The Golden Horde Revisited? History and Regional Identity Politics in the late USSR and post-Soviet Russia (Republic of Tatarstan), 1985-2018

The thesis examines changing depictions of the Golden Horde – the medieval polity that existed on the territories of contemporary Russia and Kazakhstan from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries – in historical narratives produced in the Republic of Tatarstan (a part of the Russian Federation) from 1985, the start of perestroika in the USSR, to 2018, when Russian federal law prohibited the obligatory study of national languages in national republics, which marked the end of even symbolic autonomy for ethnic minorities in Russia. The thesis explores and seeks to explain the nuances of these shifting historiographical interpretations, and in particular, the ways in which these histories affected, and were affected by, policy making processes. In this respect, this project is a case study of a metahistorical approach of how the past of a certain minority is written and used at a given time. The thesis suggests that the shifting uses and understanding of the medieval past were central to broader questions of regional identity, memory politics, sovereignty and political power in the post-Soviet years. The thesis shows that in Tatarstan history very often was understood as a type of flexible ideological and political tool, one that had a relationship with broader questions about the changing horizontal and vertical nature of political power at local and national levels. One of key findings of this thesis is also that personality and relationships are crucially important to understanding how history is produced, and that this factor is much more vital than the so-called “objective (material) reality.”