SUMMARY:

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.