SUMMARY:

Dilyara Suleymanova’s article reconstructs the discourse on the recent population census in the Tatar-language press in Tatarstan. As she shows, the census, which offered 130 options of self-determination for representatives of the cumulative group of “Tatars,” stimulated a wave of political mobilization in the Tatar press around the threat of the imperial policy of disassociating the Tatar national body. The rhetoric of the Tatar press noticeably differed from that of the Russian-language press published in Tatarstan: it evoked anti-imperial tropes, heavily relied on historical and cultural (especially linguistic) arguments and addressed the danger of internal “pluralism” within the “Tatar nation” (the possibility of freely choosing one’s identity; the priority of individual interpretations of identity over collective ones; etc.). The two most actively discussed external and internal threats analyzed in the article are the so-called Kriashen (baptized Tatars) problem and the Tatar–Bashkir conflict.