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Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a comparison between Crimea and Kazan after the Great Reforms of the 1860s, focusing on state-society interaction. In particular, it looks at the situation of Muslims, comparing the position of Tatars in the two regions. Tatars formed the most sizable group of internal "others" in both territories, about 30 percent of the population in Kazan and over 40 percent in Crimea. Most of them were peasants, rather than merchants or intellectuals. The paper combines a "top-down" with a "bottom-up" perspective, exploring not only the ways in which Muslim Tatars were legally encoded and governed but also their everyday engagement with state institutions. In how far did the relationships that Volga and Crimean Tatars entertained with the imperial state differ, and what do these differences tell us about changing and diverging forms of imperial borderlands?

Both Crimea and Kazan constitute "intermediate terrains", former frontier zones with histories of independent social, economic, and political organization that, by the mid-nineteenth century, were largely treated as part of the imperial core. They differed from more peripheral territories that were annexed in the course of the nineteenth century and not fully integrated into the empire's civil-administrative structure. Like most parts of European Russia, intermediate terrains integrated minorities to a considerable degree, offering them privileges, legal opportunities, and civic participation. Yet, while addressing the ways in which Crimea and Kazan were similar, the paper pays particular attention to their differences. It touches on their dynamic, and diverging, role in the imperial imagination. It argues that while Kazan was increasingly past its prime, the southern peninsula began to thrive. With waves of European settlers and seasonal visitors arriving, and many Tatars leaving for the Ottoman Empire, migration came to shape life in Crimea much more than in the Volga region. The end of serfdom and the shortage of land also affected the two regions in very different ways. The institutions of the Russian state took on the role of overseeing transactions and settling disputes in Crimea; and since comparable institutions had already existed under Ottoman rule, these institutions were accepted to a greater degree than in Kazan, where violent confrontations remained common.

The paper draws on archival materials from Kazan, Simferopol (Crimea), and Odessa, on local publications, the memoirs of regional administrators, and on an examination of the local press.