The Bashkir national movement is determined to achieve independence, seeing no prospects within Russia. The Bashkirs have outgrown the idea of autonomy, realising themselves as a nation with their own history, culture, identity and, most importantly, experience, which they have acquired during numerous confrontations with Russia.
At the dawn of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bashkortostan was an autonomous republic within Russia. The republic acquired this status at the beginning of the emergence of the Soviet state, having signed an agreement with the Bolshevik government of Lenin in March 1919. Bashkortostan then became the first and only republic formed on a contractual basis. Equal parties signed the agreement. However, as always happened, Russia violated the agreement in 1920, having adopted a decree on the state structure of Bashkortostan. The agreement of March 1919 implied that the Bashkir Republic would be an autonomy with a wide range of rights within the Soviet state being built, to which both parties agreed and went. Although the Bashkir Republic was formed by “bourgeois nationalists”, as the Bolsheviks would call them, the Whites, led by Kolchak, refused to recognise the republic, insisting on a “united and indivisible Russia”, for which they paid. Finding themselves between two fires, the Validovites (the Bashkir bourgeois-nationalist counter-revolutionary movement) made the only correct decision – to preserve the republic, albeit as part of Soviet Russia.
The Bashkirs resigned themselves to being part of Russia and saw no particular problems in this. Even national organizations like Kuk-Bure and then Bashkort spoke exclusively about autonomous rights. Over time, repression intensified, and Bashkortostan lost its rights. History repeated itself: just as Russia once tried to destroy the Bashkirs in tsarist times, it is doing so now. The idea of independence revived with the start of the war, although it began to be discussed in 2021, as one of the possible options, along with the conclusion of a new treaty.
