The Russian conquest of the Kazan khanate in the mid-sixteenth century and the ensuing processes of colonization and migration made the indigenous Muslim population of the Volga-Urals a dispersed minority by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the elite of these Muslims came to perceive themselves as a single distinct community, not only in relation to the surrounding non-Muslim neighbours, but also to other Muslim populations within or without the confines of the Russian Empire.
Although territory is one of the most important repositories of nationalism,^[1] research on the processes of state and nation building among the Muslims of the Volga-Urals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has largely ignored their spatial dimensions. Many scholars have been either puzzled and preoccupied by the complex interplay of Islamic and ethno-cultural elements in Muslim national thinking,^[2] or they simply re-projected the success of Soviet social engineering – the imagination and territorialization of a Tatar and a Bashkir nation – into the past.^[3] My contribution seeks to explore the importance of tangible space and imagined homelands in the formation of an increasingly politicized Muslim self-consciousness, and, in perspective, ethnic or national identity during the “long” nineteenth century. I am not going to engage in historical semantics or a detailed Begriffsgeschichte of the notion of “homeland” or “vatan.”^[4] Instead, I will try to summarize – necessarily perfunctory – some long-term developments in the Muslims’ understanding of homeland.
It is a truism of modern social sciences that these concepts are shaped and reshaped by everyday practices, concrete social interactions in time and space. Using the ideas of John Agnew,^[5] my analysis will thus link the micro- and macro-levels by exploring three closely related but analytically distinguishable spatial dimensions:

• The first is the locale, the tangible land in which Muslims actually constituted their social relations.
• The second, location, connotes the geographical area where social and economic interrelations of European Russia’s Muslims were embedded.
• The third relates to the Muslims’ sense of place, that is their discursively defined emotional attachment to an ancestral homeland.

Comparing the developments on the three different levels, my paper explores (1) how synchronous or asynchronous changes on the first two levels affected the Muslims’ sense of place, (2) to what extent the emergence of ethno-cultural definitions of communal identities were related to changes in the representations of homeland, and (3) in how far the failure of nation and state building in 1917 was related to particularities in the Muslims’ perception of space.
The starting point of my investigation is the emergence of a learned discourse among the ulema of the Volga Urals around 1800, when indigenous authors began to perceive and discuss European Russia’s Muslims as a distinct regional Islamic entity. Until 1917, I distinguish four major periods:

1) The first, from the early nineteenth century until the reform era of the 1860/1870, was characterised by an overall stability of all three levels.
2) During the second phase, from around 1870 until 1905, major modifications occurred on the level of location, while the locale remained stable. Regarding the discourse, the notions of homeland developed in the first period were cautiously adapted to changing realities.
3) Between 1905 and 1917, the third period, the Muslims of European Russia were increasingly confronted with gradual changes on the level of the locale and, in the wake of the 1905 revolution, experienced dramatic transformations on the level of location. The earlier consensus on the sense of place was finally lost, and we encounter different attempts at a re-definition.
4) The fourth period from May 1917 to mid-1918, characterized by fundamental political and social upheavals, affected the Muslims on the levels of locale and location again. Contemporary attempts to re-define homeland, however, ceased to be framed by inner-Muslim discourses exclusively, for the territorialization of political visions had become a key issue in revolutionary Russia’s politics.

