Chuvash

1. A member of a people located in the middle Volga River valley, chiefly in Chuvashia.
2. The Turkic language spoken by the Chuvash.

[Russian, from Chuvash čѡvaš.]

The Chuvash (self-name chavash) are an indigenous people of the middle Volga basin. According to the 1989 census there were 1.8 million Chuvash in the former Soviet Union. The greatest concentration (906,922) lived in the Chuvash Republic on the west bank of the Volga river between its tributaries the Sura and Sviaga, with most of the remainder living in adjacent republics and provinces. Chuvash made up 67.8 percent of the population of Chuvashia in 1989, with Russians accounting for 26.7 percent.

The ethnonym chavash first appears in Russian sources in 1508, so early Chuvash history is not entirely clear. Scholars agree that today's Chuvash are descendants of at least three groups: Turkic Bulgar tribes who arrived on the Volga in the seventh century from the Caucasus-Azov region; the closely-related Suvars (suvaz, perhaps the origin of chavash) who migrated from the Caucasus in the eighth century; and Finno-Ugric tribes who inhabited Chuvashia before the Turkic settlement. The Bulgar state dominated the region from the tenth century until conquest by the Mongols in 1236. Chuvash were ruled by the Golden Horde in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then by the Kazan Khanate from the 1440s, and were finally incorporated in the Muscovite state in 1551.

The Chuvash speak a Turkic language that preserves many archaic elements of Old Bulgar and is largely incomprehensible to speakers of other Turkic dialects. Early Chuvash was written with Turkic runes, supplanted by the Arabic alphabet during the time of the Bulgar state. A new Chuvash script based on the Cyrillic alphabet emerged in the eighteenth century. The first Chuvash grammar, which used this script, was published in 1769. The Chuvash educator Ivan Yakovlev developed a new Chuvash alphabet in 1871. The first Chuvash newspaper, Khypar (News), appeared in 1906.

Early Chuvash animism was influenced by Zoroastrianism, Judaism (via the Khazars), and Islam. Chuvash honored fire, water, sun, and earth, and believed in a variety of good and evil spirits. By the middle of the eighteenth century, most Chuvash had converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity under the influence of Russian settlers and missionaries. However, some who lived among Tatar populations converted to Islam and assimilated to Tatar culture and language. Today's Chuvash are predominantly Orthodox Christians, though pagan beliefs survive in scattered settlements.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought significant economic changes, as Chuvash peasants left their villages for railway employment, lumbering and factory work in the Urals, mining in the Donbas, and migrant agricultural labor. Urbanization began in this period and accelerated in the twentieth century, although in 1989 less than half (49.8 percent) of the Chuvash in the Russian Federation lived in cities.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chuvash leaders demonstrated interest in joining the Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state proposed by Tatar politicians as a counterbalance to Russian hegemony in the region, and later (March 1918) agreed to join the Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic. After this project fell victim to the conflicts of the civil war, the Soviet government formed a Chuvash Autonomous Region (1920), later upgraded to an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1925). Chuvash leaders declared their republic an SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic, or union republic) in 1990 and renamed it the Chuvash Republic in 1992. Important organizations active since the late Soviet years include the Chuvash Party of National Rebirth, the Chuvash National Congress, and the Chuvash Social-Cultural Center. The Chuvash Republic is a signatory to the March 31, 1992, treaty that created the Russian Federation.

Bibliography

Aygi, Gennady, ed. (1991). An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, tr. Peter France. London: Forest Books; [S.l.]: UNESCO.

Róna-Tas, András, ed. (1982). Chuvash Studies. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Shnirelman, Viktor A. (1996). Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors Among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

—DANIEL E. SCHAFER

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: a member of a people of Turkic speech and Mongolian race living in the Volga region in eastern Russia

Meaning #2: the Turkic language spoken by the Chuvash people