The national independence movements of the Union Republics in the late 1980s were often cited as proof of an almost primordial concept of the nation (and a falsification of constructivist approaches), with the Baltic nations returning to their “true self” by proclaiming state sovereignty and ending Soviet-Russian imperial hegemony. This process quickly/soon became much less unequivocal in new states without a historic period of national statehood in more or less the same borders, as in the case of the Soviet Republics of Central Asia, and within the evident cases of competing concepts of nationhood such as Moldova. At the other end of the scale, newly founded entities like the Dnestr Republic constitute a delicate situation or difficulty? for experts in nation and statebuilding with constructivist leanings.^[1]
In sum, with each matrioshka of national historiography emerging from the good old Soviet writing and rewriting of imperial history, the role of political elites and intellectuals in constructing and imbuing national identities becomes more evident. Recent research has underlined the extent to which 19th-century nation and state building in East and Central Europe was equally in the hands of a few intellectuals and political visionaries.^[2] Nevertheless, the specter of nationalism has given the corresponding process at the end of the 20th century after the fall of the Soviet empire a repute of “ethnic engineering” and malicious political manipulation.
It is a truism that processes of delayed state and nation building cannot be considered – as some local leaders imply – as a catch-up effort, to be exempted from the latest norms and prescriptions of minority protection and interethnic tolerance. Nevertheless, those shaping the new nation and state cannot be expected to jump over their own shadow; in a Bourdieuian sense they are cultural producers.^[3] In a more poetic phrasing, all they are “is elegant scarecrows on fields of words.”^[4] If no established national-history synthesis existed before communist take-over, actually creating one becomes an arduous task, especially in new states where a complete and radical break with the historiographical past would reflect neither social and political realities, nor the perceived identifications of the populace. Apart from the fact that there is no (and can be no) tabula rasa situation in societal and political realities, the institutional and human dynamics of history writing also contribute their share to producing complex, incongruous, and fascinating syntheses. Evidently, textbooks are at the center of this process as they condense historiographical syntheses to their key issues and are supposed to instill this particular view of the past into the next generation.
In the metaphor of the matrioshka, the historiographies of the 89 subjects of the Russian Federation constitute the next doll. Most of these subjects lack a readily identifiable historic predecessor with qualities of statehood, and in most cases the dominance of a titular nation in past centuries is less than obvious. Historiographically, depending upon the size and importance of the titular nation, some degree of regional history was permissible within the dominant Soviet framework of the communist period. Meanwhile, this framework has disintegrated. Researchers and institutes now face the task of underscoring the identity and profile of the respective subject of a federation that may display increasing tendencies of political centralization under Putin, but has long come to accept regional diversification and identifications.