LOCALE, LOCATION, AND THE “SENSE OF PLACE” IN THE MUSLIM DISCOURSE OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

By the early nineteenth century, a highly complex ethno-demographic setting characterized the territories settled by indigenous Muslims in the Volga-Urals.^[6] The imposition of Russian rule and the subsequent colonization from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries had made the autochthonous population (including the Chuvash and Finno-Ugrians) a demographic minority. In 1857, nearly 75 percent of the local dwellers were Russian, and only 12.3 percent (or 1.8 million) Muslim. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim population was rural, except for the dwellers of the Tatar suburbs of Kazan and Orenburg and some smaller district towns (about 2% of the Muslim population in 1857). The numerically largest groups lived in the gubernia of Orenburg (later divided into Orenburg and Ufa) and Kazan, where their settlements occasionally formed compact populated areas. Generally, though, Muslim communities were scattered among Slavic and Finno-Ugrian villages.^[7]
The autochthonous Muslim population comprised the former “Tatar” subjects of the Khanate of Kazan on both banks of the Volga, and the relatively independent Bashkir tribes of the Ural mountains. Due to the pressure of in-migrating eastern Slavs, substantial parts of the right bank Muslims and smaller groups from the left bank migrated south and east and settled on Bashkir soil. The peculiarities of the Russian penetration and administration had created a very complicated ethno-demographic structure in the Urals. Muslims migrants might either settle by permission of the Bashkir landowners (pripushenniki) or the Russian administration. Some conserved their ethno-regional self-consciousness (Mishars), others developed a distinct ethno-social identity promoted by Russian policy (teptiary). After the suppression of the Bashkir revolts and the pugachevshchina, the Bashkirs were conscribed to the Bashkir military host.^[8] While Muslim and Orthodox peasants rarely lived together in the same village, in central parts of the region ethnically Bashkir and Tatar Muslim occasionally formed common neighborhoods.^[9] Demographically, this setting did not change much over the nineteenth century, except for a slightly higher reproduction rate of Muslims and non-Orthodox subjects, and a tangible increase in the urbanization rate of Muslims, which reached 7.4 per cent (or 120,000 people) in 1897.^[10]
Two strategic decisions in Catherine the Great’s policies toward her Muslim subjects defined the settings on the levels of the locale and the location. First, Catherine renounced the policy of coercive conversion pursued by her predecessors. This policy had forced the Tatar landholders to chose between Islam and their gentry privileges, led to a destruction of Islamic institutions, and had driven the learned men (ulema) underground. The debacle of the Pugachev revolt had unmistakably demonstrated its shortcoming, and Russian authorities now chose to extend the enlightened policies of religious tolerance to their Muslim subjects. The re-emerging Islamic institutions, like mosques and schools, found official recognition. Mosques, schools, and learned men were placed under the supervision of a religious administration modeled after the Ottoman ‘Ilmīye system – the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly. Responsible for the Muslim communities in the Volga-Urals and Siberia, it had been designed both to control and instrumentalize Muslim institutions for state interests.^[11] Muslim reaction to this change of policy remained initially cautious, but in the course of time a growing number of learned men made their peace with the Assembly. It came to sustain the precarious economic situation of the ulema, mosques, and schools.^[12]
Secondly, the Empire privileged Muslim merchants in order to advance the profitable trade with its eastern and south-eastern neighbors. Until the Russian conquest of Turkestan, trading with the steppe nomads and the khanates of Central Asia, as well as processing raw materials bought there, became almost exclusively a business of Muslim merchants and entrepreneurs from Kazan, Orenburg, and Troitsk. This new economic elite replaced the de-privileged nobles and largely financed the rebuilding of Islamic networks. The new Muslim elite adapted to Russian customs only superficially, its bonds to Islam culture and institutions remained essential.^[13] Being “Muslim,” at least for the elite, became the core notion of communal identity.^[14]
Islamic communal institutions thus increasingly determined Muslim life in the Volga-Urals on the level of the locale, despite the significant differences in ethnic background, cultural traditions, and economic practices.^[15] Social mobility except for the elite was low and the everyday life experience of the overwhelmingly rural Muslim population remained confined to this community life, except for occasional encounters on local markets. The new elite, composed of mullas and merchants, by contrast integrated into overarching regional structures – that of the Spiritual Assembly in the first case, and the economic network of Muslim traders and entrepreneurs in the second.^[16]
On the level of location, both networks were increasingly tied to the Russian economy and administration. Economically, the elite mediated between Russian markets and Eurasian producers, and socially between the Russian administration and the Muslim peasantry. Hence geographically, the socio-political location still linked the Volga-Urals loosely to Central Asia and more strongly to the Russian state and its economy. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Islamic discourse of learned men was instrumental for the acquiescence of their co-religionists with Russian rule and the new religious administration. In fact, this discourse blended the “Muslim” identity with older local, tribal, or ethnic traditions and outlined the contours of a particular regional Muslim homeland.^[17]
