Confessional policy of the imperial authorities in the Middle Volga region in the Soviet regional historiography

During the Soviet period of Russian history, scientific academic institutions began to be established in the autonomous republics of the Middle Volga region as part of the implementation of the national policy, within which historical schools emerged to study confessional policy in the imperial period. Researchers mainly criticized the approaches of the imperial government towards the non-Russian and non-Orthodox population. The reassessment of religious policy was associated with the formulation of a new historiographical discourse on the national history of the peoples of the Middle Volga region. At the same time, the methodological approaches of the research were limited by the Marxist-Leninist paradigm, which influenced the formation of a specific anti-colonial discourse describing the imperial confessional policy as an exclusively exploitative phenomenon.