Abstract

Much scholarship on the Middle Volga region (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan) disengages from the issues of cultural, political, and economic domination and control of the Middle Volga and the Urals (Idel-Ural, or İdel-Ural), one of the remaining culturally distinct areas of Russia. In this study, I contribute to closing this gap by engaging the scholarship on ethnic politics and postcolonial theory, which offer important insights that shed light on these critical, but largely overlooked, questions. Looking from the lenses of these approaches, the Middle Volga can be viewed as the first instance of the culturally, linguistically, and religiously distinct subaltern in the long process of empire-building and imperial expansion.