Allen Frank’s detailed analysis of the Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya, a widely disseminated sacred history of the Muslim community of the Volga-Urals compiled probably between 1818 and 1826, revealed many of the principles that guided these learned men. The Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya circulated in numerous manuscript copies and was repeatedly reprinted in the course of the nineteenth century. It attributed the emergence of this community to the conversion of its Volga-Bulgar ancestors to Islam. It had allegedly been performed by three companions of the Prophet. The manuscript goes on to report a genealogy of their followers. This genealogy included legendary and historical personalities, as well as converted place names (toponyms), and thus established a direct link between contemporary Muslim settlements and the historical and sacral center of Bulghar – the former capital of medieval Volga Bulgaria.^[18] It thus provided the Muslim communities with their own Islamizers and denied the historic role of Central Asia as a spiritual repository. The geographical location of the tombs of these followers essentially corresponded to the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly’s sphere of influence – roughly speaking the territories of the contemporary republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. The last section, a heavily modified chronicle of the deeds of Timur, is again closely related to the realities of early nineteenth century Russian Islam. It contains many allusions to and interpretations of central issues of contemporary Islamic scholarship, and is generally apologetic to Russia rule. In our context it is important to underline the recurrent dissociation from other Islamic rulers in this section. The Ottoman sultan, the Persian shah, and the Chingisids appear as impious rulers punished by Timur, who is depicted as a pious Muslim rather than as a descendent of the Chingisid dynasty.^[19]
According to Frank, the compiler defined “Bulghar” as a community in religious and geographic terms. Listing the Followers, whose names frequently correspond to actual village names or other important landmarks like rivers and towns, the Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya transformed the genealogy into a topography. It provided the individual communities with an overarching regional Muslim identity clearly distinguished from neighboring Islamic communities. Geographically, Bulghar was not limited to the historic Bulghar lands of the Middle Volga and lower Kama region. It included also more distant groups like the Bashkirs and Mishars. These territories taken together were referred to as as vilāyät-i Bulġārda, or šahr-i Bulġār.^[20]
Islamic historiography thus integrated a regional Muslim community and associated it with a given space. Yet, this affiliation was defined by a spiritual center that ceased to exist in the fourteenth century, and it was delineated by the definition of peculiar places. Strictly speaking, there were no borders to enclose this homeland, and it could thus hardly be perceived as a territory. On the other hand, this rather loose composition of geographic spots perfectly reflected the social realities on the level of the locale: dispersed Muslim communities without pre-eminent urban centers, united merely through confessional and economic elite networks. At the same time, it separated the Muslims communities of Volga-Urals from their Central Asian neighbors and implied an acceptance of Russia as the primary location of the Muslim political and economic interaction. The broad dissemination of the Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya and similar works, as well as a large body of learned commentaries, suggest the popularity of this delineation well into the nineteenth century.

READJUSTING THE LOCATION – THE FATE OF SPATIAL “BULGHARISM” AFTER THE REFORMS

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the geographic setting of Russia’s Muslim life remained relatively stable on all three levels. Even the Great Reforms affected the Muslims to a lesser degree than their Russian and Finno-Ugric neighbors: with the indigenous landholding elite dispossessed and villagers enlisted as state peasants overwhelmingly, Muslims faced minor changes with the abolition of serfdom. In addition, economic modernization largely passed by the Muslim peasantry, which was of little importance on the Russian grain market. Areas with compact Muslim settlements remained disconnected from the railway network for a long time. As for the economic elite, the incorporation of the Kazakh steppes and Central Asia into the Empire had deprived it of its pre-eminent position in eastern trade, although the purchase and manufacturing of oriental raw materials and goods remained their most important occupation. More important, Muslims had practically no share in the developing banking system.^[21]
The juridical reforms – not implemented in the gubernias of Ufa and Orenburg anyway – hardly ever mattered for the majority of the Muslim population, for the mundane problems of everyday life were still solved in Islamic sharia courts. Only thin layers of town dwellers and some Muslim nobles, notably in the Ufa district, participated in the new institutions of self-government (city dumas and zemstva). Finally, Muslim schools became objects of educational reforms considerably later than Russian ones.^[22] Rarely, like in the last case, did agents of the state directly interfere into the lives of Muslim villagers on the level of the locale, to the result that the latter rallied closely in defence of the confessional status quo ante.^[23]
On the level of location, Russian attitudes toward Muslim subjects did indeed change dramatically in the second half of the century. State and church officials were alarmed by the illegal mass conversion of baptised Tatars and, in their wake, of pagans, to Islam. Obviously, the Empire had already lost its interest in the Muslim elite and Islamic institutions as valuable mediators for imperial policies by that time, in a region that had ceased to be a frontier area. Instead, the second half of the century witnessed an intensive debate over the possible containment of Muslim influence and a revision of the former policy of tolerance and non-interference. Competing concepts, the rivalry of ministries and an incompetent and unwilling local administration, however, impeded the formulation and implementation of a consistent policy. These are neatly illustrated by the failure of educational reforms in the 1870 and 1880 that ended up in laissez faire.^[24] The Muslim population thus experienced the reform era primarily as an assault on their confessional autonomy. This perception implied that the Muslims, on the local level, continued to regard Muslim institutions as the main repository of communal identity. The state’s failure to implement new schools and to exercise effective control over Muslim institutions, from that point of view, appeared as a product of Muslim communal cohesion and reinforced the existent inclination to self-segregation.
