The collapse of the Soviet Union and transformation of Soviet republics into independent nation-states since 1991 have placed questions of empire and nation making at the forefront of scholarly agendas.^[1] Developments in theory and the urgency of contemporary affairs have greatly influenced study of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. The Soviet period has energized the most research and scholarly debate. The fascinating development of languages, concepts, and practices of nationality; Soviet nation-building; and efforts to engineer national spaces through deportation and settlement have generated numerous influential analyses.^[2] By contrast, study of the imperial period has differed sharply in emphasis. Treatments of the imperial period have focused on the state’s efforts to promote Russian nationality and to suppress other nationalities or the state’s indifference to the idea.^[3] In part, as a result of this, the study of nationality and empire before and after 1917 often remains disconnected. Imperial Russia’s nationalism is described as failed and the development of national “discourse” in the empire is treated as a subject that can be discussed briefly before the real Soviet story of the begins, or can be ignored altogether.
There are valid reasons for this disjuncture. The year 1917 certainly marked an important departure in approaches to nationality and empire. The “ethnophilia” that characterized the Soviet period has no equivalent before 1917.^[4] To be sure, before 1917, state policies often lacked the self-conscious engagement with concepts of ethnicity and nationality that so characterized the Bolshevik regime. In some cases, the tsarist administration fostered ethnic or national development unintentionally or as a lesser evil rather than out of any desire to embrace the principle of nationality. Nonetheless, the imperial period featured much more than efforts to maintain the status quo, failed attempts to promote Russian nationality, or nationalist intelligentsias that worked to create nations despite oppression by imperial authorities. Institutions, ideas, and practices of the tsarist regime did not just oppress nationality, they also helped shape ethnic and national identities in important ways. We need to consider what the imperial regime made possible as well as what it suppressed or denied. More broadly, we need to expand our ideas of how nations and nationality are constructed. The work of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner deserves to be as influential as it has been.^[5] Yet the emphasis on print culture, schools, ethnography, censuses, maps, and museums should not obscure the importance of factors such as the landholding and military service as possible focal points for the formation of national identities.^[6]
The history of interactions among the Bashkirs, the imperial state, and local populations provides a particularly good prism through which to examine the constitution of nationalities before 1917.^[7] The Bashkirs stood at the margins of all of the social and cultural categories most salient in the imperial system. Since the eighteenth century, the people known as Bashkirs have been viewed and viewed themselves as a tribe, as an estate group, and as a nationality. Before 1917, they are nearly all of one religious group, Muslim. Some practiced settled agriculture, some were semi-nomadic, and others fully nomadic. In this article, I will examine the history of the Bashkirs over the last three hundred years in order to illustrate what forms of identity the imperial system made possible or suppressed, and how these varied over time. I will show that by 1917, imperial policies that aimed to win Bashkir loyalty, to settle nomadic Bashkirs, and to regulate their service to the state promoted the coherence of the Bashkirs as a group attached to a particular territory. Changes in Bashkir status and landholding after 1865 caused imperial officials increasingly to discuss the Bashkirs as a nationality. At the same time, institutions created after 1905 provided space for Bashkirs to mobilize to make claims as a people.
In making my argument, I must make two caveats. First, covering a long period of time in a short article lends itself to a teleological narrative. To the extent possible, I will resist this tendency. I will discuss conceptions of the Bashkirs chronologically, but do not intend to suggest that these conceptions neatly followed one another, one replacing the last, with nationality triumphing. Rather, conceptions of Bashkir identity accumulated in a sedimentary fashion, layering one on top of another in such a way that all were available in the twentieth century even if each did not have the same significance. Second, a study of social relations on a large scale, and primarily of state policy, might seem to deprive the people studied of a role in structuring their own identities. I do not mean to suggest this. Rather, I endeavor to identify the range of possibilities – the material out of which an individual might construct an identity – as well as what forces favored some over others.

Fixing People and Land, 1557-1762

At the point when Bashkir or Bashqort relations with the tsarist state intensified in the sixteenth century, the Bashkirs consisted of a set of “tribes (plemeni)” and “clans (rody)” and “clan sub-units (rodovye podrazdeleniia)” united by a common religion (Islam), language (Turkic dialects), and to some extent, their nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life.^[8] They lived primarily in and just to the south, west and east of the southern Ural mountains where forest, steppe, and mountains meet. As Rail G. Kuzeev and others have demonstrated, Bashkir organization varied substantially depending on demographic and genealogical, political and economic factors.^[9] In general, the Bashkirs lacked permanent, centralized state institutions or the institution of the “khan” that governed their neighbors.
The interaction of Bashkir tribes and the Russian state did much to shape Bashkir social structure from when some Bashkir tribal leaders swore allegiance to Ivan IV in 1557.^[10] In the two centuries after 1557, the tsar and his servitors bargained for Bashkir political loyalty by formally granting the Bashkirs land in exchange for it. Striving to expand its influence on Russia’s southern and eastern frontiers, the tsarist regime sought to divide peoples on the steppe to prevent alliances from forming against it, and to achieve security on the steppe.^[11] Bashkirs who swore allegiance to the tsar in 1557 extracted from Ivan IV a charter in exchange for their loyalty. Ivan vowed not to encroach upon (posiagat na) the religion of the Bashkirs and gave them collective, hereditary rights to their land, known in Russian as “votchinnoe pravo” or as having the status of “asaba” in Bashkir.^[12] Because of this, the territory of Bashkortostan became part of the Russian empire on different terms than did either the Kazan khanate to the west in 1552 or southern Central Asia did in the 1860s.
