PSCRP-BESA Reports No 31 (January 26, 2024)
Bashkortostan (Bashkiria) is one of the most economically developed subjects of the Russian Federation. It has large reserves of oil, gas, gold and other minerals. It refines oil, produces gasoline (1/6 of the total Russian production), kerosene, diesel fuel, chemical fertilizers. Bashkortostan also produces caustic soda (20% of the total production), synthetic resins and plastics (1/7 of the total Russian production), rocket fuel, construction materials, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, etc. Agriculture is also quite developed, and its produce is the basis for a developed food industry. However, most of the revenues of the Republic of Bashkortostan go to Moscow, leaving local residents with environmental and social problems.
Environmental and economic problems were the first motive behind the popular protests in Bashkortostan (first in the district center of Baymak and then in Ufa) in January of this year, but they soon took on an anti-war and national character.
One of the protesters’ claims against the head of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, is his active participation in mobilizing the republic’s residents for the war in Ukraine. There is a widespread opinion among Bashkirs that “this is not our war”, that Russians are trying to fight Ukrainians using non-Russians, in particular Bashkirs. Open anti-war demonstrations took place in Bashkortostan practically from the very beginning of the war. One of the most actively discussed punitive actions of the authorities against Bashkir anti-war activists in the republic is the 5-year sentence handed down in late December to Ramila Saitova, who recorded a video message to mobilized Bashkirians last summer calling on them to return home.
Abbas Galliamov, a well-known Russian political technologist of Bashkir origin living in Israel, who served as Bashkortostan’s deputy plenipotentiary representative to the Russian president from 2002 to 2008 and as deputy head of Bashkortostan’s presidential administration from 2010 to 2014, in a number of interviews about the events in his homeland emphasized that “Bashkirs associate themselves with Ukrainians,” who, unlike them, managed to escape from the yoke of Moscow. The symbol of these protests was Fail Alsynov, a 37-year-old activist of the Bashkir national movement, whose conviction on charges of inciting interethnic discord was the impetus for the protests in Baymak.
Fail Alsynov is one of the leaders of the Bashkir national movement, but in the republic, he is well-known for his environmental activities: it was largely thanks to him that the Bashkirs managed to preserve the Kushtau shihan. The shihans are solitary limestone hills that play an important role in Bashkir culture and epic. There were four of them in the republic: Tratau, Yuraktau, Kushtau and Shakhtau. Only three of them still exist: a limestone quarry is all that remains from the Shakhtau shihan. Tratau and Yuraktau were recognized as natural monuments in Soviet times, and (so far) they are not threatened, but the Kushtau shihan may well share the fate of Shakhtau. In 2020, the situation around Kushtau escalated when the Bashkir Soda Company claimed it to mine for minerals. Local residents and eco-activists, who set up a tent camp at the foot of the hill, stood up to defend the shihan. All the usual methods were used against the protesters: both private security companies were hired and the police were involved, as well as provocateurs. However, they managed to defend the shihan, and in the same year, the authorities of the republic were pressured into granting Kushtau the status of a natural monument of regional importance. It was thanks to this rare victory that Alsynov, who was one of the activists in the campaign to protect the shihan, became a household name. The same victory, according to Alsynov himself, made him a personal enemy of the head of the republic Radiy Khabirov. It was the head of the republic who initiated a criminal case against Alsynov: he personally wrote a statement to the prosecutor’s office asking to prosecute him on “extremist” charges.
The pro-Russian authorities of the Republic of Bashkortostan have already interpreted the mass protests against Alsynov’s sentence as a manifestation of separatism. The reasoning, in particular, was the appearance on January 18 on the website of the Free Idel-Ural movement, which openly declares its goal to be “the collapse of Russia and the creation of new states on its ruins,” of a video message by one of its co-chairmen, Tatar activist Rafis Kashapov, who was proclaimed head of Tatarstan’s government-in-exile in February of this year.
The video message was recorded in Tatar, which — and it is important in the context of this article — is fully mutually intelligible with the Bashkir language. Under it, a summary of the main points of this appeal was published in Russian: “We are all in one harness — which should move and loosen the foundation under Russia, and then say goodbye to it forever. (…) Each nation of Idel-Ural is obliged to support its neighboring nation, which also wants freedom. (…) And then for fascist Russia the storm will come at once and everywhere, and not only in a localized version.”
For his part, the head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, said that the protests had been inspired from abroad and that “a group of people abroad” had called for Bashkiria’s secession from Russia. One can assume with a high degree of certainty that by “people from abroad” Radiy Khabirovat meant Ruslan Gabbasov, a former associate of Fail Alsynov in the Bashkort movement, which in May 2020 was recognized as an extremist organization by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Bashkortostan. Ruslan Gabbasov currently resides in Lithuania and maintains a video blog “News of a Bashkir nationalist” (mostly in Russian). It is noteworthy that Ruslan Gabbasov quite often emphasizes that he is addressing not only ethnic Bashkirs, but the entire “multinational people of the Republic of Bashkortostan”. And this is not accidental. The ethnic situation in Bashkortostan is complicated, and the Bashkirs are not the majority. It is not by chance that Rafis Kashapov hastened to react to the events in Bashkortostan, and he reacted by calling for unity. Relations with the Tatars are of particular importance for the Bashkir national movement.
