Winner of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History.
Through close study of Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, this book shows how traditional Islamic education among the people of Tsarist Russia's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) helped to Islamize the area's Turkic peoples, setting the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia.
"Agnes Nilufer Kefeli's thorough and imaginative use of sources is notable. She makes use of Russian official sources from the State Archives of Tatarstan and elsewhere, but she also consults a broad range of nonarchival Islamic sources, including Tatar-language Arabic-script popular literature. This makes the book highly original and important to both Russian history and Islamic studies."—Allen Frank
Defence date: 13 January 2014 ; Examining Board: Professor Stephen Anthony Smith, University of Oxford /EUI (Supervisor); Professor Alexander Etkind, EUI Professor; Alexei Miller, CEU Budapest; Professor Boris Kolonitskii, European University in St. Petersburg. ; First made available online on 26 February 2015. ; The dissertation investigates the Russification policy of the late-imperial Russian state, as it related to educational policy in the Middle Volga region. It seeks to understand how the tsarist authorities sought to define Russianness and how they sought to craft relations with pagan minorities and Muslims in a region where the Slavic-Orthodox, the Turkic-Islamic and the Finno-pagan worlds interacted. It asks how far the educational projects of the Orthodox missions and the secular authorities brought about Russification. The analysis of the changes in imperial policy in the period between the 1860s to 1914 allows for the conclusion that the methods, instruments and aims of Russification policy continually changed and that policy was applied quite differently vis-à-vis the Muslim and pagan, or in most cases only superficially Orthodox , population of the region. When dealing with the educational project for the non-Muslim population in the region, also known as the project of N.Ilminskii, the dissertation aims to understand how the russifying and missionary components related to each other. Furthermore, it studies the alternative educational projects aiming at Russification of the non-Russian population of the region that the Ilminskii system had to compete with. A considerable amount of the dissertation is devoted the discussion of the Muslim reform movement and emergence of Jadidism. By analyzing and comparing the curricula of old-method madrasahs and the new-methods ones, the dissertation demonstrates the evolution that the Middle Volga Muslims underwent under the influence of both inner reforms and the actions of the authorities.
"This book investigates the policy of Russia on the Caspian and in the nearby territories from old times to the beginning of the present millennium, thus, spanning several centuries. The book also discusses the motivations of the rulers of Rus', Moscow State, Russian Empire, the USSR and later on, Russia that pursued active foreign policy targeted to extension of the geopolitical influence and strengthening of the economic presence in the near-Caspian territories and on the Caspian Sea proper. The main stages of formation of the Russian foreign policy are studied. The causes underlying the rivalry of Russia with Persia and Turkey, Central Asian Khanates and European states for the leading positions on the Caspian are analyzed. The authors describe the mechanisms used by Russia in its foreign policy with regard to the established political and economic conditions. Much attention is focused on the analysis of Russia's foreign policy in the Caspian region after disintegration of the USSR when the situation on the Caspian had changed drastically. Formerly there were two Caspian statesaUSSR and Iran, but now three new independent states appeared, i.e. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, which immediately became the focus of interest of non-regional states and leading oil and gas companies. This book describes how the policy of Russia has been changing in the face of a new geopolitical situation in the Caspian region. The approaches of Russia to addressing the regional problems, first of all, the international legal status of the Caspian Sea, hydrocarbon production and transportation, militarization and ecology, etc. are analyzed. All these factors urged Russia to develop new approaches towards the Caspian region. The book investigates the effect of the foreign policy of new Caspian states, the USA, EU and China on the Caspian policy of Russia. The complicated geopolitical situation on the Caspian and unceasing attention to its hydrocarbon resources force Russia to keep a close watch on the Caspian region that remains the main vector of the Russian foreign policy."--Preface
The sheer size of the Russian foreign debt in 1917 has profoundly affected our view of the influence of foreign capital on tsarist diplomacy. It has been argued by both Western and Soviet historians that Russian foreign relations were in good part influenced by, or even determined by, Russia's debtor status to France and—to a lesser degree—to Great Britain. Thus a Western historian argued recently that in the last years of tsarist rule "foreign credit became a tool of power politics and a limitation on Russian sovereignty in general. … Between 1887 and 1917 Russian policy was tied to French policy, inasmuch as French investments were controlled, to a large extent, by the French Government." Recently published Soviet works, while revising Stalin's judgment that Russia was economically a semicolony of Western capital, continue to assert that the "financial-economic dependence on the capital, continue to assert that the "financial-economic dependence on the Entente countries pushed tsarist Russia into a military alliance with them."