This sixteenth-century agreement between the Bashkirs and the Russian state demonstrated that the Russian state had little interest in changing Bashkir society or religious faith. Later, in the eighteenth century, some missionaries were active in the region, but there was no consistent or comprehensive attack on Islam in Bashkortostan in this period. Local administrators specifically sought to prevent missionary work in Bashkortostan as early as the 1740s.^[13] Russian officials showed less respect for their promises regarding land. The tsarist state infringed on these rights on numerous occasions in order to construct fortresses, factories, and for the purposes of rewarding servitors of the tsar with land grants. Uprisings throughout the eighteenth century in protest against such confiscations demonstrated how seriously Bashkirs regarded their ownership of land. Bashkir land losses were substantial, but resistance prevented fundamental change in the legal status of Bashkir land. Tsarist decrees confirmed the Bashkir’s hereditary landownership rights on numerous occasions (1664, 1682, 1694, 1734, 1739, 1790).
Over the next two centuries, the recognition of the Bashkirs’ votchinnoe pravo contributed to a transformation in Bashkir social structure. Bashkir tribes decreased in size with respect to both demography and geography. This reduction in scale had a number of causes. The tremendous losses of life caused by armed clashes in the eighteenth century, especially in the 1730s, weakened Bashkir social organization. The Russian military also forced many Bashkirs to flee, which caused tribal links to be lost. In-migration also caused a breaking down of the continuous land masses available to the Bashkirs, which in effect favored smaller social units. The nomadic Bashkirs had previously used land as part of large collectives, tribes, rather than individually or in family groups. The idea of property in land was not of great interest to people who readily moved to find new pastures or hunting grounds. The larger tribal associations of Bashkirs, initially at least, appeared as the holders of property rights. By the eighteenth century, however, larger tribes broke down into smaller clan or even sub-clan groups who held the rights to particular pieces of land. Increasingly, Bashkir clans were tied together through common ownership of land and were on their way to becoming territorial.^[14] The votchinnoe pravo provided a lasting connection of members of Bashkir clans to each other and to the ground they owned. Well into the early twentieth century, the surveying and demarcation of Bashkir lands was done based on the charters (gramoty) that Bashkir clans had received as many as several hundred years before. The first ethnographic maps of Bashkortostan were done on the basis of land records.^[15] Clans retained cultural importance too. When the Bashkir revolutionary Zaki Validi Togan wrote his Vospominaniia, in the 1960s, he identified the two Bashkir clans (rody) present in his village and discussed the history of his own—the Suklykai—before discussing his own family or the Bashkirs as a whole. Though Togan notes that he knew little about the history of his clan, the confiscation of land following Bashkir uprisings in the eighteenth century and the resettling of peasants on the confiscated land figure prominently in his narrative.^[16] Russian policies worked to fix the Bashkirs to particular pieces of land, and this connection remained alive as a source of identity for them even centuries afterwards.

From Nomads to an Estate Group – Cantonal Administration, 1762-1865

The construction of the fortress of Orenburg in the 1730s and the brutal suppression of a Bashkir uprising because of being cut off from the steppe to the south changed relations between the Bashkirs and the Russian state. Political loyalty remained the primary interest of the Russian state, as it would until the end of the Old Regime. The Russian state began to expect more from its relationship with the Bashkirs, however. The Bashkirs’ ownership of their land remained a crucial element of their status. In the eighteenth century, and especially after Catherine II took the throne in 1762, Russian official attitudes began to focus on how that land would be used. Under the influence of European ideas of cameralism, Russian officialdom sought to create a “well-ordered police state” that would regulate economy and society so as to achieve the maximum natural and human resources and a prosperous population.^[17] The achievement of a more rational, productive alignment of people and land was a key element of this approach to governance. The nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism practiced by the Bashkirs did not fit with this new set of ideas. The use of large amounts of good land by a relatively small number of nomadic herds neither maximized prosperity nor was conducive to what officials considered their own civilizing of steppe peoples. State policy sought to push the Bashkirs in the direction of settled agriculture, as some Bashkirs in the northwestern portions of Bashkortostan already practiced.^[18]
The need to bring greater stability to Bashkortostan became even more clear when the Pugachev uprising demonstrated the tenuousness of the tsarist regime’s hold on Bashkortostan. In 1773, a diverse group of peasants led by Emelian Pugachev rebelled against tsarist authority and overthrew the tsar’s forces in Bashkortostan. At the point of the rebels’ greatest success, only the garrison towns of Ufa and Orenburg remained under state control. By 1775, military action had restored order. The Pugachev uprising, however, demonstrated that Bashkortostan lacked a stable administration.
