Russians were using the Tatar ethnonym during the 18th and 19th centuries to denote all Turkic inhabitants of the Russian Empire, but, before the emergence of the Soviet Union, the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire did not generally identify as Tatars. Up to the end of the 19th century, Volga Tatars mainly identified as Muslims, until the rehabilitation of the ethnonym Tatar occurred. Russian officials used literary Tatar language to interact with the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire before the end of the 19th century. The Volga Tatar role in the Muslim national and cultural movements of the Russian Empire before the 1917 Revolution is significant and this continued even after 1917. Tatar authorities have attempted since the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to reverse the Russification of Tatarstan that took place during the Soviet period.