THE HISTORY OF TATARSTAN AND THE TATARS

The Turkic-speaking people of the Tatars have lived for centuries on the left and to some extent on the right bank of the Middle Volga. At the time of sovereignty, the Tatar ASSR had 3.5 million inhabitants, half of them ethnic Tatars, and another 40 percent Russians. Nevertheless, more than two thirds of all ethnic Tatars lived outside the republic. Whereas the Kazan Tatars are the descendants of the Kazan Khanate, the Kasimov Tatars are descendants of the Golden Horde and protected the czars’ borders against the Khanate.^[5] Within the Soviet Union, the Kazan Tatars had a leading role vis-а-vis Tatar communities in Siberia, Astrakhan, and the Crimea. Following a well-known pattern, Tatar leaders first demanded cultural autonomy in the 1905 revolution and only came around to demanding full territorial autonomy in 1917. The autonomous Tatar republic proclaimed in November 1917 was overrun by the Soviets in early 1918. After the tribulations of civil war, a Tatar ASSR was established on 27 May, 1920. In Kazan the crushing of the indigenization movement around 1930 and the introduction of Latin script had a stark element of anti-Islamism. Nevertheless, the urbanized Tatars atypically managed to resist Russification to a remarkable degree. Evidently, the post-Soviet Tatar Republic needed a national history for the consolidation of state and nation.
The set of four textbooks on the history of the Tatars and Tatarstan reviewed in this article clearly demonstrates the continuities in institutions and academic staff (see Tab. 1). Unlike most East European countries, the production of textbooks for pupils and students in Kazan is still the exclusive domain of state institutions: the State University, the Academy of Sciences, the Government Department of Archives, the Institute for the Tatar Encyclopedia, and the National Museum. The Atlas and the Istoriia Tatarstana 2001 were written as a pair for the satchel of Tatar children, the Istoriya Tatarstana 2000 for students and teachers in higher education. Typically, the higher education textbook has a recommendation by the Ministry of Education in Moscow, and the primary education textbook by its counterpart in Kazan. It is equally noteworthy that neither of the authors of the 2000 book is among the one dozen experts responsible for the 2001 pair. Predictably, Sabirova and Sharapov have published monographs with unambiguous titles since the 1970s: “Lenin and the Bolsheviks from Kazan” or “The Fruits of the Great Friendship.”^[6] The track record of key authors from the 2000 book – B. F. Sultanbekov and F. Sh. Khusin – is much more recent, and they seem to approach Soviet or Russian history from a Tatar angle rather than the other way around, as in “Ancient Kazan in the Eyes of Historians and Contemporaries.”^[7] Nevertheless, to reduce the historiographical debate (and its reflection in textbooks) to a dichotomy between an older generation of internationalist, Soviet-Russian historians and a new 1990s-generation of angry young men with Tatar nationalist leanings would be an oversimplification in more than one respect. Not only do some of the current vault lines predate the Tatar declaration of sovereignty, albeit in a more subdued form, but the hot issues also are partly dictated by the ambiguities of Tatar history.

THE “ATLAS”: CONTOURS OF HISTORY AND WHITE SPOTS

Typically, manuals on national history anachronistically use the past as a projection screen for current concepts of nation and state. Territorial and administrative borders that may be real today were often non-existent or meaningless in other epochs. Similarly, the current sense of national or civic belonging was absent in or secondary to other loyalties in earlier periods. Typically, the history textbooks under review (in their strictness with current republic borders, not unlike Soviet manuals) impose these recent borders on two thousand years of local history, without more than scant reference to Tatars outside of the republic. Thus, the Atlas should be read backward: it ends with a picture of a Putin visit to Kazan and a shy statement on the ambiguities of Russia’s history with its human tragedies, epoch of revolutions, and new opportunities of the third millennium. In typical style, the previous page highlights the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Tatar SSR (30 August 1990), but also features the opening of the House of the Friendship of Peoples in Kazan in 1999, preceded again by the heroism of the Great Patriotic War and the agro-industrial progress of the following half-century. Not only in the physical structure of the book, but also symbolically, the successes of “accelerated modernization” (1930-1941) and the “political repression” with 3,000 executions (1937-1938) are presented on separate pages. Having mastered this historiographical hurdle, the Russian Revolutions and the founding of the Tatar ASSR in June 1920 pose no problem for the authors: the famines of the collectivization period and the shift from the Arab to the Latin script are mentioned without detailed comment. Here again, the narrative is strangely ambiguous and distanced: “Trotsky liberated Kazan in September 1918,” but “V. O. Kappel was one of the organizers of the routing of the Reds in Kazan in August 1918” and in sum, the October Revolution and the Civil War “fundamentally changed the appearance of the country.”
Typically, the further communist SSR or ASSR and certainly post-communist textbooks delve into pre-1918 history the more they loose their footing. The post-1918 period may be problematic with its political taboos and white spots, but before the revolution, the concepts and frameworks of state and nation become increasingly artificial and unconvincing. The 2000 Istoriia Tatarstana defines its subject as “the historical territory of present-day Tatarstan and the current Tatar nation as successor to and curator of the legacies of the ancient Turkic tribes and the Turkic-Bulgar Volga state. Tatarstan is postulated as one of the oldest countries in the Northeast of the European continent.”^[8] In the Atlas, any allusions to Tatar national or civic pride are hardly discernable against the backdrop of Soviet-Russian patriotism in the post-1918 narrative. In the history of the Tatar guberniia too, the emergence and growth of the Tatar national movement is counterbalanced by the “development of a multinational bourgeoisie and proletariat.” Whereas the presence of Tatars outside the guberniia “as center of the development of the nation” is noted, the presence of Russians (approx. 40%), Chuvashi (22%), and other peoples in the guberniia is equally highlighted. Overall, a discourse of modernization predominates in the pre-revolutionary period, and whereas Russia’s reforms and economic development constituted the framework for the Central Volga region, the peoples of this region made a substantial contribution to the economic and cultural development of Russia. Implicitly, this argument refers back to the “lesser evil formula” of Soviet historiography on non-Russian nationalities by “compensating” for the authoritarianism and exploitation of czarism with the “advantages” of becoming part of the civilization, economic and even revolutionary progress of the Russian people.^[9] However, in current history books from Kazan, the dark side of czarism is hardly mentioned, and the Russian conquest of the region not at all. Thus, uninhibited Tatar national pride only appears in the medieval period, prior to Russian involvement; praising the Khanate of Kazan as “the brightest period in the history of the Tatar nation” does not denigrate the Russians. By contrast, the era of the Mongol conquest and the rule of the Golden Horde constituted a “deep vault” in history as it put an end to the Volga-Kama state, “the first state of the ancestors of the current Tatars” (but stretching far beyond current borders). In the “earliest days,” the Bulgars contributed to the creation of the ethnic basis of the Tatars as we know them.