In response to these dual challenges to settle the Bashkirs and keep order on the steppe frontier, after 1775, the tsarist administration reformed the administration of Bashkortostan. In the early 1780s, the regime extended the provincial reforms of central Russia to what was still the eastern frontier. This reform brought to the region more and higher-level officials.^[19] These officials undertook the transformation of the Bashkirs into a military estate. From the time the Bashkir tribes swore their loyalty to the tsar in the sixteenth century, the state had collected taxes and upon occasion mobilized recruits by district (ulus in Bashkir or volost’ in Russian) under the leadership of an elder.^[20] In the eighteenth century, this volost’ structure began to break down into smaller units, called tiubs or commands (kommandy in Russian). Such a system served the needs of the Bashkirs but did not provide the steady source of recruits and taxes that Orenburg Governor-General Baron Osip Igel’strom required.^[21] In an effort to mobilize Bashkir troops more systematically and to receive better men, Igel’strom established the cantonal system of administration. The first stage involved the enumeration of Bashkir households and the fixing of their locations into iurts, or tents.^[22] Next, in 1798, Igel’strom established cantons as a new administrative position between the county or uezd and the smaller Bashkir tiub.^[23] The creation of cantonal administration required a staff of more than four hundred men, including elders and their assistants. The reform thus opened new positions of authority to many Bashkirs. Cantonal administrators had behind them the power of the tsarist administration, which gave them considerable powers to control the movement of canton members and enabled the administration to begin to fix the nomadic or semi-nomadic, Bashkir population in territorial units that corresponded to political divisions of European Russia.^[24] Cantonal administration organized the Bashkir population much like Cossacks, who provided and equipped soldiers in lieu of taxes.^[25] The tsarist state thus created a new Bashkir service elite that dominated a military estate. The cantonal administration reported to the Orenburg general-governor, and remained distinct from the civil administration in the city of Ufa that had jurisdiction over the non-Bashkir population.
The final stage in the reform made complete a shift from clan to territorial organization. The iurts had been drawn more or less on top of clan-based kommands, except when they spread across county lines. From the establishment of the cantons to the 1830s, iurts were subdivided still further. The new, smaller iurts bore little relation to the older Bashkir volosts and tiubs. The clan-based organization existing before 1789, in which volost’ and tiub elders had led people primarily of their own clans, broke down. Clan-based administrative forms survived in the ownership of land, but for administrative and conscription purposes the territorial principle triumphed. Leaders of the new cantons were more oriented to the state which they served and depended less on their Bashkir constituency for authority. The breakdown of clan ties between political elite and the Bashkirs made organized rebellion much less likely.^[26] Resettlement to Bashkortostan of Russian-speaking nobles and serfs increased the presence of settled agriculturalists, which further contributed to the state’s control of the region. After the Pugachev rebellion, no major uprisings challenged the empire’s administration in Bashkortostan.
The legislation on cantons made Bashkir legal status paramount. The new laws did not attempt to specify the ethnicity or religion of Bashkirs. True, the initial connection of the Bashkir clans with the land did favor Bashkirs by blood. Groups of Muslim migrants from further lands to the west of Bashkortostan were called Mishars and others with origins outside the Bashkir clans, Teptiars, had their own cantons that played a similar function to those of the Bashkirs. Legislation on the Bashkirs seems to have assumed that those who would join a Bashkir volost’ would be other Bashkirs. But the Bashkirs remained a culturally heterogeneous group and members of other groups entered the estate. In the documents one finds expressions such as Bashkir “from the Cheremis”, or “Bashkir from the Votiak”, indicating, presumably, a prior identification with those ethnic groups.^[27] Non-Bashkirs who moved to Bashkortostan became pripushchenniki, or “those let in.” They rented or purchased Bashkir land. Those who sought the advantages of Bashkir status married Bashkirs or had their daughters marry into the Bashkir estate and assimilated into Bashkir communities.^[28] Bashkir was a spoken language, but one with different variations throughout the region. Until the very beginning of the twentieth century, no written Bashkir language existed. Tatar was the written language of Bashkir administration, making Bashkir and Tatars indistinguishable in this respect. The Bashkirs were overwhelmingly Muslim, but at times were not considered sufficiently Muslim by Russian authorities. In 1845, Russian authorities instructed canton elders to issue an order that the first duty of every Muslim was to fulfill the responsibilities of his religion and Muslim law and ordered all officials to see that Bashkirs prayed regularly in a mosque.^[29] Neither were Bashkirs exclusively Muslim. Legislation made allowances for Bashkirs who had converted to Christianity (though few did) to remain in the Bashkir volost and recognized the possibility that “pagans” (iazichniki) might be in Bashkir communities.^[30]
Although legal status and ethnic, religious, or cultural characteristics did not coincide, estate status contributed to the consolidation of a Bashkir nationality. Tsarist rule of the Bashkirs often was harsh and sometimes brutal, after 1557. Yet elements of Bashkir estate status made Bashkir status relatively attractive. The most clear attraction was the ownership of land. The Bashkirs were never enserfed and continued to own larger amounts of land than non-Bashkir peasants into the twentieth century. The provision of men for military service was also considered preferable to the payment of taxes, especially for those not chosen to serve. This provided a real incentive for non-Bashkirs to marry into Bashkir communities. Custom determined the process of admission of outsiders into Bashkir volost’s even after the 1860s, making it possible for the Bashkirs to admit into their communities non-Bashkirs who could then enjoy the Bashkir rights to their land. When the issue of whether non-Bashkir Muslims or even Christians could join Bashkir volosts arose in the late nineteenth century, state officials could find no law specifically prohibiting such admissions.^[31] To the tsarist administration, the estate category “Bashkir” identified a group of people who had a particular historical relationship with the state and who discharged their obligations to the state in particular ways. The identification of the Bashkirs as an ethnic group and the constitution of that group was not a priority. Nonetheless, legal status affected ethnic, religious, and cultural patterns of association and contributed to Bashkir group formation.

