Fighting for the Tsar, Fighting against the Tsar: The Use of Folk Culture to Mobilize the Tatar Population during World War Ⅰ and the Russian Revolution (1914-1921)

摘要

From the late 1800s, modernist clergy, education reformers and liberal and socialist activists in the Volga-Ural Muslim community appropriated, re-wrote and subverted popular Islamic literature and folk genres as a means of inculcating Russian Muslim peasants with new sets of values. During the Great War and Russian revolutions, this practice was expanded from internal community discussions of Islam and morality to empire-wide political topics, including loyalty to the empire and the construction of a new Soviet order. In some respects, this transformation mirrored the production of Russian-language propaganda during the same period. At the same time, however, the processes of creating folklore and attempting to speak the language of the peasant as they unfolded in the Volga-Ural Muslim community were also shaped by the internal culture of that community and by its peculiar position as a linguistically alien minority within the empire. In times of war and revolution, the imperial and Soviet governments relied on educated elites within the ethnic community to translate messages into language and form comprehensible to the non-Russian masses. The upbringing and education of these elites, in turn, shaped the way that they conceived of their own community's peasants and lower orders and the forms through which they chose to communicate with them. The result, in the Volga-Ural Muslim (or Tatar) case, was the creation of a literature the structure of which was borrowed from below while the content came from above (from the imperial Russian, Ottoman or Soviet governments), and which was generated primarily by members of the community. The multiple deconstructions and re-constructions of Russian society that occurred between 1905 and 1921 caused successive re-orderings of the political, social and ideological landscapes. Across this period, however, the ruling governments and their native intermediaries relied upon the same strategies to inform Muslims peasants of these changes. There was not only a continuity in propaganda strategies and writing personnel across the revolutionary divide (and, indeed, across imperial borders, in the case of the German-Ottoman propaganda effort), but also a continuity of understanding of how a particular non-Russian peasant society consumed text and internalized information. Thus, while in some ways the Great War and the Russian Revolutions precipitated a decolonization of the Russian Empire, these events also refined and expanded practices of government-minority relations that were bom under the old regime but were retained under the new one.