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Soviet Union [USSR] Bashkirs
The Bashkir nationality developed from a mixture of Finno-Ugric
tribes and a variety of Turkic tribes. They were recognized as a
distinct people by the ninth century, when they settled an area
between the Volga, Kama, Tobol, and Ural rivers, where most
Bashkirs still live. Conquered by the Mongols of the Golden Horde
in the thirteenth century, the Bashkirs were absorbed by different
hordes after the breakup of the Golden Horde. Since the sixteenth
century, they have been under Russian rule. Impoverished and
dispossessed of their land by Russian settlers, the once-nomadic
cattle breeders were forced to labor in the mines and new factories
being built in eighteenth-century Russia. For two centuries prior
to 1917, the Bashkirs had participated--together with the Chuvash,
the Tatars, and other nationalities in the area--in the many
violent outbreaks and popular uprisings that swept the Russian
Empire. After the revolutions of 1917, a strong Bashkir nationalist
and Muslim movement developed in the territory of the Bashkirs,
where much of the Civil War was fought. In their quest for an
autonomous state, the Bashkirs sought the support of both the
Bolsheviks and the White forces. In the end, most joined with the
Bolsheviks, and in February 1919 the Bashkir Autonomous Republic
was established, the first autonomous republic within the Russian
Republic.
The great majority of Bashkirs were Sunni Muslims. They had
originally adopted Islam in the tenth century, but many were forced
by the Russians between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to
convert to Christianity. Most, however, reconverted to Islam in the
nineteenth century.
In 1989 over 1.4 million Bashkirs lived in the Soviet Union.
Nearly 864,000 of them resided in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic,
where they made up about 22 percent of the population. The Bashkirs
were only the third largest nationality in the Bashkir Autonomous
Republic, behind the Russians and the Tatars.
The Bashkir language belongs to the West Turkic group of
languages. Until the Soviet period, the Bashkirs did not have their
own literary language, using at first the so-called Turki language
and in the early twentieth century a Tatar language. Both languages
used an Arabic script as their written language. In 1940 Soviet
authorities gave the Bashkir language a Cyrillic script. In 1989
about 72 percent of the Bashkirs claimed Bashkir as their first
language.
The Bashkirs remained predominantly rural and agricultural;
less than 25 percent of them lived in urban areas in the 1980s.
Although Ufa, the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, had
over 1 million people in 1987, the overwhelming majority were
Russians.
Data as of May 1989
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