The population of the Republic of Bashkortostan is about 4 million people, of whom, according to official (in the opinion of Tatar activists, overestimated in relation to the titular nation) data, 29.49% were Bashkirs, 25.39% Tatars, 36.05% Russians, 2.7% Chuvash, 2.61% Mari, more than 1% Udmurt and Erzya. The total number of Bashkirs in the Russian Federation amounted to 1.585 thousand people, of which 1.172 thousand lived in Bashkortostan, and more than 160 thousand — in the bordering Chelyabinsk and Orenburg regions.
Bashkirs are a people closely related to Tatars in terms of language, and in terms of religion they are also Sunni Muslims. Unlike the Tatars in the past, they had virtually no state tradition of their own. Until the 1920s, the Bashkirs also had no written tradition of their own and used Tatar as their literary language. After the emergence of Bashkir literature proper in the Soviet period, Tatars, who often wrote in both Bashkir and Tatar, played a very prominent role in it. Even now, the Tatar language seems more prestigious than Bashkir for many Bashkirs. It is natural that from census to census a significant percentage of Bashkirs who named Tatar as their native language is recorded.
Today Bashkirs are a minority in their republic. Out of 54 districts of Bashkortostan, Bashkirs are an absolute majority only in 17 districts; in Ufa, the capital of the republic, there are more Tatars than Bashkirs. While Bashkirs predominate in the eastern part of the republic, the bulk of Tatars are concentrated in its western districts, in close proximity to Tatarstan. Moreover, a significant part of the Bashkirs in these regions named Tatar, not Bashkir, as their native language.
Under these conditions, throughout the history of Bashkortostan as a special ethnopolitical unit created by the Bolsheviks in 1919, contrary to the project of a united Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic, it has been accompanied by Tatar-Bashkir confrontation. The authorities of Bashkortostan, on the one hand, stimulate the development of a distinct literary Bashkir language, different from the Tatar language, and, on the other hand, try to include Tatars living in Bashkortostan, whose number is close to that of the titular ethnic group, into the Bashkir ethnos. This policy was and still is dictated by the Bashkir elite’s fear of Bashkortostan being absorbed by Tatarstan.
At the same time, this policy was in the interests of the Soviet and then Russian federal center, which sought to prevent the excessive strengthening of the Tatars as the largest ethnic minority in the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Tatarstan, which in the post-Soviet period became a serious hotbed of separatism. In the 1990s, regional Tatar parties, including the Party of Tatar National Independence “Ittifaq”, were active and enjoyed considerable influence in Tatarstan. Their activities were restricted after 2001, when the Law on Political Parties was adopted in the Russian Federation, and became virtually impossible after 2003, when regional parties were banned in Russia. Until recently, non-parliamentary Tatar national organizations, such as the World Congress of Tatars, the All-Tatar Public Center, and the Tatar Patriotic Front “Altyn Urda”, operated openly in the Republic of Tatarstan and in other regions with compact Tatar communities, including Bashkortostan. In Bashkortostan, on the contrary, there are no and never have been influential local political parties.
Given the high level of ethnic self-consciousness and political organization of the Tatars of Bashkortostan, attempts by the Bashkir national movement to ignore their interests while seeking independence for the republic will inevitably lead to conflict not only with the federal center, but also with the Tatar national movement. It seems that this circumstance was not the least reason for the hasty video message of Rafis Kashapov, the head of the Tatarstan government in exile, calling for unity. However, it would be a mistake to think that this is only about protecting the rights of the Tatars of Bashkortostan or calling on the Tatars of Bashkortostan to support the Bashkirs, despite the contradictions between the Tatar and Bashkir national movements. The geographical factor should also be taken into account: one of the most important obstacles to the independence of Tatarstan is its remoteness from the state borders of the Russian Federation. But Bashkortostan, bordering Tatarstan, is only half a hundred kilometers from the state border of Kazakhstan.
We are talking about the so-called “Kuvandyk corridor”, created in its time by the Soviet authorities precisely to prevent separatist tendencies among Tatars and Bashkirs. It refers to the narrowest strip of land separating Bashkortostan from Kazakhstan — the Kuvandyk and Gaisky districts of the Orenburg region of the Russian Federation. More than half of the population of both districts are Russians, and about 40% are Bashkirs, Tatars and Kazakhs, related to Tatars and Bashkirs.
In recent years, the Free Idel-Ural movement has twice issued statements in favor of transferring the Kuvandyk corridor to the Republic of Bashkortostan. In 2018, it appealed to the then acting head of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, with a request to initiate the issue of transferring the Kuvandyk corridor to Bashkortostan, and in 2021, it responded to the statement of the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Tatar Marat Khusnullin, on the need to enlarge Russian regions by proposing to annex the Kuvandyk corridor to Bashkortostan. At that time, it was only a “declaration of intentions”, but should separatist tendencies intensify, the problem of the Kuvandyk corridor will become pressing.