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Old 09-13-2007, 09:01 PM
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Default Re: Kremlin Backed Anniversary in Kabardino-Balkaria Fails to Deter Insurgents

There are many but if you look back into history, most of them were simply called Tatars.

What you see now with the many nations such as Bashkortstan etc is the direct result of Stalin's divide and rule plan. That is, by assigning them all their own 'nations' etc, was merely his covert way of fragmenting the Tatar peoples. By using this guise of giving the Bashkurts, Udmurts, Chuvash and so forth, 'independence', Stalin was merely trying to extinguish the flames of pan-Islamism

I could write at length about this but it will divert the thread. For now, here's a tiny blurb about the Tatars:
Tatar, also spelled Tartar, is spoken both in European Russia and in Siberia. Its 5 million speakers are divided into a number of branches, the most important being the Volga Tatars, who inhabit the lands drained by the Volga River and its tributaries. The greatest concentrations of Volga Tatars are in the Republic of Tatarstan (capital: Kazan), where they number about 2 million, and in the Bashkorstan (capital: Ufa), where they number about one million. A second branch of the Tatars consists of the Siberian Tatars, who number about 100,000 and live in western Siberia.


Tatar is a Turkic language belonging to the Altaic family. The Tatars first appear in Russian history in the 13th century when, as the Mongols, they overran most of the country and settled down to rule. The new state was known as the Golden Horde, with its capital at Sarai, near the modern city of Astrakhan. But its distance from the capital of the Mongol Empire, coupled with the small number of governing Mongols in the Horde itself, led to its ultimate absorption by Turkic elements. When the Golden Horde began to crumble in the 15th century, a number of new Tatar kingdoms were formed-Kazan, Astrakhan, Crimean, and Siberian. These in turn fell to Russia a century later.

Originally written in the Arabic script, Tatar now uses the Cyrillic. ***

Tatar is spoken/used in the following countries:

Bashkortostan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tatarstan.
Language Family
Family: Altaic
Subgroup: Tukic
Branch: Northwestern(Kipchak)

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