SUMMARY:

Diliara Usmanova poses a question whether the framework of national history captures vicissitudes of historical experience of Tatars in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. The author also surveys history of the construction of the past that had gradually shifted from a narrative of a Muslim religious community to the one of national community (Tatars). Usmanova points to the fact that the “father-founders” of Tatar national history at the beginning of the 20th century came out from the Muslim intellectual milieu and educational network and yet they represented a shift from a religious to a more secular and ethno-centric perspective in imagining history of the Volga region population. Usmanova observes that the first stage in the formation of the canon Tatar national history was represented by the recovery of history of ancient states that had existed in the Volga region (including history of the Golden Horde). In an effort that was both a scholarly pursuit and a political action, Tatar intellectuals created a continuous narrative of Tatar history, which stressed the ancient roots of the nation and imagined an integral Tatar nation with the inclusion of Mishari, Kriashcheny, Teptiari and other diaspora and ethnic groups. Usmanova emphasizes the fact that the construction of ancient history for the Tatar national narrative did not preclude a heated debate over the key concepts that were to capture the Tatar national identity. The author argues that at the beginning of the 20th century the concept of Tatar nationhood was no longer religious but neither was it ethnically exclusive: the concept of the Tatar people was supplemented with the notion of Turkic community. Usmanova then surveys the development of the Tatar national history narrative in the Soviet period and through the post Soviet years, describing a crystallization of the Tatar national identity on the one hand and the persistent ambiguity of historical definitions of the Volga Tatars’ nationhood (Bulgar-Tatar debate), on the other.