“I Wanted to Bite at the Chauvinists”: Tatar History, Culture, and Politics during the Thaw

Abstract This article assesses the activities of Tatar intellectual and cultural elites during the decade and a half following Stalin's death in 1953. The climate of reform and de‐Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev encouraged these elites to recover the scholarly and artistic work of the era of korenizatsiia to deploy formerly taboo cultural tropes, such as those related to the eras of the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate, in order to articulate their visions of the Tatar past, present, and future. This intellectual development coincided with growing awareness of and unease towards Russocentrism in Soviet culture as a whole, as well as in Tatar public life more specifically. In response to Tatars’ critiques of contemporary Soviet society, party and state officials worked diligently to police the lines between scholarship, art, and politics and to punish those who transgressed the boundaries of Soviet acceptability. In analyzing these developments, this article argues that the Tatar case demonstrates the broad scope of the Thaw’s impact on nationalities issues and the extent to which resistance to Russian cultural primacy permeated the discourse of leading non‐Russian thinkers.