Frequently, questions of the influence of one language on another and of lexical or semantic borrowings are colored by more general conceptions of the superiority or dominance of one language or another. That is, this linguistic phenomenon that is naturally part of all contact situations is presented as proof of the untoward subjugation of the recipient culture (people, language) to the the source culture (people, language), or as evidence of the unnaturalness of the language used by a given people. In the present work, I trace the multifaceted discourse of borrowing in the languages of the Volga region from the 1890s to the 1910s. In this late period of the development of imperial policy towards the non-Russian population, government correspondence, brochures and archival materials demonstrate a view of Tatar as a language simultaneously under the undesirable – and unnatural – influence of Persian, Ottoman and Arabic, and still exerting the very same undesirable and unnatural influence on the neighboring Mari, Chuvash and even Bashkir languages. The primary sources for this work are the archival materials of the educator and director of the Kazan Teachers' Seminary, Nikolai Bobrovnikov, translations and reviews by Nikolai Ashmarin, linguist and a teacher at the same seminary, and of various persons involved in the translation activities of the missionary and secular organizations, as well as organs of censorship and other forms of control over printing in the region. The works of Russian academics, missionaries and educators is compared to the parallel discourse on language purity in Tatar society itself. For both these groups, the discourse of borrowing is based on the idea of the existence of a pure (saf) language, which the people ought to speak in order to thrive. The discourse also gives great weight to source languages, on the one hand fearing the Tatarization of Mari, Chuvash and Bashkir as a result of language shift, on the other hand fearing Russification of Tatars and the loss of the foundations of the Tatar people. Such discussions and conceptions of the qualitative significance of language contact, coloring academic research with political and other hues, can be seen in academic and popular discourse frequently today. Today, too, borrowing is seen with a certain degree of suspicion, as if based on a conception, as it were, of a certain pure language, which the members of a given people ought to speak.