the Turkic Bashkirs (bashkort). Later arrivals of Oguz and Kipchak Turks further Turki-fied the early Bashkir people.
By the sixteenth century, Bashkirs were dependent variously on the Kazan Khanate to the west, the Khanate of Siberia to the east, and the Nogai khans to the south. Constriction of migration routes had forced many Bashkirs to limit their nomadizing to summer months and to turn toward hunting, beekeeping, and in some places agriculture. In 1557 several Bashkir groups acknowledged Russian suzerainty, seeking protection from the Nogai khans. Subsequent years saw gradual expansion of Russian control over other Bashkir tribes, imposition of a tax (yasak) in fur, construction of Russian defensive lines to repel nomadic incursions, and infiltration of Bashkir lands by Russian peasants and other peoples fleeing serfdom and taxation. The years from the mid-seventeenth to mid- eighteenth centuries saw five major Bashkir revolts against Russian rule, usually directed against both peasant settlement and high Russian taxes. In addition, Bashkirs participated with other discontented peoples of the region in Emelian Pugachev’s great rebellion (1773-1775).
Like many native peoples in the Russian Empire, nomadic Bashkirs belonged to a specific estate category with particular privileges and responsibilities. Bashkirs were relatively privileged compared to other natives in the region, with lower tax rates and (theoretically) a guarantee to the land they had held when they joined the empire. In 1798 Russian authorities gave new content to Bashkir identity by establishing the Bashkir-Meshcheriak Host (later simply Bashkir Host), an irregular military force modeled on the Cossacks. Male Bashkirs were required to serve in units apportioned among twelve self-governing cantons. The Bashkir Host was abolished during the Great Reforms (1863), but it later served as a symbol of Bashkir independence. In the late nineteenth century, a vast increase in Russian settlement and occupation of Bashkir lands and expansion of mining and metallurgy concerns in the Urals rapidly and traumatically accelerated processes of Bashkir sedentarization. In the closing decades of the century the local Russian press debated whether the Bashkirs were dying out.
During the Russian Revolution, Bashkirs unexpectedly emerged as one of the most activist peoples in the empire. The expectation of many Tatars that Bashkirs would assimilate into the emerging Tatar nation, the Tatar and later Soviet plans for a large territorial republic that would integrate Bashkortostan with Tatarstan, and the increasingly violent confrontations between Bashkirs and Russian settlers encouraged Bashkir activism and separatism in 1917 and 1918. Ahmed Zeki Validov (known as Togan in his later Turkish exile) led a nationalist movement that sought to establish a Bashkir republic even while Red and White armies battled back and forth across the region and Bashkirs fought Russian settlers. The Bashkir republic was established by treaty between the Soviet government and Validov’s group in 1919. In 1922 the republic was expanded to include most of the former Ufa province, bringing in the large numbers of Russians and Tatars that now outnumber the Bashkirs in their own republic.
Soviet rule brought many contradictions to Bashkortostan and the Bashkirs. Famine in 1921 and 1922, accompanied by banditry and rebellion, was barely overcome before the trauma of collectivization, crash industrialization, and the emergence of Josef Stalin’s police state. Outright statements of nationalist sentiment were long taboo. Yet the Soviet government oversaw the de126
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velopment of Bashkir written language, literature, historiography, and other cultural forms that solidified Bashkir identity and may have prevented its submergence in a larger Tatar or Turkic identity. Suspicion of some Tatars that the Bashkir nation is a recent and relatively artificial creation of the Soviet state rather than an old and authentic nation challenged the legitimacy of the Republic of Bashkortostan itself and often underlay post-Soviet debates between Bashkirs and Tatars over the treatment of Tatars in Bashkortostan. See also: ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; TOGAN, AHMED ZEKI VALIDOV
Baumann, Robert F. (1987). “Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Russia: The Case of the Bashkirs.” Slavic Review 46: 489-502. Donnelly, Alton S. (1968). The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 1552-1740: A Case Study in Imperialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pipes, Richard E. (1950). “The First Experiment in Soviet Nationality Policy: The Bashkir Republic, 1917-1920.” Russian Review 9:303-319. Schafer, Daniel E. (2001). “Local Politics and the Birth of the Republic of Bashkortostan, 1919-1920.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Era of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin. New York: Oxford University Press.
DANIEL E. SCHAFER
(1371-1425), grand prince of Vladimir and Moscow (from 1389).
The eldest son and successor to grand prince Dmitry Ivanovich (“Donskoi”), Basil assumed the power as the obedient servant of Khan Tokhtamysh. In 1392, when the latter was engaged in the war with emir Timur and needed financial resources, Basil visited the Horde and bought patents for the principalities of Nizhny Novgorod, Murom, Gorodets, Tarusa, and Meshchera. Using his armed force and the khan’s support, Basil I seized Nizhny Novgorod. But Suzdalian princes did not give up, and the struggle for Nizhny Novgorod was resumed in the 1410s.
In 1397 Basil attempted to annex the Dvina land (in the valley of the Northern Dvina River), a province of Great Novgorod. In order to gain the support of the inhabitants, Basil gave a special charter to this land, but his rule there did not last long. In 1498 the Novgorodians recovered their province.
In the 1390s, Basil I entered into alliance with the mighty duke of Lithuania, Vytautas (in 1391 Basil married his daughter, Sophia). The Muscovite prince allowed his ally and father-in-law to conquer Vyazma (1403) and Smolensk (1404); only when Vytautas marched on Pskov (1406) did Basil I declare war on Lithuania. However, during this war (1406-1408) no decisive battles took place. Peaceful relations with Lithuania were restored (1408), and later in his testament (1423) Basil I entrusted his minor son and heir, Basil II, to the protection of Vytautas.
After the final defeat of Tokhtamysh by Timur (1395), Basil I broke relations with the Golden Horde and stopped paying tribute. In 1408 Moscow suffered a severe blow from emir Edigey, the ruler of the Horde, who besieged the capital for three weeks, and, having taken an indemnity of three thousand rubles, withdrew, ravaging the land and leading away thousands of captives. Basil I made no attempt to face the enemy: He retired to Kostroma and waited there for the invasion to pass.
One of consequences of Edigey’s raid was that Suzdalian princes recovered Nizhny Novgorod (c. 1410), and only in 1414 did Basil I manage to recapture this city.
It is characteristic of Basil’s relations with the Tartars that he did not acknowledge the power of Edigey, who was not a Chingizid; but as soon as the legitimate khan Jelal-ad-din (son of Tokh-tamysh) seized power in the Horde (1412), Basil immediately paid him a visit and resumed the payment of tribute.
For the lack of evidence, the last decade of Basil’s I rule remains obscure. For the same reason, it is hardly possible to assess his personality. As Robert Crummey aptly remarked, Basil I “is a shadowy figure. The sources on his long reign give us little sense of his character, except to hint that he was a cautious and indecisive man” (p. 62). See also: BASIL II; DONSKOY, DMITRY IVANOVICH; GOLDEN HORDE; GRAND PRINCE; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; YARLYK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crummey, Robert O. (1987). The Formation of Muscovy, 1304-1613. London: Longman.
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Presniakov, A. E. (1970). The Formation of the Great Russian State: A Study of Russian History in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries, tr. A. E. Moorhouse. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
(1415-1462), grand prince of Moscow from 1425 to 1462 (with intervals).
Basil II, third son and successor to Basil I (two elder sons of the latter died in childhood), ascended the Muscovite throne at the age of ten. Until he attained his majority, three persons shared the real power: his mother
