--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Beg to differ. World's most famous Tartar is Rudolf
> Nureyev :)
>
Thanks -- I had no idea that he was a Tatar! His full name seems to have been Rudolf Khamat uli Nuriev. But you gotta admit -- Marat Safin has way better name recognition! ;)
Actually due to the centuries-long Mongol/Tatar rule of Rus' and intermarrying between the Russian nobility and the Khans and sub-Khans (or whatever they were called), the Russian elite got pretty Tatarized/Mongolized after awhile. It used to be fashionable in the tsarist days for aristocratic families to trace back/invent a Tatar heritage for themselves so as to emphasize their antiquity. (You can see traces of this in Akhmatova's taking her Tatar grandmother's last name in order to appear more exotic and "Eastern" and in Nabokov's claim to be a direct descendent of Genghis Khan.) Many Russian names have Tatar/Mongol roots -- Bukharin, Rimsy-Khorsakov, and Kutuzov, for instance.
I think I have to rethink my use of the term "indigenous peoples" for non-Russian inhabitants of the Russian Empire/Federation. That term comes from the Americanm/Australian experiences in which you had settlers coming over to a previously isolated territory and doesn't work at all well when talking about a giant land mass that has had various peoples and empires criss-crossing it for ages. Calling the Uzbeks -- descendents of the former rulers of the largest empire in the history of the world -- "indigenous" like they were apaches or Maori or something is kind of silly.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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