TWO DILEMMAS OF TATAR NATION AND STATE BUILDING

Typically, the 30-page Atlas could afford to focus on modernization and gloss over the crucial changes from one epoch of statehood or domination to the next. The 300-page academic manual Istoriia Tatarstana 2000, however, has to cope with these issues, defining the ethnogenesis of the Tatars as starting with regional civilizations that began to acquire a “ethno-national character” by the 12th – 11th millennium B.C. (sic!) “following the general laws (sic!) of world history.”^[10] The authors then divide history in epochs related to statehood: north-Turkic tribes of the Volga-Ural region, the Volga-Bulgar state (9th – 15th c.), the Khanate of Kazan of the Turkic Tatars (15th – 16th c.), the Tatar people and the Russian Empire (16th – 20th c.), the Tatar ASSR and the USSR (20th c.), and finally the Republic of Tatarstan and the Tatar people after the break-up of the USSR. Quite remarkably, the manual upholds the strict well-known sequence of the terms “tribes,” “people,” and “nation.” Unlike post-1991 historical syntheses from other former autonomous and union republics, the whole history is not rewritten as a teleological process of relentless strivings for national sovereignty and statehood peaking in the civil war and/or interior period and culminating in the declaration of independence or sovereignty after the breakup of the Soviet Empire. From a perspective of nation and state building, the interpretation and assessment of the conquest by the Golden Horde in 1236, the Russian conquest of 1552 and the Kazan guberniia of 1708, the interlude of statehood in 1918, the Soviet conquest and the ASSR founded in September 1920, and the Tatar sovereignty of 1990 in the Russian Federation are all key. Evidently, the harsh realities of current power projection would belie any glories of national independence. Moreover, for any Tatar historian, trying to claim or reclaim parts of the past for the Tatars will come up against serious opponents, as s/he knows from past experience. Claiming the Golden Horde will raise Russian anxieties, whereas the alternative claim to the Bulgars will invoke Chuvash objections. Indeed, even mightier opponents – the political and historical authorities in Moscow – forestalled a positive reevaluation of the Golden Horde and a critical assessment of the incorporation of the Tatar area into the Russian and Soviet empires as a guberniia and an autonomous republic respectively.

