OTL Russia: ATL Tartarland

What if OTL Russia was instead Tartarland, with Tartars being the dominant nationality and Islam the dominant religion with Slavs and Christianity being a minority. Have the capital be in Kazan.
 

Zek Sora

Donor
What if OTL Russia was instead Tartarland, with Tartars being the dominant nationality and Islam the dominant religion with Slavs and Christianity being a minority. Have the capital be in Kazan.

Any particular century that you want this to be true by?
 
Well, that's kind of a big challenge. The Russians always outnumbered the Tatars by a very heavy margin, and numerical disparity like that is hard to overcome.
 
Well, that's kind of a big challenge. The Russians always outnumbered the Tatars by a very heavy margin, and numerical disparity like that is hard to overcome.

Well, being a minority didn't stop the Mongols from dominating China, Russia, and Iran for centuries. If we want a lasting Tatary comprising most of Russia, however, I think we'd have to cut off the Slavic-dominated parts of the west.

The rest of the Turkic-speaking peoples in Siberia and Central Asia could be assimilated in varying degrees - It's important to note that before nationalism, the Turkic groups of that region aren't very divided into the identities we call them by today. Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were just nomadic Turkics, while Uyghurs and Uzbeks were just agrarian Turkics. The label "Tatar" itself encompasses a large number of Turkic-speaking peoples even today. It's possible that the name Tatar could become synonymous with Turkic-speaking northerners regardless of their culture or language.

I'm curious as to how far Islam would penetrate the far northern Turkic-speaking and other Siberian groups in such a scenario. The Russians enforced Orthodox Christianity on the Siberian shamanists but weren't completely successful.
 
Well, being a minority didn't stop the Mongols from dominating China, Russia, and Iran for centuries. If we want a lasting Tatary comprising most of Russia, however, I think we'd have to cut off the Slavic-dominated parts of the west.

Zalesye alone had more population than all of the former Golden Horde. It's hard to attract settlers into nomadic feudalism that has civil wars every 5 years on the dot.

The rest of the Turkic-speaking peoples in Siberia and Central Asia could be assimilated in varying degrees - It's important to note that before nationalism, the Turkic groups of that region aren't very divided into the identities we call them by today. Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were just nomadic Turkics, while Uyghurs and Uzbeks were just agrarian Turkics. The label "Tatar" itself encompasses a large number of Turkic-speaking peoples even today. It's possible that the name Tatar could become synonymous with Turkic-speaking northerners regardless of their culture or language.
Absolutely. Steppe identities revolved around clan structures that overlapped and reduplicated through most of Kyphack and Oghuz nations that exist today. This grand tatar identity isn't that hard to achieve if there is political unification. Still parity with non-Lithuanian Russia at best though.

I'm curious as to how far Islam would penetrate the far northern Turkic-speaking and other Siberian groups in such a scenario. The Russians enforced Orthodox Christianity on the Siberian shamanists but weren't completely successful.
Considering that the Bulgars had lived on the Volga as the hegemonic center pre-and-post Mongols for centuries, yet when the Russians overthrew them in the 16th. c. they found it much easier to get converts and local allies....not very far.

There are only a few groups that were non-Tatar and also Muslim, and I strongly suspect that any northward expansion was interrupteed by continuous population shifts between Finnic, Ugric and Russian settlers between the 12th and 17th c.

The borderlands of the Muslim world didn't extend much farther north than Kazan and Arsk.

They did, however, extend pretty far West at times.
 
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