L'apport de quelques sources russes officielles à l'historiographie du djadidisme chez les Tatars de la Volga (Aux Archives centrales d'État du Tatarstan)

Abstract

Rafiq Mouhammetchine, The contribution of Russian official source material to the historiography of jadidism among the Volga Tatars (Turkestan Central State Archives). The author, a disciple of the aforementioned one, attempts at analysing the perception Russian observers had of Tatar jadidism, mainly on the basis of a report laid down in 191 1 by A. V. Goriachkin at the request of an examining magistrate in Kazan. The sources under scrutiny reveal the conceptual and terminological looseness of that official literature, which testifies to the paucity of information in Russian ministries — concerned as they were with fighting agaiast Ottoman influence — on the social and cultural processes then developing among the Muslim community on their own territories. It was only due to the outburst of the World War and the revival of an autonomous nationalist Muslim press that observers in St. Petersburg became aware of the deep ideological changes that had been taking place among the Muslims of Russia from the start of the century; the latter were progressively forsaking Islamic communitarism in favour of ethnic nationalism.