Country: Russia

Group: Tatar

Date: 02/16/2022

Team: Natasha Chandra (lead), Makenna Bloomfield, Katherine Edwards, Jihui Kuang

Content Warnings: racism, discrimination

Approximate Time Period: 1550-present

The Tatar community in Russia is the largest minority in the Russian Federation, many of whom live in the Republic of Tatarstan and speak the Tatar language (Minority Rights Group International, 2015). After the Russian conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in the 16th centuries, Russian governments have regularly tried to “Russify” Tatar populations   This has included forcible conversions from Islam to Orthodox Christianity during the Russian Empire and the Soviet period (Mustafina, 2015; Minority Rights Group International, 2015), as well as the destruction of mosques and other important cultural heritage (Williams, 2002). In 1944, the Soviet government also deported large numbers of Tatars from their homelands forcing them to live in exile (Williams, 2002). More recently in 2008, the Russian government required all high school exams to be in Russian, leading many schools to move instruction from Tatar to Russian (Minority Rights Group International, 2015). After 2016, the Russian authorities began to crack down on the language of the Tatar nation, leading to a crisis within the nation about the identity of the language (Paul, 2016). The Russian government has also banned Tatar’s literary and religious books (Luke, 2018).

Data Quality: Data quality for the Tatar ethnocide is rated a 2/3 due to the limited amount of unbiased, peer-reviewed sources.

Sources

  1. Luke, C. (2018). Tatar Muslims face increasing intimidation in Crimea. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/tatar-muslims-face-increasing-intimidation-in-crimea-19321
  2. Minority Rights Group. (2015). Tatars. Retrieved 6 February 2022, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/tatars-3/.
  3. Mustafina, D. A. (2015). Islam and christianity in the middle Volga region in the second half of the XVI-XVIII century. Journal of Sustainable Development, 8(5), 54.
  1. Paul, G. (2016). Struggle Over Tatar Language Impacts More than Just Tatarstan. Jamestown. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://jamestown.org/program/struggle-tatar-language-impacts-just-tatarstan/.
  2. Williams, B. (2002). The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars. Journal of Contemporary History.  2002;37(3):323-347. Retrieved 5 February 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3180785.