Movements calling themselves Tengrist today are recent, and treating them as a survival of the steppe religion is the standard error in popular accounts.
They emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in a period when post-Soviet peoples were reworking national identity and religion was one of the materials available. The earliest organised expression was in Tatarstan, where a Tengrist periodical began publishing in 1997, and the movement spread in the 2000s to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in particular, and in smaller measure to Buryatia and Mongolia. More recently a Tengrist current has appeared in Turkey, mostly online and mostly among the young.
Their content is reconstructed. The historical sources amount to a handful of inscriptions, foreign observers' notes, and folklore recorded much later, which is not enough to rebuild a religion from; what fills the gap is a combination of nineteenth and twentieth century ethnography, national epic, contemporary environmentalism, and in places borrowings from neo-pagan movements elsewhere. Practice varies widely between groups and there is no shared authority to settle anything.
Much of it is also political. Tengrism is frequently presented as the authentic, indigenous faith of Turkic or Mongol peoples, in contrast to Islam and Christianity as religions brought in by Arabs and Russians, and it appears in nationalist argument well beyond religious circles. Marlene Laruelle and other scholars have analysed political Tengrism as an invention of tradition in Eric Hobsbawm's sense: a modern construction given ancient credentials to serve present identity claims. Some versions carry ethnic exclusivity; others are ecological and quietist and carry none.
Adherents naturally reject the invention framing, and hold that they are restoring a suppressed religion rather than fabricating one. Both positions are represented here without endorsement. The factual points that stand regardless are that these organisations date from the 1990s, that no institutional lineage connects them to the Gokturk or Mongol sky cult, and that the historical material is genuinely ancient even where the modern movements are not.