, but also for the different peoples of Russia. In recent years, the Volga Tatars’ attempts to establish new historical narratives have been analyzed.^[1] Among the prominent scholars interested in post-Soviet historiography have been not only historians belonging to the post-Soviet space, like Victor Shnirelman or Salavat Iskhakov, but also Western scholars in Europe, North America, and Japan, here mainly affiliated to the Slavic Research Centre at Sapporo University. This center is the organizational framework for a number of research projects on the CIS, one of which was “The New Era and Nations in Eastern Europe and Central Eurasia.” The first publication of this project, which focused on attempts to Christianize the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Volga-Ural region, has already attracted interest.^[2]
The present book, like the first one (and like all the other projects of the Slavic Research Centre), is a joint project of historians from Japan and from several regions in Russia. It is divided into four parts: in the first one methodological aspects are covered, while the second part focuses on “macro-regional interactions between nations.” The third part deals with the role of nations in the (Russian) imperial system, and the fourth is about the formation of present-day nations.
Since the first article of the first section, Tomohiko Uyama’s brilliant analysis of the Tatar, Chuvash, and Bashkir ethnogenesis is only a slightly modified version of the original, published in English,^[3] it is not necessary to give a lengthy review. Instead, we may just confine ourselves to presenting his most important and paradoxical conclusion. According to Uyama, the historiographical discourses of these three peoples hardly interact with each other at all: each group has managed to develop specific discourses that exist independently from the narratives of the other Volga-Ural peoples. Taking into account, for instance, that Tatars and Bashkirs share a closely intertwined past (both are Turkic peoples, 90 percent of the vocabularies of both languages is identical, the majority of both peoples once professed Islam), this statement might seem surprising.
In the second article, Igor Kuchumov dwells on the development of historiographical discourses in Bashkortostan since the beginning of the 1990s. In his introduction, he rightly points out that to most Soviet researchers, the Bashkir ethnogenesis seemed to be an inexplicable mystery: it was only in 1974 that R. G. Kuzeev could establish the (still disputed) fact that the Bashkirs are not autochthonous in the region they now inhabit. In previous years, the theory of Bashkir autochthony had been a dogma not to be questioned. Even famous researchers like S. I. Rudenko, whose research on Bashkir material culture is still regarded as seminal, had to give in to the apparently wrong autochthony thesis.
One would be absolutely wrong to assume that the end of the Soviet system gave way to non-ideological approaches to history in Bashkortostan. On the contrary, historical science has been replaced by mythology. Throughout the 1990s Bashkortostan became a laboratory for ethno-genetic theories, one more fantastic than the other. One might, for instance, think of the works of Salavat Gallyamov, who traces Bashkir influences even in Ancient Egypt and finds striking parallels between Bashkirs and Kurds, which he explains by looking at the similarities in the ethnonym (“Bashqort” and “Kurd”).
Kuchumov chooses an adequate approach to these theories: instead of deconstructing their arguments by a thorough content-analysis (which would have taken them undeservingly serious), he asks for the reasons why these theories were put forward and questions the framework in which they developed.
A number of articles in the second and third sections of the book deal with the ethno-confessional developments among the Finno-Ugric peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries, but rather than offering new perspectives on the situation, they happen to be good surveys of already established findings. This holds true for Leonid Taimasov’s research on the ethno-confessional situation in Kazan province in the late 19th century, Vladimir Kudriavtsev’s and Ananii Ivanov’s surveys of Mari culture, Valerii Yurchenkov’s article on the Mordovian ethnos, and Vladimir Vladykin’s survey on the Udmurts. All of them cover the subject in a very general way, and it is difficult to see any new findings in them. A small remark on Kudriavtsev’s article has to be made: his attempt to find traces of cultural interaction between the Mari and the Volga Bulgarians in folklore and national costumes is hardly convincing, as it lacks hard evidence, which of course is due to the subject itself: only in very rare cases it is possible to trace the exact origin of national costumes. Nevertheless, Kudriavtsev’s basic idea of showing that cultural interaction has deep roots is, of course, right.
All the articles in this collection are worth reading as they help to overcome the stereotypical view of a monolithic religious landscape in the Volga-Ural region. But do they really present new findings? Most of the results presented are already commonplace.
Katsunori Nisiyama’s article on the return of baptized Tatars back to Islam offers new insights. Although its subject is closely linked to a well-known theme – the attempts by the Russian missionary Nikolai Ilminskii to convert the Volga-Ural peoples to Orthodox Christianity – Nisiyama manages to offer new findings. In the middle of the 19th century, Orthodox officials witnessed the mass apostasy of baptized Tatars returning to Islam. After this shocking discovery, Orthodox officials rushed to investigate the reasons for the apostasy. The investigator was none other than Nikolai Ilminskii, whose system would later become so famous. Although there is already a certain amount of literature on the Tatars’ return to Islam – for instance, the aforementioned massive apostasy in 1866 has been covered by French and American researchers^[4] – Nisiyama manages to present new findings as the two reports by Ilminskii on the Tatars’ apostasy had not attracted interest until recently. Apart from this, Nisiyama covers the missionary tour the Orthodox clerics organized immediately after they got to know to alarming results of Ilminskii’s reports. It becomes obvious how much importance the Orthodox clerics attached to the fate of the Tatar apostates, and this is also due to the fact that Muslim apostasy was a clear sign of the failure of their missionary attempts.
In total, even if not all of the articles in this collection can be regarded as innovative – some of them just sum up what is already known – the book still offers sufficiently new findings, and readers will appreciate a good survey on the present state of the art in the historiography of the Volga-Ural peoples.