The Bashkirs

The Bashkirs are a Turkic people whose homeland is the Southern Urals and their foothills, from the middle Volga to the Ural Mountains. Most of them live in the Republic of Bashkortostan, with its capital at Ufa. They speak Bashkir, which belongs to the Kipchak-Bulgar group of Turkic languages and is the closest relative of Tatar; by religion they are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school. For centuries the Bashkirs have been neighbours and fellow servicemen of the Mišärs.

Name and origin

The first ethnographic description of the Bashkirs was given by the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan in 922, who called them a warlike and powerful people of cattle breeders. The 10th-century geographer Ibn Rustah described them as an independent people living on both sides of the Ural range, between the Volga, the Kama, the Tobol and the upper Yaik. The most widely accepted explanation of the name is baš 'head, leader' + kort 'wolf', that is 'wolf-leader', pointing to an old totemic tradition.

The ancestors of the Bashkirs were Turkic tribes of South Siberian and Central Asian origin who, before reaching the Southern Urals, roamed the Aral and Syr Darya steppes and came into contact with Pecheneg-Oghuz and Kimak-Kipchak tribes. The exact course of the people's formation is nonetheless debated: Turkologists and Finno-Ugric scholars have long argued over it.

From the Golden Horde to Muscovite rule

By 1226 the Bashkir lands were part of Genghis Khan's empire, and in the 13th and 14th centuries all of Bashkortostan belonged to the Golden Horde. Islam began spreading among the Bashkirs in the 10th century and was finally established in the 1320s and 1330s under the Golden Horde. As the Horde broke up, the Bashkir lands came under its successor states: the khans of Kazan, the Nogai and Sibir.

After the fall of Kazan in 1552 (see the Siege of Kazan 1552), the Bashkir lands gradually came under the rule of the Tsardom of Muscovy. In 1555–1557 the tribal councils of central and southern Bashkortostan sent delegations to Kazan; in return for paying yasak, a tribute, they received charters confirming their rights to their land. The conquest, however, brought recruitment obligations and heavy taxes, and pressed the nomadic herders to settle.

Uprisings

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Bashkirs rose against Russian rule again and again, chiefly in defence of their lands and rights:

1662–1664, 1681–1684 and 1704–1711;
1735–1740, which began with the Orenburg expedition and the building of fortresses on Bashkir land;
1755–1756, led by mullah Batyrsha;
1773–1774, when the Bashkirs under Salawat Yulayev joined Yemelyan Pugachev's rebellion.

An official report of 1740 gives an account of how the 1735–1740 uprising was put down: according to it, 16,893 rebels were killed, at least 1,175 Bashkir villages were destroyed, and 3,236 captured Bashkirs were forcibly conscripted and sent to the regiments and fleet of the Baltic governorates. Women and children were handed out, presumably as serfs. Vasily Tatishchev put the Bashkirs' total losses at 60,000 people. The Baltic governorates included the governorates of Estonia and Livonia.

After the uprisings were crushed, much of the Bashkirs' ancestral land was taken away and given to the Meshcheryaks, that is the Mišärs, who were in state service.

Bashkirs in Estonia

After the uprisings of 1735–1740 and 1755–1756, some captured Bashkirs were sent into the army and fleet, and others to penal servitude in the fortress of Rogervik, today's Paldiski. Their later fate, such as which units they served in and whether any of them stayed here, is not described in known sources; the answer lies in the records of the regiments and the fortress.

The best-documented case is that of the Bashkir national hero, poet and leader in Pugachev's rebellion Salawat Yulayev (1754–1800) and his father Yulay Aznalin. In September 1775 their nostrils were torn and their foreheads and faces were branded. By imperial command they were sent to Rogervik for life, arriving on 29 November 1775 by way of Kazan, Moscow and Novgorod. The fortress was then almost empty; there they met other convicted participants of Pugachev's rebellion, among them the Bashkir colonel Kanzafar Usayev. Salawat Yulayev died in Rogervik on 26 September (8 October in the new calendar) 1800; the prison's last entry calls him a 'convicted slave'. Yulay's date of death and the graves of both men are unknown. See also Tatar soldiers in Estonia and the history of Estonia's Muslim Tatars.

Bashkirs in Estonia today

According to the 2021 census, 112 Bashkirs lived in Estonia (55 men and 57 women); 27 of them gave Bashkir as their mother tongue, and 38 were Estonian citizens.

The community is brought together by the Tallinn Bashkir Cultural Association 'Agizel', a member of the Estonian Union of Nationalities. According to Postimees, the Bashkir cultural society was founded in 2000 and has been led by Fljuza Hairullina, who has lived in Estonia since 1986; its concerts and performances have featured Estonian as well as Bashkir and Tatar artists. For the 255th anniversary of Salawat Yulayev's birth, the Bashkir and Tatar festival Sabantuy was held in Estonia.

