DrBulat Rakhimzianov

Bulat Rakhimzianov is a historian of contemporary Russia, focusing on the politics of history and knowledge/power relations. Before completing his second PhD at University College Dublin in 2024, he served as a Senior Scholarly Researcher (the Russian equivalent of the position of Associate Professor - without teaching duties) at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan (Kazan, Russia, 2008 – 2020). Before this appointment, he taught at Russian universities, including Kazan State (currently Federal) University.

His early training was in medievalism, and through his Russian PhD, awarded in 2001, he established himself as an expert in the medieval history of Rus’ and the Later Golden Horde. Exploring their relationship with Muscovy during the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, he published eleven journal articles, three monographs, three edited collections and fifteen book chapters on the topic, contributing to the development of international understanding of the Later Golden Horde. These publications spanned leading Russian-language and international presses, including journals Russian History, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Drevnjaja Rus'. Voprosy medievistiki, collective monographs The Golden Horde in World History, The History of the Tatars since Ancient Times (7 vols), etc. Since undertaking and completing the PhD at University College Dublin, he has shifted from working directly on the history of the Later Golden Horde to analysing the ways in which the contemporary historiography of the Golden Horde is connected to political and identity debates in modern Tatarstan – part of the Russian Federation where he comes from and which is the object of his current research. This culminated in his second PhD, awarded in September 2024, entitled “The Golden Horde Revisited? History and Regional Identity Politics in the late USSR and post-Soviet Russia (Republic of Tatarstan), 1985-2018.” Alongside this work, he has also recently co-edited the volume Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917 (co-edited with Kati Parppei; Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023; Russian translation: Saint Petersburg: Academic Studies Press/Bibliorossika, 2025), a major study of Russia’s ethnic and religious diversity as well as its ethnic, national and geopolitical identities in formation both in the past and in the present day. Rakhimzianov’s research has been underpinned by a series of professional honours and awards from George Washington University, University College Dublin, Research Council of Finland, Gerda Henkel Foundation, ACLS, Carnegie Corporation, Fulbright Program and many others.

One of the key findings of his PhD thesis was that personality and relationships are crucially important to understanding how history is produced. This led to his next research project, supported by a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (2026 – 2028): “Tatar Historians and the State: Cooperation, Conflict and Reconciliation in Putin’s Russia, 2000 – 2022.” Building on the original idea that President Putin's rule lacked a coherent political ideology throughout the period, the project explores the ambiguous history of the mutual influence of knowledge and power.