During and after perestroika, debates on ethnic history were activated ev-erywhere in the (former) Soviet Union, but they became especially heated in Tatarstan. In 1990, historians started criticizing the anti-Golden-Horde cam-paign of 1944 and declared that the theory of the Tatars Bulghar origins had been imposed by force. They began instead stressing the roles of the Kipchaks and the Golden Horde in the formation of the Kazan Tatars.78 This does not mean that they regarded the Tatars as descendants of the Mongols; they em-phasized that the Turks had quickly assimilated Mongolian conquerors. Fa-khrutdinov repeated the claim Safargaliev had made in 1950 that the Tatar tribes who migrated from Mongolia had been Turks.