Bashkir Particularity and the Great Reforms

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideology of the empire changed again and, with it, tsarist officials’ conceptions of the Bashkirs’ social status and role in the body politic. Beginning in the 1860s, the tsarist administration sought to make Bashkir status more like that prevailing in central areas of the empire. The strategic position of Bashkortostan and the steppe by the late 1840s explains much of their change in status. Bashkortostan’s neighbors to the south and south east, the Kazakhs, gradually became less of a threat to Russian interests.^[32] By the time the tsar’s forces pushed further into Central Asia in the 1860s, the need to have Bashkirs perform military service in support of the Orenburg line declined.^[33] The strategic reason for the maintenance of the Bashkirs as a military estate disappeared. The change in Bashkir status had broader, all-imperial justifications as well. In the Great Reforms, the autocracy began to supplement enlightened culture and ministerial government with liberal ideals of government then considered European.^[34] Most important for our purposes, Alexander and his officials sought through reform to extend rudimentary civil status to all the tsar’s subjects whom they deemed ready for it. Reformers abolished serfdom and sought to increase participation in public life, and to create new institutions, such as zemstvos and city dumas, which would include non-noble representatives. Participation in local self-administration, juries, and universal military service obligations were intended to increase social responsibility and economic initiative.
Reform of Bashkir status in the 1860s reflected these changes in local strategic conditions and imperial ideology. Imperial administrators sought simultaneously to reduce the explicitly military dimensions of Bashkir organization and to diminish, but not to eliminate, differences of status between ordinary Bashkirs and peasants and to make the Bashkir elite noble in the manner of most elites in the empire. Gregory Freeze has pointed out that the primary objective of reforms such as the zemstvo, city dumas, taxation, and military service was to “maximize resources and efficiency, not erase the separateness and isolation of individual groups.” Indeed, estate categories certainly retained power after the 1860s.^[35] When applied to a group such as the Bashkirs, though, I would argue that the two objectives were perceived as inseparable. The intention to create a civil order that extended to nearly all the empire’s population resulted in a reduction in the isolation of the Bashkirs, even though the reforms did not amount to a specific attack on estate distinctions.
Local authorities, particularly Orenburg Governor-General Bezak, sponsored the transformation of the Bashkirs’ estate status. Bezak considered the maintenance of Bashkir isolation “unjustifiable” given the strategic situation on the southeast frontier and the desire to construct a more effective and uniform administration.^[36] He believed the Bashkirs were ready for the new administration. He wrote to his superiors in 1865 that the “degree of maturity (stepen’ zrelosti) of the Bashkirs in the understanding (po vospriatiiu) of the new civic principles (grazhdanskikh nachal) of administration and legal proceedings” gave hope for the Reforms’ smooth introduction. Volost courts, he argued, worked better among Bashkirs than among other peoples. His belief in reform helped bring about Emperor Alexander II’s issuance of new Statutes on Bashkirs in May 1863. According to the statutes, “the inorodtsy known by the name Bashkir, Meshcheriak, Teptiar, and Bobyl’… receive civil organization (ustroistvo) as free rural residents on the bases elaborated in these statutes.”^[37] The statutes specified that the Bashkirs and the Mishars and Teptiars, other groups organized into cantons but with smaller landholdings, all receive the rights permitted peasants in 1861. They could enter into contracts, acquire property, run industrial and merchant establishments, enter trades and change estate statuses as appropriate.^[38] The Statutes on Bashkirs effectively eliminated existing forms of state opeka over the Bashkirs. The Bashkir cantons with their appointed elders were eliminated completely in 1865. The government removed the Bashkirs from military administration and placed them under authority of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and of civilian governors. Bashkirs gained the same organization into self-governing districts (volosts) that peasants did, and elected their elders (starshiny).^[39] The Great Reforms applied equally to the Bashkirs as to other peasants. With the institution of universal male military service obligations in 1874, Bashkir men served the tsar alongside other peasants.^[40] In 1875, when zemstvo self-administration was introduced to Ufa province, Bashkirs participated in elections to and served in the bodies. Two Bashkirs even served terms as chairmen of the uezd zemstvos. The Reforms demanded that all those officials considered able to serve the cause of the tsar and the empire do so. The Bashkirs were no exception. They fully participated in those institutions designed to school the population in the mission and goals of the tsarist state.
At the same time Bashkirs were included in reformed institutions, the Bashkir elite was made part of the empire’s elite. Bashkir nobles who possessed krepostnye akty received “all rights and privileges given in general to the Russian nobility.”^[41] In addition, most of the canton elders who had administered the Bashkirs received noble status. In 1884, the lands of Bashkirs of noble status but lacking krepostnye akty, 1,982 in all, were divided off from those of Bashkir communities in which the owners resided.^[42] The law provided some Bashkirs with greater privilege, but also created a legal divide between elite and non-privileged Bashkirs. As the Bashkir administrator, translator and man of letters, Mukhametsalim Umetbaev wrote in 1898, he had to resist those telling him he should not be concerned with burdens placed on Bashkirs to provide labor (natural taxes) since he was not one of them.^[43] According to one scholar, whereas in the cantonal system of administration, Bashkir cantonal elders had mediated relations with Russian authority, the elimination of the cantons meant that Russian-speaking civil administrators now had more direct authority over the Bashkirs.^[44]
The transformation of Bashkir status produced by the Statutes was not total, however. Bashkir status continued to bear the imprint of the terms of Bashkirs’ initial incorporation into the empire. From the perspective of the Russian administration, what distinguished the Bashkirs was not their language or way of life, but their ownership of property. Administrative arrangements may have changed, but the Bashkir relationship to the land remained. Village communes retained significant powers over their land that other peasants lacked. Bashkir villages could sell or mortgage their property. Whereas state law specified how land must be divided in other peasant communes, in Bashkir villages the village assembly retained authority over the distribution of lands within it.^[45] Land remained communal property, with provisions for division of portions of it into the private property of individual Bashkirs. Finally, Muslim imams and traditional law, rather than state law, determined the division and inheritance of property among Bashkirs. The Bashkirs thus remained legally distinct from the peasants with whom they served in zemstvos and in the military. They retained both property rights to their land as well as greater control over its disposition within the commune. These policies advantaged the maintenance of Bashkir group identity and served to draw Bashkirs toward their village communes.

