The Crisis of Legitimacy in Tataria and the Formulation of the Tatar Nationalist Project

Abstract

Back in 1990 a Tatar journalist explained the rise of Tatar nationalism in Tataria as follows:

It is very easy for a Tatar to become a nationalist in the USSR. One just need attend history classes at school, when, at the description of the horrors of the Tatar-Mongol invasion, the whole class turns to look at you; watch films in which glorious Russians perish at the hands of savage Tatars; get used… to the idea that the Volga is the great Russian river, that it is Russian woods that surround you; take part every year in the festivals of seeing off the Russian winter What can a Tatar be proud of? Squalid Kazan’? KamAZ which was built by the whole country? Where is that something to be proud of, to love? Of the musical treasures of the Tatars only the garmoshka* has survived, of the national dress - only the tyubeteika? of the literature - only books that nobody can read.*1