Tatar, any member of several Turkic-speaking peoples that collectively numbered more than 5 million in the late 20th century and lived mainly in west-central Russia along the central course of the Volga River and its tributary, the Kama, and thence east to the Ural Mountains. The Tatars are also settled in Kazakhstan and, to a lesser extent, in western Siberia.
The name Tatar first appeared among nomadic tribes living in northeastern Mongolia and the area around Lake Baikal from the 5th century ce. Unlike the Mongols, these peoples spoke a Turkic language, and they may have been related to the Cuman or Kipchak peoples. After various groups of these Turkic nomads became part of the armies of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan in the early 13th century, a fusion of Mongol and Turkic elements took place, and the Mongol invaders of Russia and Hungary became known to Europeans as Tatars (or Tartars).
After Genghis Khan’s empire broke up, the Tatars became especially identified with the western part of the Mongol domain, which included most of European Russia and was called the Golden Horde. These Tatars were converted to Sunnite Islām in the 14th century. Owing to internal divisions and various foreign pressures, the Golden Horde disintegrated late in the 14th century into the independent Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga River, Sibir in western Siberia, and Crimea. Russia conquered the first three of these khanates in the 16th century, but the Crimean khanate became a vassal state of the Ottoman Turks until it was annexed to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1783.
In their khanates the Tatars developed a complex social organization, and their nobility preserved its civil and military leadership into Russian times; distinct classes of commoners were merchants and tillers of the soil. At the head of government stood the khan of the foremost Tatar state (the Kazan khanate), part of whose family joined the Russian nobility by direct agreement in the 16th century. This stratification within Tatar society continued until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
During the 9th to 15th centuries, the Tatar economy became based on mixed farming and herding, which still continues. The Tatars also developed a tradition of craftsmanship in wood, ceramics, leather, cloth, and metal and have long been well known as traders. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they earned a favoured position within the expanding Russian Empire as commercial and political agents, teachers, and administrators of newly won Central Asian territories.
More than 1.5 million Kazan Tatars still live in the Volga and Urals regions, and they constitute about half the population within the republic of Tatarstan. They are now known as Volga Tatars and are the wealthiest and most industrially advanced of the Tatar groups. Almost a million more Tatars live in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, while the Siberian Tatars, numbering only about 100,000, live scattered over western Siberia.
The Crimean Tatars had their own history in the modern period. They formed the basis of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was set up by the Soviet government in 1921. This republic was dissolved in 1945, however, after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused the approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars of having collaborated with the Germans during World War II. As a result, the Crimean Tatars were deported en masse to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where their use of the Tatar language was forbidden. They regained their civil rights in 1956 under the de-Stalinization program of Nikita Khrushchev, but they were not allowed to return to Crimea, which had been incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1954. It was not until the early 1990s that many Crimean Tatars, taking advantage of the breakup of the Soviet central government’s authority, began returning to settle in Crimea after nearly five decades of internal exile. In the early 21st century, they numbered about 250,000.