The Bashkirs (almost) on their own – Impoverishment and Perceptions of the Need for Cultural Change

Soon after the promulgation of the Statutes, the last major aspect of state tutelage over the Bashkirs –the requirement that the state approve sales of Bashkir communal land – was removed. Bashkirs’ losses of land and the end of their military service reduced the distinctiveness of their estate status from that of other residents of Bashkortostan. Officials believed the impoverishment that resulted from stress on Bashkir landholding made change in Bashkir status necessary. A change in legal status, however, was only a first step toward a broader cultural and social transformation of the Bashkirs. In addressing this need for cultural change, tsarist officials began to address the Bashkirs as a nationality rather than an estate group.
In 1865, Orenburg received a new Governor-General, Nikolai Kryzhanovskii. He argued that the ban on Bashkir land sales ran contrary to recognition of the Bashkirs as “landowners with full rights (polnopravnye sobstvenniki)” and should be eliminated. His proposal became a law in February 1869 that sought to regulate Bashkir land ownership.^[46] In addition to permitting Bashkirs to sell their land, the law required a much more clear demarcation of Bashkir land. Much of it had never been surveyed. Moreover, Bashkirs had allowed some non-Bashkirs, called pripushchenniki, or “those let in”, to lease some of their land, and the precise limits of such land leases were not clear either. The 1869 law called for the surveying and demarcation of Bashkir land from those of pripushchenniki who rented from them. Pripushchenniki who rented Bashkir land received fifteen desiatins per household.^[47] Pripushchenniki land holdings greater than that were to be held in reserve, supposedly for households with little land.
In arguing that the Bashkirs should be able to sell their land freely, Kryzhanovskii was, to some extent, following the logic of the Statutes on Bashkirs. Since Bashkirs were considered fully able to own land and participate in civic life, why should they not be able to enjoy unlimited rights of landownership? Yet in seeking to end limits on Bashkir landownership, Kryzhanovskii also followed the logic of economic development underlying the Great Reforms. Since at least the Catherinian era, the Russian state had sought to match people to land in the most productive manner. The effort to do so became more urgent in the Great Reform era as the state sought to Amaximize efficiency and resources.”^[48] In justifying the sales of Bashkir lands, Kryzhanovskii pointed to the fact that Bashkir land on the steppe was sparsely populated and produced little, and that mineral resources under Bashkir lands in the Urals lay undeveloped since Bashkirs lacked capital to develop them. The accelerated sale of Bashkir lands would make more land available for settlers from more agriculturally developed central and western parts of the empire. Settlers from these regions would be more agriculturally productive and would speed the proper development of Bashkir lands while hastening the demise of Bashkir nomadic pastoralism.^[49] Kryzhanovskii believed the economy of the region would benefit from in-migrants and new agricultural practices.
The combination of the Bashkirs’ ability to sell land and the government’s efforts to survey their land proved devastating for the Bashkirs. The Bashkirs may have been sufficiently developed to participate in civil life, but they proved no match for the combination of an influx of Russian settlers, market forces, and administrative corruption. Through manipulation, intimidation, and deceit, local officials, nobles both Russian Orthodox and Muslim, and others managed to steal or buy Bashkir land at ridiculously low prices. Between 1868 and 1878, the Bashkirs lost just over 1 million desiatin of land (2.838 million acres). The plundering of Bashkir land became a cause célèbre among Russian populists. A Senatorial inspection that followed resulted in the Minister of the Interior and the Orenburg Governor General losing their posts and the governor-generalship being eliminated altogether. The result for the Bashkirs was a rapid transfer of their lands to other persons, the cutting of their forests, and their impoverishment. The decline in Bashkir land ownership reduced their ability to maintain the semi-nomadic lifestyle that had been practiced by Bashkirs in the south and east of Bashkortostan. The difficult transition to settled agriculture made it more profitable for them to rent out their land at extremely low prices to Russian and other settlers arriving in Bashkortostan in large numbers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
By the 1890s, the economic situation of the Bashkirs had deteriorated markedly. Stories of Bashkir poverty appeared frequently in both the central and local press. By the late 1890s, local administrators had begun to take notice. The discussion that ensued on how to improve the Bashkirs’ situation reflected a new understanding of them as an ethnic or national group. In the summer of 1898, at the time when a new surveying of Bashkir lands was set to begin, the governor in Ufa wrote to influential figures who would have some knowledge of the Bashkirs’ situation in order to ask their advice on how to improve the Bashkirs’ lot. The governor’s description of the situation indicates that the Bashkir votchinniki, those with title to their land, were considered a nationality (narodnost’).^[50] He noted his “extremely sad conclusion” in a letter to M. I. Umetbaev, a Bashkir, a translator for the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, and a man of letters, arguing that:

коренное население губернии башкиры вотчинники, при обширной территории владеемых ими земель, находятся в крайне плохом экономическом положении, значительно худшем в сравнении с благосостоянием остальных пришлых народностей и несомненно требующем особых административных забот.

