Allworth, Edward, ed. (1994). Central Asia: 130 Years of Russia Dominance, A Historical Overview. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Wimbush, S. Enders. (1985). Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide. London: C. Hurst and Company. Bulatov, M. (1979). Tashkent. New York: Smithmark Publishing.
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MacLeod, Calum, and Mayhew, Bradley. (1999). Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand. London: Odyssey. Sahadeo, Jeff. (2000). “Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, Empire in Tashkent, 1865- 1923.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Ur-bana-Champaign.
TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the USSR, was founded in July 1925 with the goal of centralizing control over the distribution of foreign news in the Soviet Union under the oversight of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom). Until the collapse of the USSR, TASS remained the single most important supplier of foreign news to the Soviet mass media, a major producer of domestic news, and a key instrument for conveying information and propaganda from the Soviet government to foreign governments and populations. After 1991 TASS became ITAR-TASS (Information Telegraph Agency of Russia), the central information distributor for the Russian Federation.
TASS’s predecessor, the Russian Telegraph Agency, or ROSTA, was founded by the Bolsheviks in September 1918 and charged with an array of functions including provision of news reports to the Soviet press, instruction of journalists in training, and supervision of provincial newspapers. ROSTA staff and financial resources were clearly not adequate to these huge tasks and, in fact, the provincial press was run by local initiatives during the civil war. In the winter of 1921 to 1922 the newly created Press Section of the Party Central Committee’s Agitprop Department took over supervision of the provincial press and ROSTA was restricted to wire service functions.
TASS never had a monopoly on the collection and distribution of either foreign or domestic news. Until the late 1920s RATAU, the Ukrainian Republic’s official wire service, maintained correspondents abroad and engaged in a series of turf wars with ROSTA/TASS over distribution of foreign news in Ukraine. Major newspapers such as Pravda, Izves-tia, and Trud (the central labor union newspaper) generally posted several correspondents abroad.
In addition to its public news distribution functions, TASS supplied “Not for Press” information
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
bulletins to Soviet leaders during the late 1920s and most likely for most of Soviet history. See also: JOURNALISM; SOVNARKOM
Hopkins, Mark W. (1970). Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus Publishing. Mueller, Julie Kay. (1992). “A New Kind of Newspaper: The Origins and Development of a Soviet Institution, 1921-1928.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California-Berkeley.
Tatarstan is a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, located at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, with its capital at Kazan. Originally formed as the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920, it was renamed the Republic of Tatarstan in 1990. Tatars, sometimes referred to as the Volga Tatars or Kazan Tatars, form the indigenous population of Tatarstan. They form the second largest nationality in Russia (5.5 million in 1989) and one of the largest in the former Soviet Union. As of 1989, about one quarter of Tatars lived in Tatarstan (1.8 million), with large communities in Bashkortostan (1.1 million) and other republics and provinces of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia. Additionally, about one million Tatars lived in other republics of the former Soviet Union, primarily in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in Central Asia. The Tatar language belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family and has several dialects. Most Tatars are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi legal school, with smaller numbers of Kriashen, or Christianized Tatars.
Finno-Ugric tribes, the earliest known inhabitants of Tatarstan, were joined by Turkic-speaking settlers after the third century C.E. Most important were the Volga Bulgars, who arrived in the seventh century and by the 900s had established a state that soon dominated the entire Middle Volga. Bulgar economic life combined agriculture, pas-toralism, and commerce, making the Bulgar state one of the most important trading partners of Kievan Rus. The Volga Bulgars officially adopted Islam in 922 during the visit of Ibn Fadlan, an emis1519
TATARSTAN AND TATARS
Tatars of Kazan. © JAMIE ABECASIS/SUPERSTOCK sary of the Caliph. In 1236 their capital at Great Bulgar was captured and destroyed during the Mongol invasion, and Bulgars subsequently became a subject people of the Mongol empire and the Golden Horde.
Russians and Europeans often referred to these invaders as Tatars, a term that originated with a Turkic tribe in the Mongol army but by the nineteenth and early twentieth century was applied by Russians to several different Turkic Muslim groups, including ancestors of today’s Kazan or Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, and Azerbaijans. The implication that these peoples are descended from the Mongol invaders was long commonplace. While scholars agree that Mongols and their allied tribes may have played some part in the formation of today’s Tatar people, most also assert that contemporary Tatars owe a much larger debt both genetically and culturally to the Volga Bulgars, with an admixture of local Finno-Ugric peoples and several Turkic tribes that migrated to the region over ensuing centuries.
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In the 1440s, as the Golden Horde disintegrated, a separate khanate emerged at Kazan, in what some scholars see as a restoration of Bulgar statehood. In 1552 the Kazan Khanate was conquered and destroyed by Muscovy, marking the first Russian incorporation of large Muslim populations into their expanding empire. Under Russian rule, intense Christianization campaigns alternated with periods of greater toleration. In the late eighteenth century, Catherine II granted the Tatars the right to trade with the Muslims of Central Asia and allowed them to form a spiritual board at Ufa to regulate the religious affairs of Muslims in European Russia. With their superior knowledge of Turkic language and customs, Tatar merchants quickly established a virtual monopoly over trade between Russia and Central Asia. This contributed to the formation of Tatar commercial and industrial classes, urbanization, formation of a small industrial working class, and emergence of a secular national intelligentsia. These factors made the Tatars, like the Azerbaijans in the Caucasus, one of the most economically integrated Muslim groups in the empire.
The nineteenth century saw important intellectual and cultural changes, most importantly the Jadid movement to reform Islamic education by introducing the secular subjects taught in Russian schools, and the emergence of Western forms of culture such as novels, plays, theater, and newspapers. The development of national identity and cultural nationalism proceeded as well with the creation of a standard Tatar literary language. However, the broader questions of national language and the parameters of the nation remained controversial. Intellectuals who imagined all or most Turkic-speakers as belonging to a single nation of Turks quarreled with those who defined a narrower Tatar nationality, while others emphasized the larger Islamic community. Nevertheless, as Russia drifted toward revolution in the early twentieth century, most members of the educated elite shared a belief that their community formed the natural leadership of Russia’s Muslim Turkic population.
Tatars were divided by the same social and political conflicts as Russians during the revolutionary period. The question of national autonomy was intertwined with these conflicts, with a serious division emerging in 1917 between supporters of extraterritorial cultural autonomy and those favoring the autonomy of a large territorial Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state within a Russian federation. Local Bolsheviks and Left SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), both Russian and Tatar, secured Soviet power
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