AHC: Create a Lipka Tatar Nation

[The Militant Doberman]

Lipka Tatars are a very interesting historical ethnic group. First made up of pagan Tatars fleeing Islamization in late Middle Ages, then subsumed by Muslim Tatars, the Lipka Tatars settled in what is now Belarus, Poland and Lithuania. Though for a long time they served as a military cast and kept their Islamic, Turkic identity and language alive smack in the heartland of Christian Eastern Europe by now they have mostly assimilate into the local host cultures.

Your challenge is to create a scenario where instead of assimilating they carve out an independent state that exists into the modern era.

In fact, you know what? Let’s break this challenge up further into categories (from easiest to hardest):

1) Create a Lipka ethnic state (no limitations on language or religion)

2) Create a Lipka ethnic state that is majority-Muslim

3) Create a Lipka state where the national alphabet is the Belarusian-Arabic script.

4) Create a Lipka state where pre-Islamic beliefs and religion survives.

How does each of these scenarios impact the history of Eastern Europe?
Assuming the Lipka state is formed late (sometime between late 1700s to start of 1900) resulting in minimal butterflies how would the existence of such a country impact the 20th century?

 

[Koprulu Mustafa Pasha]

With those numbers... if some Crimean Tatars flee to PLC rather than the Ottoman Empire, their numbers might be more. At the very best they might for a small buffer state in Western Belarus but doomed to be absorbed by either Poland or Russia.

 

[The Militant Doberman]

With those numbers...

Keep in mind: the numbers quoted in Wikipedia is their current population.

I assume their numbers were higher prior to centuries of assimilation (though I admit I failed to find what their past population was like with a quick Google search).

 

[Chrzęścimir]

Today Lipka Tatar is local variant of Polish nationality. We are Poles!

 

[Augenis]

At the tail end of the 16th century, the entire Commonwealth had about 200 thousand Tatars, although personally I believe that this is too high of an estimate.

The immediate problem with starting a Lipka Tatars nation is the nature of their presence in Lithuania and later in Poland. In Lithuania, the Tatars were almost like the monarch's personal force, serving directly him and settled by the Grand Dukes where he needed them - which meant settling them in the surroundings of cities like Vilnius, Trakai, Kiev, Minsk, Slonim, etc., where they would be employed as soldiers, guards, etc. What this meant is that there was no such thing as a Lipka Tatar "region" or a place where they would make up a majority or even a plurality, just a lot of communities dispersed across the whole country.

It's similar to the Jewish minority, really. Visible on demographic charts, but not on demographic maps.