Tatarlyq: The Search for Tatar Nation and Identity between Empires

Maryam Moghaddami, University of California, Davis

The experience of the 19th and 20th centuries for many is marked by mass migration and displacement. The history of the Volga Tatars in the Russian Empire is no exception to this. Many Tatars in the late 19th and early 20th century moved across the vast expanse of the Russian empire as settlers, traders, and religious leaders consolidating Russian rule even as they themselves were subject to it. Russian interests in the Far East and the 20th century extension of railway lines into Manchuria led to an influx of Russian subjects into the region, particularly surrounding the city of Harbin. Tatars, too, were a crucial part of Harbin’s diverse melange constructing their own schools, mosques, and community centers. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the massive nation-building project of the Soviet Union created and promoted a plethora of nations, classifying and legitimating ethnohistorical distinctions and giving them territorial form. Such a monolithic conception of the Tatar nation relegated the diaspora to the periphery, limiting the ways in which the experience of the diaspora community could be understood. For Soviet scholars, the Tatars across the border in the Far East posed a security threat both through their physical presence and their ideas. Termed by the Soviets as “bourgeois nationalists” and “Japanese spies,” these Tatars had competing and often more encompassing visions of communal belonging emphasizing a Turkic and Muslim identity. This paper explores that difference, looking at the manner in which Tatars framed their identity against the backdrop of competing Soviet and Japanese influences.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 118. Migrant Agencies and Countering State Mandates