State-Confessional Relations in the Tatar ASSR during Perestroika (1985–1989)

Abstract

This article traces how state-confessional relations in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic were gradually reshaped between 1985 and 1989. The evidentiary base consists of two document collections held in the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (GA RT): the papers of the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU (F.P-15) and those of the Council for Religious Affairs plenipotentiary (F.R-873). Reading party records alongside the documentation generated by the Council for Religious Affairs brings into view the deepening structural crisis of late-Soviet state atheism. A documented shift in the ways in which the same party bodies described Islam within a span of just two years is used as a gauge for the depth of the unfolding ideological transformation. The turning point of 1988–1989 appears to have emerged from the convergence of all-Union developments – glasnost, the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ (1988), and foreign-policy considerations – with region-specific dynamics, above all the 1,100th anniversary of the adoption of Islam by Volga Bulgaria marked in 1989. The religious revival encompassed both Islamic and Orthodox communities, though their institutional trajectories and outward forms diverged in important respects. The article also suggests that the particular intensity of the revival in Tatarstan rested on the close link between Islam and Tatar ethnic and cultural identity.