During the early years of Finland's status as an autonomous Grand Duchy under the Russian, Tatars were already being employed by the Russians on the construction of the Bomarsund fortress in Aland and the Suomenlinna/Sveaborg fortress on an island off Helsinki.

The ancestors of the present-day Tatars came to Finland from the 1870s to the mid 1920s from a group of some 20 villages in the Sergach region on the Volga River, to the southeast of Nizhni Novgorod, formerly Gorki.

The Tatars are fully integrated into Finnish society and they are actively engaged in Finnish economic and cultural life in a wide array of professions. At the same time, they have succeeded in maintaining a distinct identity and in keeping the Tatar language alive by using it in family and private circles and also in their organizations.