Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 3 – Six years ago, the people of Bashkortostan came out in defense of Kushtau, a mountain that has been part of their national space for centuries; and they did so not by means of a frontal attack on officialdom but by demanding that the authorities live up to their own laws.
Remarkably, they won, although their protests, unlike those taken in the name of the defense of the environment or of religious interests, the ones in Bashkortostan have attracted far less attention since they don’t fit into the idea of many about what a protest in Russia should be (nemoskva.net/2026/08/03/kushtau-zhivi-3-avgusta-godovshhina-protestov-protiv-vyrubki-shihana-kushtau/).
Many environmental movements arise because of a threat to the well-being of the people who live in an area. That was the case at Shiyes. Others appear because they affect places that have a religious or ethnic significance that people want to preserve or revive, as in many parts of the Russian North and the North Caucasus.
But the case of the movement around Kushtau, a mountain in Bashkortostan, the situation was different and more complicated; and the reasons that the protesters, although powered by ethnic concerns, have achieved at least a partial victory is that they invoked federal laws to protect their republic against its own rulers.
Bashkir activists were very clear that those seeking to defend Kushtau didn’t do so for religious reasons as some Russian commentators have insisted, pointing out that Muslims have no tradition of defending such a geographic landmark (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/08/status-of-bashkir-language-also.html).
At the same time, these activists generally conceded that the development of the mountain by a soda company would not have a direct negative impact on the population around it. There would be some damage to rivers and to the range of plant and animal life but not necessarily a disaster to the Bashkir population.
Given that thousands of protesters have come out to oppose the development of Kushtau and more than 10,000 have signed a petition against that move, the question inevitably arises: “why is this Bashkir mountain so important” for Bashkirs? The answer, Vasilia Yagodina of Knife Media says, is instructive (knife.media/kushtau-ecology/).
More than two hundred million years ago, what is now Bashkortostan was covered by a Urals Sea. The four isolated mountains (shikhans) are the ancient reefs from that sea, and they can be seen from almost anywhere in the republic, thus making them symbolic of Bashkortostan in a way that Ararat is for Armenia.
Originally, there were four shikhans, Kushtau, Orkatau, Toratau, and Shakhtau; but during Soviet times, the last was destroyed by being mined for soda. Now, Bashkirs fear that the development of Kushtau in the same way will cost them an important symbolic part of their national landscape.
Over the last two decades, scholars in Bashkortostan have sought to document the flora and fauna that are unique to that place and that would be lost if Kushtau were to disappear under industrial development. Their work has been widely covered in the Bashkir media, and Bashkirs know far more about the mountain’s ecology than many, including the government, think.
They know that if these plants and animals are destroyed, they won’t be replaced; and they know that if yet another shikhan is reduced to nothing, they will lose something that has been part of their physical and mental maps for hundreds if not thousands of years, Yagodina continues.
But they know something else that Ufa appears to have forgotten: the destruction of these forms of life and the environment which supports them is a violation of at least two federal laws, “On the preservation of the environment” and “On the animal world.” Consequently, they believed they could use Moscow laws against republic leaders.
They want all three of the remaining shikhans to become a protected area and national park, and the strength of their protests forced Ufa to promise that, although in the years since, the authorities have not kept their promises, something that has kept the Kushtau issue at the center of Bashkir thinking.
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