ABSTRACT
So intertwined are confessional and ethnic identities in the republics of the post-Soviet Russian Federation that Russian scholars are inclined to view post-Soviet developments as a single process of the ‘revival and reconstruction of ethno-confessional traditions’ ( Malashenko 1998a: 7). Since for the current authors this relationship is the object of rather than a premise for study, in this chapter we chart the ways in which ethnic and religious identities and processes are woven together in the social fabric of contemporary Tatarstan and Dagestan. We suggest that the specific ethnic structures of Tatarstan and Dagestan – bipolarity in the first case, polyethnicity in the second – lend quite different significances to ethnic identification in each republic. The role of Islam in society is also profoundly shaped by this ethnic context, it is suggested, working either to cement ethnic distinctiveness (in the case of Tatarstan) or to transcend it (in the case of Dagestan).