Changes on the level of location in the sense of an increasing pressure to modernize were reflected in the discourse on homeland, too. For example, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, outstanding spiritual authorities came to criticize the Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya for the historical and logical flaws in its narratives. These authors refuted also the core notion of the Prophet’s followers having converted the local Muslims, and the chronology of the Timur legend. But while these critics were increasingly dismissive of the work as a historical source, they remained firmly committed to uphold the “Bulghar” religious and cultural continuum, which they now sought to rearrange in accordance with scientific history and geography. Mulla Husayn Amirkhanov from Kazan, for example, extended the genealogy of Bulghar rulers to the Kipchak Khans that ruled the Golden Horde and the Kazan khanate after the Mongol conquest. Mukhammad “Ali Choqorо, a famous Sufi sheikh and poet of Bashkir origin, identified the actual city of Kazan as the “center” or “substitute” of “Bulghar” (märkäz-i Bulġār, nā'ib-i Bulġār). Moreover, the fact that Bulghar lands were part of a larger Russian identity (mahrūs ar-Rūs) was already unquestionable for Choqorī. Thus, basic elements in the discursive construction of the Muslims’ sense of space remained intact: homeland was continuously understood as a network of localities in a defined space, scattered around the historical and spiritual capital “Bulghar,” and increasingly identified with the actual city of Kazan.^[25]
Core notions of the Bulghar-orientated identity concept, however, were called into question already during the 1870s and 1880s by one very influential Kazan ‘alim, Shihāb ad-Dīn al-Marjāni. Using critical historical and philological methodology and ignoring the metaphoric dimensions of the narrative, Marjāni condemned the whole Tawarikh-i Bulghariyya as a work without historical value. Favoring a “Tatar” identity, Marjāni downplayed the historical continuity between Bulghar and Kazan. This break with “Bulgharism” and the emphasis on ethnicity in Marjāni’s writing, however, was no wholesale renunciation of the former’s sense of place. In fact, Marjāni, constructed his “Tatar” homeland in a very similar vein: by the selection of villages and towns whose mosques and imams he thoroughly described in a collective biography. This “Tatar” homeland was clearly centered around Kazan, and comprised Muslim settled territories to the north and east of the city. While some places of major importance for the Tatar merchant class are mentioned (Chistopol’ on the Kama, Orenburg, Makar’evo, the site of the Nizhnii Novgorod fair), Marjāni omitted territories in the Ural and even Kargali, the famous Muslim trade outpost near Orenburg. In doing so, he clearly split up the established notion of a “Bulghar territory” that encompassed the whole Volga-Ural region.
But for the time being this was, as Marjāni had to admit himself, a minority position. Russian policy was of little help for an ethnic turn in the quest for identity. On the contrary, the finally inconsistent turn against Islamic institutions and their autonomy only reaffirmed Muslim communities in their localism and their attachment to a corresponding spatial “Bulghar” identity.^[26]

THE IMPACT OF 1905

The Revolution of 1905 modified Russian-Muslim relations on different levels – the day-to-day exchanges in the locale transformed slowly but with a lasting impact, and the settings for the location changed immediately, but with less enduring results. During the revolutionary period, major constituents of Russia’s Islam policy were reversed. Muslims were integrated into the electoral system and represented in parliament. Bans and censorship on the Muslim press were lifted and already by 1906-07 the emergence of a Muslim public opinion in the empire could no longer be denied. These changes in the location could not but have repercussions on the level of locale, where the clearly drawn borders between Muslims and non-Muslims became blurred. Simply speaking, during the revolution the Muslims increasingly learned to distinguish between the imperial state and Russian society. Urban merchants and peasants alike learned that their non-Muslim neighbors articulated demands that largely reflected their own interests.^[27]
Under these circumstances, strategies aiming at preserving Muslim identity by segregation and traditionalism lost much of their former plausibility. Jadidsm, the Islamic reform movement marginalized before 1905, set out to redefine the conditions of communal identity and reconcile Islam with European modernity.^[28] But even jadid reformism continued to regard the Muslim communities and their Islamic institutions as the main repository of identity, and it was exactly the reform of these institutions that they were preoccupied with.
