Muslim Industrial Workers in California: Two Tatar Memoirs from the Eve of the Great War

Scholarship on the cultural history of Russia’s Tatar community has generally focused on the contribution of social and religious elites to the main currents that are generally assumed to define this history, including Islamic reformism and modernism. This paper examines the accounts of Tatar industrial workers who traveled as far, or even further, than their elite compatriots,—to California—and left us accounts of their observations though the lens of their status as workers. Their accounts reveal that among Tatars before 1917 social and religious reform, and adapting to global modernity, was not the exclusive preserve of social and economic elites.