Volga (Tatar-Bashkir & Finno-Ugric)

The river, and the reason Russia is not a nation-state. The Volga is the longest river in Europe and was the trade artery between the Baltic and the Caspian long before Russia existed, carrying Arab silver north to the Vikings. Its middle course was held by Volga Bulgaria, a Muslim state from the tenth century, and then by the Khanate of Kazan, a successor of the Golden Horde. Ivan IV took Kazan in 1552. That conquest is the moment Muscovy stopped being a Russian principality and became an empire governing large Muslim and non-Slavic populations, and the pattern set then - conquest followed by co-option of local elites into the nobility - was repeated for the next three centuries. The region is still the most ethnically mixed part of Russia. Tatars and Bashkirs are Turkic and mostly Muslim; Chuvash, Mari, Udmurt and Mordvin are Finno-Ugric peoples who were there before either Slavs or Turks. Forced conversion campaigns in the eighteenth century failed, and Kazan became a centre of Islamic reform in the nineteenth, producing the Jadid movement that argued for modern schooling across the Muslim world. The Soviet period gave the region autonomous republics with real linguistic institutions and no real sovereignty. Tatarstan came closest to leaving in the 1990s, signing a power-sharing treaty in 1994 that was steadily unwound after 2000. The middle Volga is also Russia's second industrial belt, with oil at Samara and Tatarstan and car plants at Tolyatti and Naberezhnye Chelny. The Volga's dams have turned much of it into a chain of reservoirs.

• Existed: 922 CE – present
• Type: Entity