Paradoxically, the impact of the revolution on the level of the locale became tangible only when the post-1907 regime revoked much of its political concessions and returned to an obstructive policy toward Muslim institutions. By 1910, a special inter-ministry conference banned educational reforms in Muslim schools and opted for closer cooperation with Muslim traditionalism in order to contain the modernists. The competition between reformers and preservers for control over Islamic institutions escalated and threatened the unity and solidarity of the Muslim communities. At the same time, a generational conflict loomed on the horizon: impressed by the revolutionary fervor of the surrounding Russian youth and frustrated by the comparably low pace of reforms in Muslim institutions, young Muslim intellectuals and urbanites increasingly turned their back on jadidism, entered the Russian educational system, and shared their fellow students’ socialist attitudes, if not convictions.^[29]
During the revolutionary years, the Volga-Tatar Muslim jadids, the most Europeanized element in the Empire’s Islamic elite, soon came to dominate an emerging all-Russian Muslim movement (Ittifak). Hence, the revolution also redefined the spatial dimensions of Muslim socio-political interaction on the level of location, from regional to empire-wide. Acquiescent of Russian rule, Ittifak strove for a Muslim confessional and cultural autonomy within the confines of the Empire. At the same time, now with the backing of wealthy mullas and merchants, they set out to reform and partly secularize the Islamic educational system. But they were conspicuously uninterested in other social or political questions on the agenda of the day: the Muslim faction’s political program was by and large copied from that of the Kadets. Significantly, this was also true for the debates over the agrarian question, with its implicitly spatial dimensions.^[30] In fact, land hunger concerned Muslim peasants no less than others, particular in the Urals where Slavic colonization continued. Ironically, Muslims on the local level were very occupied with territorial questions, whereas the political elite, actively remolding the location, displayed little understanding of the peasantry’s agenda and other divergent viewpoints.^[31]
In my opinion, the one-dimensional political orientation of the jadids had significant repercussions on the reformulation of the Muslims’ sense of space, too. On the one hand, the discourse on identity was now substantially modernized and Western critical methodology made broad inroads.^[32] Still more significant was the swift dissemination of “Pan-Turkic” or “Turco-Tatar” ideas: a generation of younger historians increasingly rooted the Muslim community in the glorious past of the Golden Horde. Its successor states, ruled by Chingisids, were now considered “Tatar,” and consequently, regional Muslims’ identity historically defined as “Tatar.” Geographically, the reference to the Chingisid heritage was by no means straightforward. While some historians refined Marjāni’s narrower Kazan-Tatar conceptions, others stressed the decent of different Muslim communities from the common Chingisid heritage. This interpretation was used to legitimate both the common political cause of Russia’s Muslims, and the leading role of the Volga-Ural jadids as heirs to the pre-eminent Kazan khanate.^[33]
These debates resulted in an spatial extension rather than in a thorough re-conceptualization of homeland. Oscillating between an “ethno-cultural” pole that stressed its “Tatar” or “Turkic” character, and a “Muslim” one that still saw Islam and its institutions as the common ground, the discussion continued to display little interest for geographical dimensions and reiterated the earlier concept of a network of places and regions rather than to delineate a common territory. Spatially, the jadids from the Volga-Urals simply extended their “ex-territorial” notion of homeland: now it was no longer confined by the territory historically settled by “Bulghar” ancestors or administered by the Spiritual Assembly, but extended to the confines of the Empire. In fact, some jadids demanded that the whole Muslim population should be administered by a common spiritual board – in fact an extension of the Orenburg mufti’s area of jurisdiction. At the same time, the notion of homeland had not acquired territorial dimensions, strictly speaking. Perhaps partially due to censorship, none of the “ethno-cultural” historians, to my knowledge, formulated exclusive claims to certain ethnic territories. At least the leading Tatar intellectuals perceived homeland continuously as a pattern of interrelated communities with Kazan as its capital and center,^[34] embedded in the Empire as the political fatherland. The community’s limits were just extended to the range of the public discourse and coincided with the borders of Imperial Russia.^[35]

