Bashkurdistan (1917–1919)

After the February Revolution a Bashkir Regional Bureau organised councils (shuros) in the rural districts in June 1917, and the first and second All-Bashkir Qurultays, in Orenburg in July and Ufa in August, set the goal of “a democratic republic on a national-territorial basis as part of federal Russia” and elected a Bashkir Central Shuro. After the October Revolution the Central Shuro confirmed the need for autonomy on 11 November (Old Style) and declared it on 15 November (28 November New Style). The declaration was signed by the chairman Sharif Manatov, his deputy Zaki Validi, the secretary Shaikhzada Babich and the heads of six departments. Troops, banks, railways, post, telegraph and taxation passed to Bashkir institutions, and provinces and districts gave way to cantons. The constituent Qurultay in Orenburg on 8–20 December (Old Style) approved autonomy within the borders of Lesser Bashkiria, divided it into nine cantons and set up a pre-parliament, the Kese Qurultay, of 22 members, one per 100,000 inhabitants. The Kese Qurultay set up the Bashkir government, and the Qurultay provided for a Bashkir Army under Validi, an independent judiciary and the separation of religion and state. The territory covered 79,560 square kilometres with 1,250,059 inhabitants. In January 1918 Lenin told Manatov that the Bashkir movement was “not counter-revolutionary” and that the national movements of the peoples of the East were “quite natural and very necessary”, yet the Soviet government did not recognise the autonomy. After the Red Army took Orenburg the Central Shuro declared neutrality and adopted its own constitution, the Regulations of Autonomous Lesser Bashkiria, which made Bashkir the sole official language.

Tension soon turned to armed conflict. On the night of 15–16 February 1918 the Orenburg Muslim Military Revolutionary Committee arrested seven members of the government, a decision approved only after the fact on the strength of slander. In March two members of the government, Gabdulla Idelbayev and Gimran Magazov, were shot. On the night of 3–4 April Amir Karamyshev’s Bashkir detachments and Cossacks freed the government members from the Orenburg prison, and four days later a secret meeting in Ufa resolved to fight the Bolsheviks. With the help of the Czechoslovak Legion the autonomy was restored by late May; on 1 June the government called for armed resistance, and it established links with the Provisional Siberian Government, Komuch and the Orenburg Cossacks. In May a meeting in Kostanay with the Alash Autonomy discussed a joint struggle, and a meeting in Samara decided on a Federation of Southeastern Muslim Regions that was never implemented. Bashkir delegates attended the State Conference in Ufa on 8–23 September. But when Kolchak forcibly dissolved the Bashkir Army and handed its units to the Orenburg Cossacks, the Bashkir government, Mustafa Shokay of the Alash Orda, Viktor Chernov of Komuch and others discussed an anti-Kolchak front at Krasnaya Mecheti in late November. On 16 February 1919 the Central Shuro resolved to work with the Soviet government and to fight “all world imperialists”, and after preliminary agreements at Simbirsk on 27 February and in Moscow on 9 March the agreement of 20 March was signed, by which the Soviets recognised the national-territorial autonomy that had existed since 1917. Under White occupation Lesser Bashkiria was formally an autonomy of 13 cantons, but in practice the Siberian government, Komuch and Dutov governed it through the old district administrations. The Bashkir historian Kulsharipov calls Bashkurdistan the first independent state of the Bashkir people, and the American historian Richard Pipes, in a 1950 article, called the Bashkir republic “the first experiment in Soviet national policy”.