ABSTRACT
The specific issues that Russia and the Muslim regions face today with regard to the challenges of pluralism and democracy are new. However, the historical experience of imperial Russia was not entirely devoid of explorations in wider participatory politics and pluralism: the years following the 1905 Revolution saw the debut of parliamentary life that brought about profound changes in the very nature of the tsar’s autocratic regime. Hence, the years 1905-17 represent Russia’s brief, and at times agonizing, attempt at planting and acclimatizing the seeds of pluralism in the frozen soil of autocracy. For pluralism to take root and eventually prepare the ground for democracy, identity perceptions at the level of the individual and the imperial self had to change. This chapter discusses perceptions of pluralism on the contested terrain of identity of the Muslims of the European regions of the Russian empire at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