LOST IN SPACE – MUSLIM NATIONALISM AND STATE BUILDING IN 1917

The detachment from territorial commitments, as well as the ambiguities of ethnic or confessional identities, was functional, first, as long as the Muslim movement embraced virtually all Muslim or Turkic people of the Empire, and, second, as a majority of learned men and intellectuals regarded Muslim cultural and confessional autonomy within the Empire as their political priority. Given the peculiar features of the consolidated Muslim community in the Volga-Urals, and, allegedly, the similarity of Islamic traditions and institutions throughout the Empire, the leading jadids could easily imagine a Muslim community that embraced all Muslim populations of the Empire without feeling any necessity to define it in geographical terms. Consequently, Ittifak, while dominated by leaders from the Volga-Urals and the Crimea, used to address one “Muslim nation” (milliät) and claimed to speak on its behalf.
This rationale collapsed with the Empire in 1917, but Muslim politicians and intellectuals from the Volga-Urals only reluctantly accommodated to this fact. Instead, they tried to carry on where they thought to have been forcibly stopped after 1907. Reviving Ittifak structures in Petersburg, Kazan, Orenburg, and other cities, they still claimed to represent all-Russian Muslim interests vis-а-vis the Provisional government. Confessional and cultural autonomy for all Muslims inhabiting the Russian state dominated their political agenda. But when in May 1917, the first (and, in fact, the last) all-Russian Muslim Congress convened in Moscow, political neo-jadidism, much to the surprise of its protagonists, was openly challenged by a younger generation of left-leaning Muslims who stressed the importance of social issues, including the land question.^[36] As mentioned earlier, their appearance can be related to a redefinition of settings for everyday interaction on the level of the locale, where ethno-confessional boundaries became more permeable, and social conflicts intensified.^[37]
While this generational conflict befell the majority of delegations, a second cleavage was more obviously related to the geographical origin of the delegates rather than their political convictions: when the issue of cultural autonomy was discussed, Tatar intellectuals, referring to the dispersed settlement patterns, opted for a non-territorial cultural autonomy within a democratic Russia. Significantly, socialist and liberal centrists both argued that a territorial federalization would bereave the less developed periphery of any incentive to make progress. Delegates from the south-eastern periphery – Azerbaijan, Turkestan, and the steppes – understandably took a more critical stance vis-а-vis the civilizing blessings of direct or mediated Russian rule. Under the charismatic leadership of the young Bashkir scholar Zaki Validi, they opted for the territorialization of Muslim autonomy instead.^[38] This split along geographical lines certainly reflected the factual disintegration of the state on the level of location, and it was still reinforced by the fact that the center and the periphery assessed the agrarian question with its spatial impacts differently: whereas the leftist young Tatar intellectuals dedicated themselves to peasants’ claims for the expropriation and redistribution of land, the largely nomadic livestock breeders in the steppes and parts of Central Asia, who were deeply affected by Slavic colonization, pressed for a restitution of traditional ownership rights. The search for a compromise was effectively dodged by delegates from Bashkiria and Turkestan, who boycotted the vote on the agrarian question.^[39]
After Moscow, Tatar leaders continued to lay claim to an all-Russian Muslim movement, but as the Second Congress in Kazan in summer 1917 neatly illustrated, geographically the movement had shrunk to its pre-1905 dimensions and comprised activists from the Volga-Urals and Western Siberia almost exclusively. The Moscow double disagreement, however, had also anticipated the split that occurred within the formally united Tatar-Bashkir Muslim elite during fall of 1917. It came as a surprise in particular for the Tatars, who were still preoccupied with cultural and social demands, and who saw their political role as trailblazers challenged by exactly the group from which they had least expected. These leading Tatar intellectuals had engaged in a lengthy debate of identity issues during the second decade of the twentieth century. They had eagerly deconstructed the myth of “Turkic” or “Muslim” unity, expecting that economic and cultural progress would make the Muslims more aware of cultural differences and inevitably lead to the emergence of various Muslim nations. Some considered that the economically and culturally most “civilized” Muslims of the Volga-Ural already formed a distinct community. Even the “progressive” past of Islamic renewal and economic success in the nineteenth century was historicized and exploited for identity-building. This renewed “Tatarism,” however, remained rather vague as to its geographic range: for Djamaletdin Validov, for example, the Tatar nation comprised ethnic Tatars, Bashkirs, and even Kazakhs, who, as he believed, would sooner or later be assimilated by the more advanced Tatar culture.