Thesiss

This dissertation deals with a sensitive area of late Imperial Russian history, that of the attempt to assimilate the indigenous populations of the Western regions of European Russia and Central Asia. In particular, it explores the role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in t…

This thesis traces a complex discourse of the self in the early Soviet era, navigating the identities both assumed by and ascribed to Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (1892-1940), a Volga Tatar and at one time the highest-ranking Muslim in the Communist Party. After the Bolshevik Revolutio…

The Soviet approach to national self-determination through ethnic-territorial state-building during the civil war was a problematic policy, for it was not always clear what constituted a national community. Linguistic and cultural similarities among Muslims of the Volga-Ural reg…

On 8 April 1783 Catherine II annexed the Crimean khanate, introducing a predominantly Muslim population into Russia for the first time in over two hundred years. The new territory brought roughly 300,000 new subjects into the imperial fold, and Catherine endowed them with a set …