Volga Tatars

Volga Tatars

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Ilfak Guilfanov • Musa Cälil Elvira Nabiullina • Rinat Akhmetov Rudolf Nureyev • Marat Safin • Rinat Dasayev
Total population
c. 6 million (2002)
Regions with significant populations
Russian Federation:    5,500,000 Tatarstan:    2,000,000 Bashkortostan:    990,000
Languages
Tatar; Russian
Religion
Sunni Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christian minority

The Volga Tatars are the largest subgroup of the Tatars, native to the Volga region. They account for roughly six out of seven million Tatars worldwide. They are in turn subdivided into various subgroups, the largest being the Kazan Tatars, native to Tatarstan proper.

Volga Tatar subgroups

Kazan (Qazan) Tatars

The majority of Volga Tatars are Kazan (Qazan) Tatars. They are the majority of the population of Tatarstan, one of the constituent republics of Russia.

During the 11th-16th centuries, numerous Turkic tribes lived in what is now Russia and Kazakhstan. The present territory of Tatarstan was inhabited by the Volga Bulgars, a people with uncertain origins The Bulgars settled on the Volga River in the 8th century and converted to Islam in 922 during the missionary work of Ahmad ibn Fadlan. After the Mongol invasion of Europe from 1241, Volga Bulgaria was defeated, ruined, and incorporated into the Golden Horde.

Few of the population survived, nearly all of them moved to northern territories, but it is possible that there was (or wasn't) also some degree of mixing between it and the Cuman-Kipchaks of the Horde during the ensuing period. The group as a whole accepted the language of the Kipchaks and the ethnonym "Tatars" (although the name Bulgars persisted in some places), while the invaders eventually converted to Islam. Two centuries later, as the Horde disintegrated, the area became the territory of the Kazan khanate, which was ultimately conquered by Russia in 1552.

Noqrat Tatars

Tatars live in Russia's Kirov Oblast and Tatarstan. Their dialect have many Kozla Mari words and they have admixture of Finno Ugrian Maris.^{[citation needed]} Their number in 2002 was around 5.000 people.

Perm (Ostyak) Tatars

Kazan Tatars live in Russia's Perm Krai. Some also comprise an admixture of Komi Permyaks.^{[citation needed]} Some Tatar scholars (as Zakiev) name them Ostyak Tatars. Their number is (2002) c.130.000 people.

Keräşens

Main article: Keräşens

Many Kazan Tatars were forcibly Christianized by Ivan the Terrible during the 16th century, and later, during the 18th century.

Some scientists suppose that Suars were ancestors of the Keräşen Tatars, and they had been converted to Christianity by Armenians in the 6th century while they lived in the Caucasus. Suars, like other tribes which later converted to Islam, became Volga Bulgars, and later the modern Chuvash (who are mostly Christian) and Kazan Tatars (mostly Muslims).

Keräşen Tatars live all over Tatarstan. Now they tend to be assimilated among Chuvash and Tatars. Eighty years of Atheistic Soviet rule made Tatars of both faiths not as religious as they once were. Russian names are largely the only remaining difference between Tatars and Keräşen Tatars.

Some Turkic (Kuman) tribes in Golden Horde were converted to Christianity in the 13th and 14th centuries (Nestorianism). Some prayers, written in that time in the Codex Cumanicus, sound like modern Keräşen prayers, but there is no information about the connection between Christian Kumans and modern Keräşens.

Population figures

In the 1910s, they numbered about half a million in the area of Kazan. Some 15,000 belonging to the same stem had either migrated to Ryazan in the center of Russia (what is now European Russia) or had been settled as prisoners during the 16th and 17th centuries in Lithuania (Vilnius, Grodno, and Podolia). Some 2,000 resided in St. Petersburg Volga-Ural Tatars number nearly 7 million, mostly in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the population is found in Tatarstan (nearly 2 million) and neighbouring regions, significant number of Kazan Volga-Ural Tatars live in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Outside of Tatarstan, urban Tatars usually speak Russian as their first language (in cities such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Ufa, and cities of the Ural and western Siberia).

Volga Tatar diaspora

A Tatar cemetery in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

Places where Volga Tatars live include:

• Ural and Upper Kama (since 15th century) 15th century—colonization, 16th-17th century—re-settled by Russians; 17th-19th—exploring of the Urals, working in the plants
• West Siberia (since 16th century): 16th—from Russian repressions after conquering of Khanate of Kazan by Russians 17th–19th—exploring of West Siberia; end of 19th—first half of 20th—industrialization, railways constructing; 1930s–Joseph Stalin's repressions; 1970s–1990s—oil workers
• Moscow (since 17th century): Tatar feudals in the service of Russia, tradesmen, since 18th—Saint-Petersburg
• Kazakhstan (since 18th century): 18th–19th centuries—Russian army officers and soldiers; 1930s–industrialization, since 1950s—settlers on virgin lands - re-emigration in 1990s
• Finland (since 1804): (mostly Mişärs) – 19th – Russian military forces officers and soldiers, and others
• Central Asia (since 19th century) (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan; for Xinjiang see Chinese Tatars) – 19th Russian officers and soldiers, tradesmen, religious emigrants, 1920-1930s – industrialization, Soviet education program for Central Asia peoples, 1948, 1960 – help for Ashgabat and Tashkent ruined by earthquakes. - re-emigration in 1980s
• Caucasus, especially Azerbaijan (since 19th century) – oil workers (1890s), bread tradesmen
• Northern China (since 1910s) – railway builders (1910s) - re-emigrated in 1950s
• East Siberia (since 19th century) - resettled farmers (19th), railroad builders (1910s, 1980s), exiled by the Soviet government in 1930s
• Germany and Austria - 1914, 1941 – prisoners of war, 1990s - emigration
• Turkey, Japan, Iran, China, Egypt (since 1918) – emigration
• England, USA, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Mexico – (1920s) re-emigration from Germany, Turkey, Japan, China and others. 1950s – prisoners of war from Germany, which did not go back to the USSR, 1990s – emigration after the breakup of USSR
• Sakhalin, Kaliningrad, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Karelia – after 1944-45 builders, Soviet military personnel
• Murmansk Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai, Northern Poland and Northern Germany (1945–1990) - Soviet military personnel
• Israel – wives or husbands of Jews (1990s)

Bulgarism

"Bulgarism" is a term for the position that the Kazan Tatars are significantly descended from the Volga Bulgars or are actual Bulgars that have not mixed. The alternative position assumes that Tatar ethnogenesis was only completed upon the arrival of the Cumans and Kipchaks. Tatarstan was called Bolgaristan until 1919.

The "Bulgarist" position espouses the view that there was very little, or no mixing with Mongol and Turkic aliens after the conquest of Volga Bulgaria, especially in the northern regions that ultimately became Tatarstan.

See also

• Bulgars
• Volga Bulgaria
• Mari people
• Bulgarism
• Tatar language
• Tatar alphabet
• Finnish Tatars
• Tatars of Kazakhstan
• Chinese Tatars
• Tatars
• Crimean Tatars
• Lipka Tatars
• Nağaybäk
• Tartary
• Little Tartary
• Tatar nobility
• Tatarstan

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.