Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

Its territory had been part of the Kazan, Simbirsk and Ufa provinces. The Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic decided by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities in March 1918 was never realised because of the civil war, and although Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev pressed for its revival, on 13 December 1919 the Politburo, citing the opposition of all the Bashkir communists, decided not to create it and annulled the 1918 decree, which put a separate Tatar autonomous republic on the agenda. On 22 March 1920 Lenin received Burhan Mansurov and other Tatar communists in the Kremlin to discuss a Tatar republic. The decree of 27 May proclaimed it, and on 25 June the Kazan provincial executive committee handed all power to a provisional revolutionary committee. The committee issued an appeal announcing the autonomy on 11 July and fixed the borders by 11 September, and the First Constituent Congress of Soviets on 26–27 September elected the presidium of the Tatar Central Executive Committee and the first Council of People’s Commissars. Mansurov was the first chairman of the Central Executive Committee. The republic was first divided into ten cantons, with three more added in 1921. When the drought of 1921 brought mass famine, it received more than 8 million poods of seed and 6 million poods of food from other regions in 1921–1922.

A first draft constitution of 1925 was never approved, and the constitution of 1937 changed the name to the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Proposals to make it a union republic were considered in 1922, 1936, 1977 and at other times but never adopted. According to the Russian-language source Stalin explained in 1936 that the Bashkir and Tatar republics could not become union republics because they were surrounded on all sides by Soviet republics and regions and so had, in effect, nowhere to secede to from the USSR. In 1921 there were 3,100 Tatar workers, technicians and engineers at large enterprises (15.5 per cent); by 1932 there were 16,400 (33.6 per cent). Industrialisation and collectivisation followed in the 1930s, and after the Second World War the oil industry grew until in 1966 the republic produced 32.5 per cent of Soviet oil. On 30 August 1990 its Supreme Soviet adopted a declaration of state sovereignty, making it the Tatar Soviet Socialist Republic – Republic of Tatarstan, and from 16 May 1992 it has been the Republic of Tatarstan.