Who ruled Kazan?

Kazan stands on the left bank of the Volga where the small Kazanka River flows in, some 700 kilometres east of Moscow. The middle Volga was a meeting zone between forest and steppe, between Finnic, Turkic and Slavic peoples, and between Islam and Orthodox Christianity. Kazan's history turns on that boundary. It was the capital of a Tatar khanate until 1552, when its conquest by Muscovy opened the way for Russian expansion to the east, and it remains the centre of Tatar culture and of the Republic of Tatarstan.

The date of Kazan's founding is disputed. In the 900s the region belonged to Volga Bulgaria, a Turkic state whose rulers adopted Islam in 922, and archaeologists have argued that a Bulgar fortress stood on the Kazan hill by around 1000. On that basis the city officially celebrated its millennium in 2005, although many historians date a substantial town to the 13th or 14th century. After the Mongols destroyed the Bulgar cities in the 1230s, the area passed under the Golden Horde, and Kazan grew into the seat of a local principality. Russian chronicles first mention it in connection with a raid by river pirates from Novgorod in 1391.

As the Golden Horde fell apart, the exiled khan Ulugh Muhammad took over the town around 1438, and his successors ruled the Khanate of Kazan for more than a century. The khanate controlled the Volga trade between Russia, Central Asia and Iran, and its capital had a stone citadel, mosques and a large market. It was also locked in conflict with Moscow. Russian armies attacked repeatedly, and rival parties in Kazan backed khans from Moscow's client dynasty at Kasimov or from the Crimean Giray family.

In 1552 Ivan the Terrible besieged the city with a large army and stormed it on 2 October after mining its walls. Many defenders and inhabitants were killed, mosques were destroyed, and Tatars were moved out of the fortress area, which was rebuilt as a Russian kremlin with the Annunciation Cathedral at its heart. In Moscow, St Basil's Cathedral was built to commemorate the victory. Kazan became the base for Russia's advance down the Volga and into Siberia.

Under the Russian Empire the city grew into a provincial capital and trading centre. In 1774 the rebel Yemelyan Pugachev captured and burned most of it, but it was rebuilt under Catherine the Great, who allowed mosques to be built again. Kazan University, founded in 1804, became one of the leading universities in Russia: the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky taught there, Leo Tolstoy studied there, and the young Vladimir Lenin was expelled in 1887 after joining a student protest. Tatar merchants and scholars also made Kazan a centre of Muslim reform and publishing.

During the Civil War, Czechoslovak and anti-Bolshevik forces seized Kazan and the imperial gold reserve stored there in August 1918, but the Red Army retook the city within a month. In 1920 Kazan became the capital of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet period brought heavy industry, including aircraft and helicopter factories, along with campaigns against religion. In 1990 Tatarstan declared sovereignty within the Soviet Union, and in 1994 it signed a treaty defining wide autonomy within Russia, although much of that autonomy was later reduced.

Kazan today has about 1.3 million people. Its kremlin, which since 2005 has held the rebuilt Qolşärif Mosque beside the cathedral, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.