Language is not neutral, it has historically been used to define who belongs and who does not. Tatarstan is a republic within Russia whose borders were not formally defined until the early Soviet era. Sometimes referred to as Tataria, the republic is located around 500 miles east from Moscow. The term Tatar emerged from Western countries attempting to group together people who practiced Islam and spoke a range of Turkic Languages. Historically written in Arabic script, the Tatar language was first restructured under Soviet language policy in 1927 through the introduction of a Latin-based alphabet called Yanalif, and further altered in 1939 with a switch to Cyrillic, aligning Tatar more closely with Russian orthographic systems. These script reforms did more than alter the visual form of the language, they disrupted continuity in its literacy.
In January 1927, Avrahm Yarmolinsky described the curious collection of polyglot Soviet literature acquired by the New York Public Library in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol. 31, No. 1. The collection comprised more than 400 titles across 27 languages spoken by minority populations within the Soviet Union. Among them were 723 Tatar-language pamphlets, bound into 68 volumes.
Researching this collection raised questions about how the pamphlets had been organised, translated, and digitised over time. Conversations with the New York Public Library’s General Research Division revealed that the collection had never been fully contextualised. Translations and digital versions of the pamphlets were either nonexistent or not publicly accessible, leaving a significant body of cultural and historical material difficult to engage with. This discovery established the goal of the archive, to make the collection accessible through digitisation and translation, creating a resource that allows the pamphlets to be understood and preserved for future research.