According to the governor, the situation had reached the point that among this “коренного населения края проявляются признаки вымирания, наблюдается даже в некоторых местах уменьшение населения против числа душ Х ревизии”.^[51] The governor’s request for Umetbaev’s opinion on the Bashkir situation is especially notable for his identification of the Bashkir landowners as the native people of the region whose claim to the land tied them to it and tied them together as a nationality. His declaration of concern that the Bashkir nationality was dying out and needed special state intervention for its preservation indicated an official view of the Bashkirs as more than a legal status group.^[52]
In 1898 and the following years, discussions expanded among officials and members of the intelligentsia on the fate of the Bashkirs and how their “dying out” might be prevented. The debates among Russian administrators on the fate of the Bashkirs continued to reflect a shift in conceptions of them. Before 1865, the Bashkirs were defined by their legal title to their land and their military service to the tsarist state. In 1865, the Bashkirs were considered sufficiently developed to participate in the institutions created by the Great Reforms. By the time consideration of the Bashkirs reached State Council in 1902, officials discussing the Bashkirs’ assessed Bashkir capabilities differently. Officials argued that the “backwardness and complete lack of culture of the Bashkir tribe” (otstalosti i polnoi nekul’turnosti bashkirskogo plemeni) required a new approach to their administration. Russian administrators identified the cause of Bashkir “laziness and carelessness” (lenosti i bespechenosti) and that of other “Eastern inorodtsy” with confidence; it was Islam. Due to changes in law in 1886, the number of mosques and religious servitors had grown rapidly in Bashkortostan. In the opinion of state officials, two things were required to raise the “intellectual and moral level” of the Bashkirs. The Bashkirs’ legal distinctiveness must be ended and the general laws on the peasantry applied to them. This would provide greater possibilities for Russian officials to regulate the disposition of Bashkir land, its allocation within the village and its sales to outsiders; to eliminate imams from the disposition of inheritances; and to facilitate the entry of non-Bashkirs into Bashkir villages.^[53] Second, the sale of Bashkir lands should be used to finance general and specialized schools for the Bashkirs that officials believed would develop them intellectually and provide the practical skills necessary for them to make a living. New vocabulary for describing the Bashkirs accompanied these proposals. Officials referred to the Bashkirs as a “narodnost’” and as “aborigenes” in addition to the more traditional “narod” and “plemia”. New policies of assimilation accompanied this conceptual shift toward regarding the Bashkirs as a nationality. Rather than simply settling the Bashkirs, state officials believed the culture of the Bashkirs needed transformation through education. Officials also sought to transform Bashkir villages by making it easier to introduce non-Bashkirs into them. Engineering the national composition of the countryside became an essential part of state strategy in Bashkortostan.
In November 1904, the State Council rejected these proposals. It did so in part because it seemed “inexpedient” to apply to the Bashkirs a set of laws on the peasantry that was slated for reform in the near term anyway. But it also did so out of a respect for the estate distinctiveness of the Bashkirs, and out of fears that efforts at reform might provoke disturbances at a time when the war with Japan required all to focus on the struggle with the external enemy. Equating the Bashkirs with peasants entailed an “abrupt violation of the firmly-formed order in the Bashkir way of life” that might provoke displeasure in “the dark inorodcheskoe milieu.”^[54] Although tsarist officials had offered a diagnosis of both the defects in Bashkir status and the need for reform, the time was not right for potentially destabilizing changes in the treatment of Bashkirs. The time never would be right. The Bashkirs retained their particular status until 1917.
Although the Ufa governor seemed interested in preserving the Bashkir nationality, this was not the central motivating factor for most state officials involved in proposed reforms. Policy proposals put before the State Council appeared to be aimed at achieving greater state control over them and easing the entry of non-Bashkirs into Bashkir communities. Yet, suppressing Bashkir identity was not the first priority of the proposals, either. By the first decade of the twentieth century, officials feared greater religious identification much more than the possibility of nationalism among Bashkirs. Religious ties appeared to be stronger than national ones.^[55] Religion tied the Bashkirs to a much larger Muslim community in the empire that challenged Orthodoxy. If anything, tsarist officials sought to use nationality to counter the power of religion. After the issuance of the Manifesto on Toleration of April 17, 1905, Islam grew still more rapidly in the number of adherents, clerics, and mosques. A Special Conference on Matters of the Muslim Faith was created to bring the empire’s laws into accord with the new legislation. It considered ways to reform the Islam religious administration, the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, so as to make it more responsive to the needs of the people. The overall thrust of discussions was toward the breaking up of the Spiritual Assembly. One official, Vladimir Cherevanskii, argued before the Conference that concentrating authority over matters of Muslim faith, marriage, family and inheritance law in European Russia and Siberia in the OMSA amounted to the creation of a “Muslim Rome” because it brought together Muslims from all over the empire who had experienced harm to their “economic and moral needs.” To counter this concentration, the official proposed that the state break up the OMSA according to territorial principles and according to “those ethnicities (narodnosti) which have their own histories.”^[56] Another expert consulted by the Conference, A.S. Budilovich, confirmed Cherevanskii's emphasis on geographic and ethnic divisions.^[57]
The reforms of the1860s reduced the distinctiveness of Bashkir status, making less privileged Bashkirs more like peasants and allowing Bashkir elites greater opportunities to become nobles. The Bashkirs’ loss of lands and their changed terms of military service reduced their particularity still further. As Bashkir estate particularity declined in power, however, the Bashkirs were increasingly discussed as a nationality based on their landholding. Officials began to argue for state intervention in Bashkir affairs not due to their estate status, but due to their nationality and cultural characteristics. In the case of the Ufa governor, the Bashkir “nationality” deserved preservation in general. Other officials believed that separating Bashkirs from other Muslims would reduce the power of Islam in the empire. In each case, the Bashkirs took shape as a nationality.

