The Volga

Long before Russians arrived, the middle Volga belonged to Finno-Ugric forest peoples and to the Volga Bulgars, Turkic settlers who built a trading state around Bolgar and adopted Islam in 922, when the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan visited from Baghdad. The Mongols destroyed it in the 1230s, and from the wreck of the Golden Horde rose the Kazan Khanate in the 15th century, a rival that raided Muscovy and held the river trade. Nizhny Novgorod, founded by Russian princes in 1221 at the Oka confluence, was Moscow's frontier fortress against it.

Ivan the Terrible took Kazan in 1552 after building the island fortress of Sviyazhsk as his base, and Astrakhan followed, putting the whole Volga under Moscow. Russian towns — Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk — rose as forts along the river, and Orenburg and Ufa guarded the steppe against nomads. The region repeatedly rose against the tsars, most violently in Pugachev's rebellion of 1773–75, when Bashkir, Tatar and Cossack rebels besieged Orenburg and burned Kazan. In 1612 a Nizhny Novgorod merchant, Kuzma Minin, and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky raised the militia that drove the Poles out of Moscow.

The Soviet era renamed the cities (Gorky, Kuibyshev, Ulyanovsk after Lenin, born in Simbirsk in 1870) and filled them with industry, much of it evacuated east in 1941, when Kuibyshev became the reserve capital. Gorky was closed to foreigners and served as Andrei Sakharov's place of exile in the 1980s. After 1991 Tatarstan and Bashkortostan won wide autonomy through bargaining with Moscow, most of which has since been clawed back.

The Volga is where Russia most visibly mixes Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Tatars, Russia's largest minority, make up about half of Tatarstan and have their own Turkic language, Sunni Muslim heritage and literary tradition; Bashkirs, also Turkic and Muslim, share Bashkortostan with Tatars and Russians. The Chuvash speak the last surviving Bulgar-descended Turkic language but are mostly Orthodox. Mordvins, Mari and Udmurts belong to the Finno-Ugric family, and among the Mari an old nature religion of sacred groves is still practised openly.

Kazan presents itself as a city of two faiths, with mosque and cathedral inside one Kremlin, and bilingual street signs are standard in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Language is politically charged: Moscow ended compulsory teaching of republic languages in schools in 2017, and Tatar activists have long been kept under pressure.

Sabantuy, the plough festival held in June, is the great shared celebration of Tatars and Bashkirs, with horse races, wrestling on sashes, climbing a greased pole for a prize and sack races. Crafts are regional: the red-black-and-gold painted wooden tableware of Khokhloma and the carved gingerbread of Gorodets in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the clay toys of Dymkovo near Kirov, and the fine goat-down shawls of Orenburg, so light they are said to pass through a wedding ring. Rivalries run between the big cities, above all Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod.

About 28 million people live in the region, most in a string of large cities: Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Ufa with over a million each, Perm about a million, Saratov and Tolyatti somewhat less, and republic capitals such as Izhevsk, Cheboksary, Saransk and Yoshkar-Ola in the hundreds of thousands. The countryside is emptying and ageing, as across Russia.

The economy is heavy industry and oil. Tolyatti builds Lada cars at AvtoVAZ, Nizhny Novgorod builds GAZ vans and lorries, Naberezhnye Chelny builds KamAZ trucks, Samara builds rockets, Izhevsk builds Kalashnikov rifles, and Tatarstan and Bashkortostan pump and refine oil. Since 2022 the defence plants have run at full stretch, with high wages and labour shortages, and the Alabuga economic zone in Tatarstan has become known for producing attack drones — which in turn has made the region a target.

Kazan is the showcase: rich, well-kept, with a large university, 2018 World Cup stadiums (Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Saransk were all host cities) and a lively centre along Bauman Street. Summer means the dacha, the Volga beaches and river boats; winter means long dark evenings and ice fishing on the reservoirs. The war shows in recruiting billboards, funerals in small towns and the heavy toll borne by poorer republics such as Bashkortostan.

The Volga's kitchen is Russian bread and fish crossed with Tatar and Bashkir pastry and meat. Tatar cooking is the best known: echpochmak, a triangular pastry filled with meat and onion; peremech, a round fried pie open in the middle; kystyby, flatbreads folded around mashed potato or millet; and gubadia, a layered festive pie of rice, dried fruit, egg and korot, a dried salty cheese. Chak-chak, small pieces of fried dough bound in honey, is Kazan's signature sweet and the standard gift from Tatarstan.

Bashkortostan is famous for its honey, including the wild honey of the Burzyan forests, and for bishbarmak, boiled horse meat or lamb served on wide noodles with broth. Kumis, fermented mare's milk, is drunk across the Bashkir and Orenburg steppe and was once prescribed in sanatoriums. Horse-meat sausage, kazy, appears on festive tables in both republics.

Further north, Udmurt perepechi are small open pies with savoury fillings, and Perm has posikunchiki, small fried meat pies. The river supplied sturgeon and sterlet for the old merchant tables, and ukha fish soup is still made on the banks. Samara brews Zhigulevskoye beer, the most familiar Soviet beer name, and Saratov and Orenburg grow melons and sunflowers on the steppe.

Kazan is the region's great sight: the Kazan Kremlin, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with the Annunciation Cathedral, the leaning Söyembikä Tower and the rebuilt Qolşärif Mosque, then Bauman Street and the old Tatar quarter by Lake Kaban. From Kazan boats and roads reach Sviyazhsk, the island monastery-town, and the ruins of Bolgar, the Volga Bulgar capital, both with monuments on the UNESCO list.

Upriver, Nizhny Novgorod has its red-brick Kremlin above the Oka confluence, the Chkalov Staircase, the old merchant street of Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, and a cable car across the Volga to Bor; the Makaryev Monastery and the craft towns of Gorodets and Semyonov lie in the oblast. Samara has its riverside embankment, Stalin's wartime bunker and the Zhiguli Mountains across the water in Samarskaya Luka National Park. Ulyanovsk keeps Lenin's childhood home and memorial, and Saratov has the Radishchev art museum and a long embankment; Yuri Gagarin landed near Engels, across the river, in 1961, where a memorial marks the spot.

East towards the Urals, Perm has its opera and ballet house, the Khokhlovka open-air museum of wooden architecture and the Perm-36 former Gulag camp; the Kungur Ice Cave is a short drive away. Ufa has the Salawat Yulayev monument above the Belaya, and Bashkortostan's Shulgan-Tash cave holds Palaeolithic paintings. Smaller capitals — Cheboksary, Yoshkar-Ola with its new embankment, Izhevsk with its Kalashnikov museum — and Lermontov's estate at Tarkhany in Penza Oblast complete the region.