Bashkirs and Bashkorts Two Very Different Things, Gabbasov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 15 – Many in Moscow lump all Bashkirs together, viewing those in the national movement and those comprador figures it has installed in Ufa as Bashkir nationalists, Ruslan Gabbasov says. But in fact, the first are Bashkorts, the Bashkir self-designator, while the latter are Bashkirs, the term the Russian empire has always used.

            “Bashkorts are patriots of their own republic, while Bashkirs” like the current republic head Radiy Khabirov are “Bashkirs.” That should be obvious, the Bashkort activist now seeking political asylum in Lithuania says, given what Khabirov has said from the outset (svoboda.org/a/bashkorty-i-bashkirtsy-ruslan-gabbasov-o-puti-ot-imperii-k-federatsii/31614049.html).

            When Khabirov was named from Moscow, Gabbasov recalls, the new republic head “declared that he first of all wanted to justify Putin’s trust. Do you understand?  Not the trust of the people of the republic but precisely Putin. And since then, he has in fact cleansed the political field of the republic from any opposition elements.”

            The Bashkort activist says he began his political activity in Kuk Bure in 2011. “This organization occupied itself with the defense of the interests of the Bashkir people, constitutional rights, and federalism and called for honest elections.” But in 2014, part of its membership broek away and formed the Bashkort movement.

            Gabbasov was among them. As an ideologist for the group, he notes that the new group “put before itself the very same tasks Kuk bure did but in a broader fashion, and this frightened the authorities.” Kuk bure was concentrated in Ufa and among the urban national intelligentsia. But Bashkort worked throughout the republic and even beyond its borders.

            By 2020, when the group was banned, it had 18 branches in the republic as well as one in neighboring Chelyabinsk Oblast. More than a thousand activists were affiliated with it, and its VKontakte page had some 60,000 subscribers. To end this threat, Moscow and Ufa declared the group extremist and banned it.

            The powers that be could ban the group, but it couldn’t by so doing eliminate the activists who were part of it. That was demonstrated when Bashkort members took the lead in opposing Ufa’s plan to develop for industrial purposes a mountain sacred to the history of the nation. Bashkorts resisted, and Ufa had to back down, although the threat remains.

            The group’s members are being repressed, and that is why Gabbasov is seeking political asylum in Lithuania. From there, he hopes to continue to promote Russian federalism, not by suppressing the non-Russian republics as many in Moscow want but by raising the status of predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays to that of the republics.

            There are many precedents for that dating back to Novgorod, Gabbasov says. At the same time, he indicates that in Bashkortostan, he hopes to build a civic rather than an ethnic state in which all residents interested in the republic’s progress will find a common home.