THE BULGARS AND THE GOLDEN HORDE

The Soviet concept of ethnos^[11] generally implies a primordialist approach of contrasting ethnogeneses instrumentalized by ethno-nationalist movements. With ethnogenesis as the bedrock of any ethno-historical mythology, shared ethnogenesis becomes unacceptable, no matter how improbable it may be to an outsider. On 9 August, 1944, the Central Committee of the CPSU decreed that Tatar scholars had failed to depict the feudal, reactionary, period of the Golden Horde in the appropriate dark colors. Not only had the Golden Horde been commonly accepted as an evil force in Russian history, it also represented a cornerstone for any pan-Turkic ideology in the region and thus an “absolute evil” in history, a “bourgeois-nationalist” deviation in historiography. It was pointed out that the Tatar national hero Idegei had been one of the “most powerful feudal lords of the Golden Horde” and “had attacked Russian towns and villages, and took thousands of Russian into slavery.”^[12] For Tatar historians the consequence was a disgrace of historic roots and a centuries-long gap between pre-history and history. Claiming the Bulgars inhabited the Middle Volga region prior to the invasion of the Mongols challenged a similar claim by the Chuvashi.^[13] Unlike the Tatars, the Chuvashi of the right bank of the Volga were generally Christianized in the Russian state from the 16th century onwards. Their language is set somewhat apart from other Turkic tongues. However, after fierce debates in the late Stalin years, the Tatar scholars repented and rejected the concept of a Golden Horde and a Mongol Tatar ancestry. The new ancestry assumed a merger of Bulgars and Finnish-Ugric elements under “the beneficial influence” of the Russian people by the end of the first millennium. Both Tatar and protesting Chuvashi scholars faced a hard choice between autochthony of ethnogenesis and autochthony of language. To be indigenous to the Volga region implied accepting a shift to a (non-autochthonous) Turkic language, while to claim language continuity implied late settlement in the region. Both Tatars and Chuvashi claimed to have been the first to settle in the region and invent pre-Bulgar (pre-historic) Turkification to circumvent the above dilemma. Chuvashi could point to language continuity with the Bulgars, and Tatars to continuity of territorial statehood. The redefinition of Tatar ethnohistory began under perestrojka and culminated in a 1993 Kazan conference celebrating 750 years of the Golden Horde. From that point onwards, the official version defined the Golden Horde as the cradle of Tatar statehood and Tatar ethnicity in which the Bulgars constituted a subordinate element. In competition with the overbearing Russian attitude of the early 1990s, the earliest Turkic-Tatar statehood was traced back to the 7th century (thus predating Kiev Rus’). Although the Mongol-Tatar view predominates, the Bulgar position is still upheld by a number of scholars in Kazan, who deny a language shift and claim language continuity from pre-Mongol Bulgars to the Khanate, thus antedating the arrival of the Bulgars to preclude any debate as to who settled in the Middle Volga region first.^[14]
Moscow historians faced a similar dilemma in distancing their befriended people – the Tatars – from the natural enemy of the Golden Horde; eventually, these scholars redefined the Russian army as the Tatars’ liberator from foreign oppression, whereas the Golden Horde inadvertently attacked the future “Soviet friendship of peoples.” Thus, a sharp distinction between the Tatar Mongol invaders and the Kazan Tatars was essential, making the Kazan Tatars the descendants of Bulgar peoples, enslaved and exploited by the “Tatar yoke” of the Golden Horde, the greatest disrupter of the future alliance of peoples.^[15]
The 2000 manual dwells extensively on the Bulgar state and includes the Golden Horde period. In their assessment of this period, Sabirova and Sharapov take issue with the tendency of nearly all Russian and most Tatar historians to perpetuate without qualification the epithet “Volga Bulgaria under the Tatar-Mongol yoke.” For one thing, the Golden Horde protected the region for more than a century against Catholicism and Russian expansionism. By intensifying East-West trade relations, the Mongol empire marked a period of economic growth and cultural blossoming. The admittedly difficult relations between Bulgars and Mongol rulers were – during the first century – based on mutual interests, determined by written arrangements rather than brutal force.^[16] The two authors depict both the Bulgar and the Golden Horde periods as eras of order and prosperity. In the 13th century, the Bulgar-Russian rivalry was replaced by cooperation with the onslaught of the Mongols. Mongol expansionism is explicitly classified as a normal phenomenon of world history, not as an absolute evil or an interruption of the normal course of history.^[17] The authors seem to deplore the actual hardship of the short period of military confrontation more than the abstract loss of political independence. Again, the 2000 manual describes the new order established by the Mongols and the state of the Golden Horde emerging from its decline around 1260 in more positive terms and explicitly criticizes the pejorative qualifications used by Russian historians, while pointing to cultural highlights and monuments from this period. Only the period of the decline of the Golden Horde in the second half of the 14th century was again characterized by chaos and destruction. The subsequent rise of the Kazan Khanate is explicitly linked to the pre-Mongol era of the Bulgars. The authors noted that symbolically, as the new capital of the Bulgar-Kazan state, Kazan was often referred to as “New Bulgar.”^[18] A pertinent statement on the disputed issue of the Kazan Tatars’ ancestry (Bulgars or Mongol-Tatars) is missing. In line with this realistic approach, the founding of the national state of Tatars by the end of the 14th century is also not depicted as paradise regained, but rather as a laborious process of stabilization. The fixation on relations with Russia continues, underlining the peaceful and cooperative character of Kazan to its neighbors, including Russia. Overall, in the 2000 textbook for students in higher education, a matter-of-fact realism has replaced ideological convictions, but most of the discourses remained the same.
The 2001 textbook for the younger generation combines a massive flood of historical details with categorical statements with a national bias, but without excessive ethnocentrism: each period of sovereignty or foreign dominance has separate chapters on the state, culture, population, the economy, and society. The attention devoted to the early Turkic tribes and states of Eurasia as an uninterrupted continuity of the Turkic khanates (6th – 7th c.) and the Ancient Bulgar state (7th – 10th c.) as glorious forerunners of the Volga-Bulgar state (10th – 13th c.), “one of the greatest medieval states of Eastern Europe,”^[19] prepares the ground for the Bulgar position. The authors eulogize the heroic resistance of the Bulgars against the Mongol invasion, which did not end with the conquest of 1236. The general image of the period of the Golden Horde is not too negative, including even a short period of economic and cultural “flourishing” (rastsvet). There is no doubt, however, that the small Mongol elite ruling a territory of incredible size was quickly Turkicized by the local population. Whereas for the Chinese the term “Tatars” comprised all “barbarians,” in Europe the Mongols were erroneously identified as “Tatars.” Actually, the indigenous population of Bulgars and Kypchaks had “no relation whatsoever with the conquerors.”^[20]

