There is a Kriashen people, and we have our own cultural particularities. Long live the free and independent nation 'KRIASHEN.'"-Protocol of the All-Russian Worker-Peasant and Red-Army Congress of Kräshens (1921). 1 "[A] Kriashen is not simply a Tatar of another faith; he is instead the bearer of other historical customs, rituals, and traditions; he has a different type of psychological constitution."-A. V. Fokin, Kräshen delegate to the Congress of the Peoples of Tatarstan (1993). 2 This article argues for the culturally productive power of imperial rule by exploring how missionary projects in Russia constituted new understandings of ethnic particularity among one group of imperial subjects-baptized Tatars, or Kräshens. 3 I demonstrate that while many Tatars who had been formally baptized into Christianity sought to rejoin the Tatar Islamic community over the course of the nineteenth century, a perhaps larger group, slowly abandoning the complex of Muslim and indigenous Turkic ("pagan") practices that conditioned their subordination to the church's spiritual authority, constructed an indigenous Orthodox Christian identity. Subsequently, and particularly in the early Soviet years, at least some Kräshen activists sought to transcend the predomi-497

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