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A Century of Tatar Revival 1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Extract
When, in 1766, Catherine II summoned the Legislative Commission to convene in Petersburg, there were among the deputies representing the various provinces of the Russian empire delegates sent by the Moslem population of the Volga and Ural regions. In the memoranda which these delegates presented to the Commission and in the instructions received by them from their electors, there were embodied the main grievances of the Tatar people. These complaints concerned the difficult religious and economic situation of the Tatars, who, since conquest of the Kazan khanate by Ivan the Terrible, had been subjected to permanent persecution for there faith and had become severely restricted in their rights. The Tatar delegates asked for recognition of their faith, for the removal of limitations on their trade activity, and for restitution of the rights of the Tatar nobility.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1953
Footnotes
1
In order to avoid a misinterpretation of the term “Tatar,” which has varied in meaning through the ages, the author considers it necessary to define its use in the present study. The name of a Mongol tribe, it has come since the time of the iMongol conquest of Russia to be applied to most of the Turkic-speaking .tribes of eastern Europe and part of Asia. In tsarist times, for example, the Azerbaijanis, various tribes of the Northern Caucasus and of Siberia, and the Tatars of the present Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and of neighboring districts in the Volga-Ural (or Idel-Ural, “Idel” being a Tatar name for Volga) region, were called “Tatars.” Since the creation of the Tatar ASSR, this name is now applied only to the last-named group of the Volga-Ural region, and it is so used in this paper.
Statistics of 1939 give the total number of Tatars as 4.3 million, of which about 3.5 million lived in the Tatar and Bashkir ASSR's and in neighboring districts.
References
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