A HISTORIOGRAPHIC RETROSPECTIVE

In vivid contrast to the three other books, Khakim’s historical-methodological guide addresses the dilemmas and disorientation of historians and teachers head-on. In his introduction, the author notes that in pre-revolutionary history, Tatars and other non-Russian nations only entered the scene when they were conquered by the czars. Communist history, he continues, was class history only in name. By prohibiting the study of the Golden Horde, the authorities in 1944 de facto excluded the Tatar period from the history of the Russian state, with Tatar history becoming just a “makeweight” in the history of the USSR. The declaration of state sovereignty of the former autonomous republics created a demand for a new perspective. Tatarstan emancipated itself from Moscow’s vision and began to develop its own version of history. In Soviet history books, the Mongol-Tatar invasions were invariably depicted in darkest colors, and instead they eulogized the civilization of the Bulgar period. For Khakim the legacy of the Golden Horde gave the Tatars their own imperial tradition, making them the Russians’ equals.^[21]
Thus, Khakim not only stated his own position, but also criticized alternative opinions their ideological motives. In the early 1990s, Rafael Khakim was a champion of Tatar independence and an advisor to the first president Shaimiev, concerned with hammering in the ideology of ethno-national statehood and the imperial character of the Russian Federation (and its Soviet predecessor). Consequently, non-Russian nations had no option but to create their own nation-states as guarantors of their collective cultural and economic rights.^[22] In sum, the ethnic concept of the nation again predominates over a civic concept. In this respect, the national “ownership” of the autonomous and union republics seems to prevail from the ambiguous Soviet tradition. Eventually, Khakim reveals his own bias in the Bulgar/Tatar debate and his socialization by noting that recent democratic times have allowed for an objective reconsideration of history with the normative a-priori conclusion that “Golden Horde was a highly developed civilized state.”^[23]

THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CONQUESTS

By 1990 the Tatars constituted the second largest ethnic group in Russia, but had no chance of national statehood, being surrounded by Russian territory and with only a slim ethnic majority in their own republic. Nevertheless, after the declaration of sovereignty, a reevaluation of the preceding half millennium of Russian/Soviet dominance seemed due, particularly as Tatarstan had been the first non-Russian area to be incorporated, when Ivan the Terrible took Kazan in 1552. Since the Second World War, Soviet historians had insisted, with a typical amalgam of national and class discourse, that Ivan had been a conqueror and his subjugation of the Tatars was subjectively a negative deed in history. As a consequence, however, the Tatars had joined the “progressive” Russian people in a centuries-long struggle culminating in the victory of socialism in 1917. Paradoxically, textbooks fail to mention any resistance against the Russian invaders, as if the Tatars had been fully aware of their eventual salvation. Thus, the influence of Russian culture, modernization, and class struggle objectively made the centuries of repression and exploitation worthwhile for the Tatars. Similarly, the spontaneous participation of the Tatars in the revolution of 1917 and their striving for an autonomous republic, granted to them in 1920, was stressed. The dark sides of Stalinism, with its repression of national elites and excesses in forced modernization, were again “justified” as a subjective evil outweighed by the objective advantages offered by the Soviet statehood.^[24] Typically, the flood of Soviet publications on the difficult topic of the respective annexation of non-Russian peoples by Czarist Russia omitted the most controversial cases, Dagestan and Tatarstan.^[25]
Somewhat in contrast to its neutral and realistic approach to the issues of ethnogenesis and the history of the Golden Horde, the 2000 textbook takes on a more principled and one-sided stance on the subsequent Russian annexation that ended the sovereignty of the Kazan Khanate. Adding a new twist to the Soviet historiographical “lesser evil formula,” the Tatar-Mongol occupation was now justified by the resulting progress and a more evil alternative, in this case, the Russian conquest. By the same token, the resistance against Russian rule and Ivan IV’s aggression three centuries later is highlighted in a separate chapter, as are Russian colonization and policies of ethnic assimilation. In fact, the entire description of the Czarist period is devoted to Tatar national resistance with minimal attention given to socio-economic developments or arguments that might serve a “lesser evil” justification.^[26]By qualifying the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible as “aggression”, the authors employ a starker term than “conquest” (zavoevanie), the familiar taboo term of Soviet historians for Russian expansion.^[27] By drawing massive attention to the Tatars’ struggle for national, economic, and cultural survival under Russian rule and by bringing in the people or nation for the first time as a major historical actor, the two historians allow for the assumption that nation building is a gradual process rather than a meta-historical fact; the defense of “national identity and independence” never seemed such an issue in the era of the Golden Horde. In terms of the spiritual life of the nation, they highlight the flexibility of Islam in adapting to the new circumstances of capitalism and industrialization. Similarly, positive developments such as the establishment of a national educational system are attributed to the societal solidarity and dynamics of the Tatars, explicitly ruling out any role for the (Russian) state. By the end of the 20th century, Tatar national consolidation had shifted to national liberation, parallel to the increasingly reactionary character of the Russian autocracy in decline. Again, the argument is structural and historical rather than national and emotional: the growing number of Tatars in Russian industry determined their role in the “social-political movement” against the Tatars’ deprivation of rights in Russia and resulted in national-liberal and socialist opposition. Here again the Russian and Tatar socialists seem to have acted in full concord.^[28]