Bashkirs in the Last Years of the Tsarist Empire

In the years after 1905, the Bashkirs were subject to contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the developments of the previous half-century countered the development of group cohesion. In particular, the loss of their lands and the transition from a military estate to military service, with others peasants reduced incentives for assimilating into the Bashkir estate. The Stolypin reforms beginning in 1906 promoted landholding among all peasants, and the Peasant Land Bank purchased land and resold it to settlers, further eroding the distinctiveness of the Bashkirs. The end of Bashkir cantonal administration and then the disbanding of the Bashkir Detachments in the 1870s eliminated another source of Bashkir identity. The state also took steps to control who could claim Bashkir status and thus make assimilation into Bashkir status more difficult. After 1905, state laws for the first time formally limited those who could be considered Bashkir votchinniki to family members of the votchinniki and sons- and brothers-in-law “taken into their families.”^[58] This contributed to the sense of the Bashkirs as a more tightly defined group based on land ownership.
When being a Bashkir no longer conferred concrete advantages and when the state attempted to place limitations put on who could be recognized as a Bashkir votchinnik, those who were registered as Bashkirs but had other cultural or ethnic identities began to re-identify themselves as people other than Bashkirs. The lack of consistency in data collection in various censuses makes it impossible to provide firm numbers on the national identities of people in Bashkortostan. However, political scientist Dmitry Gorenburg’s analysis of changes in Bashkir suggests a drift from identification as Bashkir. Between 1897 and 1920, the proportion of Bashkirs in Bashkortostan declined by 10.7 percent, from 40.9 percent to 30.2 percent. At the same time, the numbers of Mishars and Teptiars, those often called New Bashkirs after 1865, increased. The number of Mishars went from one to 6 percent of the general population and the number of Teptiars increased from 1.8 to 5.3 percent of the population. The Tatar population rose from 8.4 to 9.7 percent of the population.^[59] Nearly all of these shifts took place in the northwestern part of Bashkortostan, where all these groups had very similar cultural characteristics and languages. When given the opportunity, a substantial number of people who had been Bashkirs began to identify themselves as Tatars, Teptiars, or Mishars after the turn of the century.
The same legal and economic factors that made being a Bashkir both less distinctive and less of an advantage with respect to landholding provided the basis for the assertion of a Bashkir national community in the first decades of the twentieth century. At roughly the same time that state officials began to discuss the Bashkirs as a national or cultural group rather than an estate, the Bashkirs took advantage of the relatively wider public sphere after 1905 to assert their collective interest. Land was at the base of their demands. The surveying of land called for in 1869 divided land between Bashkir votchinniki from those pripushchenniki who had settled on or rented Bashkir land since the early stages of colonization. As we have seen, the Bashkirs saw substantial portions of their land then taken from them for the benefit of the pripushchenniki and or transferred to those closely connected with the local administration. Another attack on Bashkir landholding began in 1898. The surveying of Bashkir land begun in 1869 had largely been finished by then, but this did not bring clarity to landholding in Bashkortostan. The emphasis on surveying had been on demarcating Bashkir lands from those of pripushchenniki. Only about 8 percent of land owned by Bashkir votchinniki had been surveyed.^[60] Boundaries between Bashkir villages remained unclear, and an influx of migrants to the region confused the issue further. In 1898, the state began a project to survey Bashkir lands, ostensibly at least in part to protect Bashkir land rights and to simplify relations between Bashkirs and those in-migrants who rented land from them.^[61] In the end, however, the legislation protected in-migrants who rented from Bashkirs by requiring Bashkirs either to sell land to in-migrants at low prices or to compensate peasant in-migrants for their investments in improvements to the land.^[62] The attack on Bashkir land rights prompted Bashkirs to mobilize collectively based on the defense of their land rights.^[63]
Of course, Bashkir land had been confiscated by the government before, and this had provoked Bashkir discontent. In the early XXth century, though, institutions and public forums made possible the expression of this discontent in new ways. The creation of an elected representative institution, the State Duma, presented one such forum. Few Bashkirs made it into the State Duma, and those who did were largely either nobles or Muslim clerics for whom the land question was not the most pressing issue. Nonetheless, the three speeches in the First and Second Dumas by representatives from Ufa and Orenburg province outlined what would become important elements of Bashkir collective identity, with resonance far beyond 1917. A representative from Ufa Province, Shakhaidar Syrtlanov, spoke in the First Duma of the Bashkirs’ acceptance of Russian sovereignty in the four hundred years previously, which indicated “this is not a conquered people”. He specifically noted the charter from Ivan IV to the Bashkirs granting them their land. Syrtlanov cited the Bashkirs’ service in Russia’s wars and their service rendered in the Bashkir cantons. Shakhbal Seifitdinov also stressed that the Bashkirs had long been loyal subjects of the tsar, and spoke favorably of the Cantonal system of administration, when, in his view, leaders of the cantons were Bashkirs themselves and defended the interests of the Bashkirs.^[64] In the First and Second Dumas, representatives from Ufa and Orenburg provinces summarized the history of the confiscations of Bashkir land in the 1860s and after, and presented the Bashkirs’ request that their land be returned to them.^[65]
