Abstract:
When we talk about Russia, we immediately imagine the largest country in the world that expands for more than seventeen million square kilometers: the great compact and homogeneous block, which extends from the European continent to Asia, from the Gulf of Finland to the Black sea, crossing the wide spaces of Siberia and down into the territories of the North Caucasus. We must remember, however, that the political and geographical space that we are typically used to consider as ethnically homogeneous is in truth one of the most varied and complex multi-ethnic environments in the world, politically driven by a Russian core but made up of multiple ethnic and socio-cultural entities that are, actually, not only Russian.
To investigate the origins of the multi-ethnic nature of Russia it is necessary to take a step back, at least, until 1552 when Moscow Tsar Ivan IV first conquered an Islamic sovereign state derived from the Mongol Empire, of Turkic-speaking and of Muslim faith: the Kazan' Khanate. From that moment onwards, the Russian Empire expanded eventually becoming one of the most multi-faced and multi-ethnic realities in history in which, unavoidably, the national question has always played a prominent role, especially from the Nineteenth century when the concept of “nation-state” and, therefore, of mono-ethnic state was born.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through a historical survey (first chapter) that begins with the origins of the multi-ethnic Russian state up until the present days, right on the reality of that ethnic group which marked for the first time, the multicultural and multi-confessional nature of Russia and that all over the centuries has managed to redesign the relationship between the Russian center and its political entities: the Tatars of the Volga. Focusing mainly on the post-soviet period, the paper will investigate the process that has allowed the formation of what is today known as “the Tatarstan model”: a special relationship made of concessions and privileges, but also of compromises, that allowed, thanks to the resolution and perseverance of the Republic of Tatarstan, to create one of the autonomous realities better integrated into the Russian Federation. It will also be analyzed to what extent, even though it is fully incorporated within the Russian political and cultural space, Tatarstan has managed to maintain its administrative (second chapter) linguistic (third chapter) and religious (fourth chapter) peculiarities without the need to appeal to violence or to an armed conflict as, unfortunately, we know was the case of another Russian entity: the sadly famous example of Chechnya.