The Sultanbekov manual too follows the old Soviet terminology of tribe-people-nationality-nation. With each step on this scale, the loss of statehood became more relevant and critical. Thus, the Bulgars became the “nationality” (narodnost’) of the Kazan Tatars during the Kazan Khanate (1445-1552). The end of the khanate is partly blamed on the selfishness of elites and Ivan’s military campaigns are not presented in a particularly negative light. As for the Mongol invasion, the driving motive of the book in this episode is similarly to instill a sense of national pride and belonging into the youngest generation. Indeed, the authors take their time to draw an imaginative picture of the 30,000 Tatars fighting off a 5-times superior Russian army laying siege to the capital of Kazan. Paradoxically, after the Russian conquest (zavoevanie) the Tatars share in the glory of belonging to a Great Power and their historic fate is closely tied to Russia and its economic, cultural, and political might. At the same time, the Tatars continued their resistance against the “arbitrary and cruel repression of their religion and national culture.” With the “lesser evil formula” on his mind, the author points out the fallacy of presuming any positive consequences of Russian rule for the Tatars: the net sum of exploitation, repression, and loss of statehood was in one word, “catastrophic.”^[29]
Whereas the 2000 textbook consistently contrasted the Tatar national movement to the Russian empire, it conflated the interests and strivings of the Tatar national movement and the Russian revolutionary movement in the narrative on the chaotic years 1917-1918 with the Moslem Socialist Committee, the All-Russian Moslem Congress, and other similar organizations. Inevitably, the national movement of the Tatars (and other non-Russian nationalities) collided with the aspirations of the Provisional Government and heeded Lenin’s promise of a new nationalities policy including territorial autonomy. The detailed, but matter-of-fact description of the competing state-building projects of 1918 includes the rise and fall of the Volga-Ural Republic. Lenin’s surprise action to smash the nascent republic is neither applauded nor condemned explicitly and his qualification of this Tatar state as “counterrevolutionary and nationalistic” is noted without protest or denial. During the civil war, Tatar brigades participated on the side of the White generals as well as under “legendary commanders” on the side of the Red Army, “both claiming to fight for a future free Tatarstan.”^[30] The Tatar ASSR of 1920 thus became the third “unification” (sobiranie) of the Tatars after the Volga-Bulgar state (11th – 15th c.) and the Kazan Khanate. After failed efforts for a third unification with the Volga-Ural Republic and the Tatar-Baskirian Soviet Republic of 1917, the Tatars had to content with the socialist option of an ASSR, thereby joining the Russian people in an uncompromising socialist experiment.^[31] The Tatar leaders thus prevented a communist absorption of the Tatar autonomy. Despite the subsequent atrocities of “communist absolutism,” the realistic historians evidently have come to accept the Tatar ASSR as a “lesser evil”! Overall, for a textbook written ten years after the end of communism, there is quite surprisingly more implicit affinity to and sympathy for the Soviet empire than for the Russian empire. The Russian period allowed for the rise of a Tatar national movement that broke out from the “prison” of the declining, increasingly reactionary empire in cooperation with the Russian people. In a parallel argument, the incorporation in the Soviet state is again presented as a historical inevitability ending with the decline of the communist empire and Tatarstan’s sovereignty in 1990.
The 2001 manual also bridges the gap between the Russian and the Soviet empire by merging the national movement of the Tatars with the class struggle of the “toiling masses” (trudiashchiesia massy) against the autocracy. The promise of national self-determination explained support for the Bolsheviks against the Provisional Government. The narrative is equally undecided as to whether the glory of the Tatars derives from the legendary commanders on the side of the Reds or from their equally famous adversaries in the Idel’-Ural Republic of 1918 or in the Tatar ASSR of 1920.^[32] Once the die has been cast and the Tatars have their own republic within the Russian Federation, the remainder of their story from 1920 to 1990 in 200 pages puts a spotlight on Tatar contributions and heroes, but essentially, it is history… Russian history.

CONCLUSION

Having reviewed four textbooks for Tatar history, the metaphor of the matrioshka still stands: Each next puppet may be slightly different from the previous, larger one, but real historiographical innovations and surprising insights are extremely thin on the ground. National history and the inevitable Russian framework blur out any broader, comparative perspective. Most of the discourses, priorities, and arguments constitute a deja vu for historians familiar with the textbooks and academic manuals of earlier decades. An unrelenting belief in modernization and progress permeates all textbooks, whereas the reviewer searched in vain for any inkling of theories defining nation building as a companion of modernization rather than a primordial fact.