In the Second Duma, representatives from Ufa and Orenburg went into greater detail regarding the land question, the extent of Bashkir losses, and restrictions put on their landholding. One, Khasanov, stated the Bashkirs’ case that if, in the view of Stolypin’s government, “private property is really inviolable, then Bashkir land must likewise be inviolable.”^[66] The essential points suggested in these speeches, that the Bashkirs were the native people of the region with a recognized right to the land; that their entry into the Russian state was voluntary and thus could be revoked according to the will of the Bashkir people; that the Bashkirs needed to be led by Bashkirs to protect their interests; and that the Bashkirs had demonstrated through military service their commitment to fulfilling their obligations – provided the cornerstones of Bashkir assertions of national identity thereafter. Thus, the key elements of Bashkir national ideology was formed within the context of imperial institutions and policies and found expression there.^[67] It is no surprise that the Bashkir “kuraltai” or national assemblies in 1917 resolved to give local administrative units in an autonomous Bashkortostan the name “cantons,” the same one used from 1798 to 1865, and made the control of land and the end of Russian colonization central points of its agenda.^[68]

Conclusion

This brief analysis of a long period suggests a number of different ways in which the imperial Russian state greatly influenced the development of Bashkir nationality. The pre-1917 regime may have lacked the firm vision of a union of territorial nationalities characteristic of Lenin and Stalin. In the case of the Bashkirs, however, imperial policy did much to make possible a Bashkir nationality. Before the late eighteenth century, the overwhelming priority for the tsarist state was the loyalty and support of Bashkirs. In order to achieve this, the state extended hereditary rights to the land to the Bashkirs. The documentation of these rights helped fix the tribal social organization of the Bashkirs and promoted the development of smaller clan units.
When the state’s priority shifted in the 1790s toward settling the nomadic Bashkirs and defending the steppe frontier, the state introduced a cantonal system of administration. The cantonal system created a new Bashkir elite that acted as an intermediary between the state and Bashkirs. Cantonal administration broke down Bashkir tribal allegiances while it furthered Bashkir identification with military service. The combination of landowning and service in lieu of taxes fostered the development of Bashkir communities, as others sought to assimilate into them and enjoy these advantages.
When the desire to include more of the tsar’s subjects in civic life became an imperative in the in the 1860s, state policy eroded Bashkir isolation, equating ordinary Bashkirs more with peasants and Bashkir elites with nobles while continuing to recognize Bashkir ownership of land. The effort to make Bashkirs sedentary and the effort to engineer Bashkortostan’s national mix after the Great Reforms proved disastrous for Bashkir ways of life. By the early XXth century, being a Bashkir became less attractive. The sense of loss of land and impoverishment caused imperial administrators to begin to discuss Bashkirs as an ethnic or cultural group that required intervention and, in the minds of some, assimilation for its preservation. The maintenance of Bashkir distinctiveness was allowed and even encouraged, since Islam loomed as a larger threat than Bashkir nationalism in the minds of the empire’s administrators. The Revolution of 1905 and the new political system that emerged from it enabled Bashkir leaders to appeal to notions of private property and Bashkir loyalty and to speak in the name of the Bashkirs as a people. The imperial system accepted and in some ways embraced nationality and allowed space for articulation of a nation. The Bashkirs drew upon their historical relations with the imperial state to define Bashkir identity. These emerged more forcefully after the collapse of the tsarist empire.
The history of the Bashkirs within the empire did not lead in a straight line toward the emergence of a nationality. Rather, state policy provided an array of possible cultural patterns from which a Bashkir identity could be built, from tribes fixed through land charters, estate status and military service, or a cultural community with particular characteristics. All these sources of identity were available in the fashioning of a national identity or of alternatives to one, as is evident from Bashkir activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The actions of the Bashkir elites in the context of the tsarist regime’s acceptance of the importance of ethnic nationality made nationality a salient political identity of the Bashkirs by 1917. The version of Bashkir interests articulated in the Duma provided the basis for Bashkir claims to respect before 1917, and for territorial autonomy afterwards. Many ideological factors and practical considerations contributed to the Bolshevik leadership’s decision to declare the autonomous Bashkir Soviet Republic the first such republic in Soviet Russia.^[69] Considering the importance of Bashkir attachment to their land and their tradition of military service, however, the early recognition of Bashkir autonomy is not surprising.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has suggested that the existence of “ethnic/national” sosloviia such as that of the Bashkirs holds out the “intriguing possibility that the shadow of soslovnost’ hung over the construction of national as well as social identity in the Stalin period.”^[70] A full treatment of the relationship of Soviet developments to those before 1917 lies beyond the scope of this paper. The history of the Bashkirs suggests, however, that the category “Bashkir” did not begin as an ethnic/national estate. Entry into the estate remained fluid and allowed for the assimilation of non-Bashkir groups. By the late nineteenth century, however, nationality and estate had merged. The case of the Bashkirs suggests that the policies of the tsarist state in general and the estate system in particular may indeed cast a long shadow over the formation and definition of nationalities under the Soviets.