On 16 June 1989 a memorial bust of Salawat Yulayev by the Bashkir sculptor Tamara Nechayeva was unveiled in Paldiski. The bust was stolen in the early 1990s; the replacement corroded, and in 2016 the National Museum of Bashkortostan in Ufa gave the town a new bronze bust. Part of the Paldiski museum is dedicated to him, and Salavat Julajevi tee is named after him. In December 2010 a delegation of Bashkortostan's UNESCO national commission visited Estonia with the event 'Baltic dialogue: in the footsteps of Salawat Yulayev'. His years in Estonia are covered in the bilingual book Salavat Julajev. 260 aastat Salavat Julajevi sünnist (ed. Fljuza Hairullina, TEA Kirjastus, 2014).

The Bashkirs and the Mišärs

The Mišärs live in Bashkortostan to this day. Some of them settled there between the late 17th and early 18th centuries from the Temnikov district of Tambov governorate; they held a distinct status locally and owned land under local rights. The Mišärs were serving Tatars of the Russian state, and from 1798 to 1865 Bashkirs and Mišärs served together in the Bashkir-Meshcheryak Army, which among other campaigns fought in the war of 1812 against Napoleon.

Mišärs also make up the majority of the Estonian and Finnish Tatars (see the Mišär road to Tallinn). The Bashkirs and the Mišärs are thus neighbours in the same Volga-Ural world: close in language, shared in faith, but different in their historical status.

Language

Bashkir and Tatar are the closest relatives in the Kipchak branch and largely mutually intelligible; studies put their shared vocabulary at 94.9%. Both share a common written ancestor, Volga-Ural Turki. Bashkir stands out mainly through sound changes: word-initial s becomes h (Bashkir hüź 'word', Tatar süz), Common Turkic tš becomes s (Bashkir ağas 'tree', Turkish ağaç), and the language has interdental fricatives that Tatar lacks. The same tš sound takes its own path in Mišär: the Estonian Tatar alphabet writes ts where literary Tatar has tš.

Bashkir was first written in Arabic script; in 1923 an Arabic-based Bashkir alphabet was created, in 1930 the language moved to the Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet and in 1939 to Cyrillic, which is used today. In Bashkortostan, Bashkir is an official language alongside Russian. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies it as vulnerable. Many Bashkirs consider Tatar, rather than Bashkir, their mother tongue.

Autonomy 1917–1920

On 15 November 1917 the Bashkir Regional Central Shuro, led by Sharif Manatov and Zeki Validi Togan, proclaimed the autonomy of Bashkiria. On 20 December 1917 a Bashkir army was formed under Validi. In the turmoil of the civil war the government moved from Orenburg to Chelyabinsk; on 20 March 1919 an agreement on Bashkir autonomy was concluded with the Soviet government. Validi chaired the Bashkir Revolutionary Committee from February 1919 to June 1920, but left, finding that the Bolsheviks had broken their promises. He emigrated in 1923 and became professor of Turkic history at Istanbul University; the Ibn Fadlan manuscript he discovered is one of the key sources on early Bashkir history. Validi died in 1970.

Today

As the Soviet occupation collapsed, the Supreme Soviet of the Bashkir ASSR adopted a declaration of state sovereignty on 11 October 1990; on 25 February 1992 the republic was renamed Bashkortostan, and an agreement signed on 3 August 1994 recognised it as a sovereign state within the Russian Federation. In 2009, however, the Russian Constitutional Court effectively rescinded the agreement's sovereignty provisions.

According to the official figures of the 2021 Russian census, 1,571,879 Bashkirs lived in Russia, 1,268,806 of them in Bashkortostan.

Sources

Bashkirs (Wikipedia) · Baškiirid (Estonian Wikipedia) · Bashkir language (Wikipedia) · History of Bashkortostan (Wikipedia) · Bashkir rebellion of 1735–1740 (Wikipedia; 1740 report figures after I. G. Akmanov, 2016) · Bashkir liberation movement (Wikipedia) · Bashkiria 1917–1919 (Wikipedia) · Zeki Velidi Togan (Wikipedia) · Mishar Tatars (Wikipedia) · Mişärlär (LearnTatar) · Bashkir uprisings of the 17–18th centuries (Bashkir Encyclopedia) · Salawat Yulayev (Wikipedia) · Salavat Julajev (Estonian Wikipedia) · Paldiski saab Baškortostanilt uue Salavat Julajevi kuju (ERR) · Baškiiride külaskäik Eestisse (UNESCO Eesti) · Baškiiri naine õpetab vene lastele eesti keelt (Postimees, 2008) · Tallinn Bashkir Cultural Association Agizel (Estonian Union of Nationalities) · Fljuza Hairullina (ed.), Salavat Julajev. 260 aastat Salavat Julajevi sünnist, TEA Kirjastus 2014.