ABSTRACT
More than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, transitional post-communist Russia continues to be fertile ground for investigations of ethnic identity and the struggle to retain linguistic and cultural integrity in an assimilating society. In this chapter I will be using articles found in the post-Soviet press of Tatarstan as a means of accessing Tatar public discourse on the role of language in the creation of both the Tatar ethnic identity and the Tatar nation.1 Using this public discourse, I will demonstrate that Tatar identity, in particular as constructed through linguistic performance, is inextricably linked with orientation towards or away from Russian language and culture, such that the integrity and cultural "purity" of post-Soviet Tatars - thought by many to be necessary for the survival of the Tatar language, culture, and nation - is equated with their de-Russification. In particular, I will examine the role that language plays in ethnic self-identification and nationhood by looking at the specific case of the return of archaic Arabic loanwords to the lexicon of present-day Tatar, the clearest linguistic expression of Tatars' post-Soviet cultural realignment.