^[40] The same Djamaletdin Validov obviously ignored the territorial dimensions of the Bashkir secession and accused its leaders of having invented a distinct Bashkir culture and identity artificially.^[41]
The ambiguous semantics and non-spatial dimensions of “Muslim” identity thus survived the “culturalization” of the debate, but they had become increasingly dysfunctional in the wake of the substantial changes that had affected the Muslims’ locale and the location through 1917. And it seems very likely that it was precisely the “cultural complex” that made the Tatar intellectuals insensitive for the spatial dimensions of the identity problem far into the same year. But when finally during summer, territory had become the key issue on both levels – the locale (with the spontaneous seizure and redistribution of land) and the location (with the Muslim peripheries increasingly drifting away from the center), – even Bashkir territorial claims could no longer be ignored or defined away. Finally, without the Bashkirs’ participation in the possible delineation of Tatar-Muslim state in the Volga-Urals, the latter could hardly ever have comprised a demographic Muslim majority. Above all, the compact Muslim settlement areas in the Ufa gubernia were to serve as the core of a future state, as the deliberations of the special commission under ґAlimzhan Sharaf, created by the Muslim National Congress in late 1917 and early 1918, clearly demonstrated.^[42] Consequently, negotiations continued between the Bashkir movement and the Tatar National Congress and its institutions during autumn of 1917. These negotiations notwithstanding, the Bashkirs formed their own autonomy and government. The latter took a definitively more resolute stance on the territorial question: in December 1917, the Bashkirs already discussed the necessity of resettlements in order to regain control over what they believed was their homeland. For the time being, they remained rather vague whether this was to be aimed at Muslim colonists, too.^[43]
In a strictly spatial sense, the Bashkir movement had thus formulated a much more consistent vision of homeland that more convincingly reflected the transformations that had occurred on the levels of the locale and location. Unlike the Bashkir leadership the Tatars still lacked a convincing national map to delineate their homeland as a territory. When they started to lay claims to a possible state territory under the political constraints of 1917, they had to cope with a complex ethno-demographic situation, and beyond it they found themselves confronted with competing and, probably, more convincing claims by other ethnic groups.^[44] The preservation of a highly specific, if historically plausible, ex-territorial notion of homeland – developed in the early nineteenth century and subsequently modified, but never substantially revised – was outdated by 1917.
It would thus be at least insufficient to blame the failure of Muslim (Tatar) state building in the wake of the 1917 revolutions simply on the complex ethno-demographic setting or the Bolshevik policies of divide et impera.^[45] In fact, the October coup intensified Tatar-Bashkir negotiations for a while, but they came to naught when the Bashkirs chose to side with the Cossacks under Ataman Dutov in Orenburg in a short-lived attempt to preserve their own autonomy.^[46] Kazan-based Muslim efforts in state building continued into the spring of 1918, when they were effectively curtailed by the Bolshevik takeover in that city. On the retreat during summer of 1918, the Communists themselves brought the issue of a Tatar-Bashkir republic back onto the agenda. Whether it was more than a tactical offer to secure Muslim loyalty remains a hypothetical question, since the fronts of the Civil War rendered its realization impossible for the time being.^[47] Finally, the Communist version of an Idel’-Ural state was quietly sacrificed for the promise of a (never realized) greater Bashkiria and the ensuing volte-face of Bashkir formations in 1919. When the Bolsheviks emerged victorious from the Civil War, they created two small and separate territorial autonomies including significant majorities of non-titular ethnic groups: a Tatar ASSR with a Russian majority, and a Bashkir ASSR where both Tatars and Russians outnumbered the titular nation.