Bashkirs - Orientation

Identification. The Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (BASSR) was one of the sixteen autonomous republics and other autonomous areas that comprised the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Today Bashkirstan is one of the eighteen republics that form Russia. About two-thirds of the almost 1 million who call themselves Bashkirs live in the national republic. The rest live mostly in neighboring areas. Another 90,000 live in the Central Asian republics.

Location. Bashkiria is situated between 51°31′ and 56°30′ N and 53°30′ and 60° E,astride the southern part of the Ural Mountains. The country has a variety of land forms: wooded steppe and steppe west of the Urals and forested mountains in the core region, which slope off to the east and southeast into steppe. The republic extends over 144,151 square kilometers, 80 percent of which lies in the valleys of the Belaya and Ufa rivers, which are part of the Kama River Basin, and 20 percent in the upper Sakmara and Ural river valleys. The soils are 35 percent chernozem and the remainder a variety of floodplain, mountain, and podzolic soils. The climate is continental, with relatively warm to hot summers and cold winters. Temperatures differ considerably from north to south and from west to east. Temperatures may reach +40° C in summer and descend to —40° to —50° C in winter. Average January temperatures range from —14 to — 17.5° C and July temperatures from 16.5 to 20.5° C. Precipitation is at least 55 to 60 centimeters in the north and 30 to 40 centimeters in the southern steppe. The growing season in the lowlands is about 120 to 135 days.

Demography. According to the 1987 census, the total population of the BASSR was 3,895,000, of which about 24 percent, or just under one million were Bashkirs. The rest of the population in the republic included Russians, 38 percent of the total population; Tatars, 30 percent; Chuvash, 2.9 percent; Maris, 2.5 percent; Ukrainians, 2.3 percent; Mordvinians, 1.4 percent; Udmurt, .6 percent; and others. Counting those residing outside the republic who identified themselves as Bashkirs, the total for the Soviet Union was 1,371,000 in 1979. Censuses between 1926 and 1970 show that a significant number of Bashkirs steadily turned to Tatar as a spoken and literary language. Since 1970 this process seems to have slowed or even reversed. Those who live outside the republic, however, are being absorbed by Russian or Turkic groups. Some 80.3 percent of Bashkirs are rural dwellers; in Chelyabinsk Oblast, 66.3 percent; in Perm Oblast, 77 percent; in Orenburg Oblast, 76.7 percent; in Kurgan Oblast, 95 percent; in Kuibyshev Oblast, 63 percent. In rural settings they have been resistant to assimilation. Ufa, the capital of the republic, had a population of 1,092,000 in 1987, of which just under 20 percent were Bashkirs. The other seventeen towns and urban-type settlements were mostly inhabited by non-Bashkirs.

Linguistic Affiliation. Bashkir belongs to the Kipchak, or West Turkic, Language Group. There are two dialects today—the southern (Yurmata) and the eastern (Kuvakan). The major differences are phonetic. Bashkir is close to the Tatar language, and more than one-third of present-day Bashkirs claim that language as their native tongue. Arabic script was used until 1929, when a Latin alphabet was introduced. In 1939 a Cyrillic alphabet replaced the Latin.