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.
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.
Maybe he's talking about European Russia/Russia west of the Urals.The whole Russia, or can there be a large Slavic polity in the eastern part?
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.
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.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.
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.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.