“My Bashkirs”: Between Folklore, Empire, and Contemporary Identity
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
- Jun 24
- 8 min read
Aleksei Rumiantsev
In 2025, the monument to Salavat Yulaev (1754–1800) in Ufa, one of the most recognizable symbols of Bashkortostan, was dismantled for major restoration after decades of structural deterioration. Salavat Yulaev, a participant in the 1773–1775 Pugachev Rebellion and a key poetic figure in Bashkir cultural memory, occupies a central place in modern Bashkir national narratives as a symbol of resistance, cultural continuity, and collective identity.
City authorities stated that the monument would be restored to its “original appearance.” In November 2025, the final elements of the sculpture were removed from their pedestal and transported for reconstruction. The monument’s internal structure is being replaced, the bronze surface treated against corrosion, and the pedestal rebuilt. When completed, the restored monument is expected to stand for decades to come. It will be materially renewed, yet presented as the same historical object.[i] Although officials framed the dismantling as a temporary restoration measure, media discussions of the project raised questions about the monument's future appearance and location.[ii]
What, then, is being restored: the monument itself, or the idea of it?
The bronze rider overlooking the Belaya River was designed to depict Salavat Yulaev at the moment he called people into battle. The rider’s hand is raised, attracting the attention of an unseen audience. This imagined address finds its linguistic counterpart in a phrase often attributed to him: bashqorttarım (“my Bashkirs”). The possessive suffix (-ım, ‘my’) establishes a bond between the speaker and the collective. It implies intimacy, but also authority: the speaker claims the right to address a people as his own. The form positions the speaker simultaneously within and above the collective.
Like the monument itself, this expression is a reconstructed form rather than a preserved original. The history of the word bashqorttarım (“my Bashkirs”) reveals how Bashkir identity itself was historically reshaped: moving from an imperial estate category toward a modern national identity through oral tradition, literary circulation, and canon formation. What appears to be a stable form of address is, in fact, the product of repeated historical reconstruction.
A Voice Without a Text
Salavat Yulaev (1754–1800), remembered both as a participant in the Pugachev Rebellion and as a celebrated hero of Bashkir folklore, literature, and public commemoration, is also associated with poetry. None of the poems attributed to Salavat Yulaev survive in manuscripts written during his lifetime. Poetry attributed to Salavat circulated orally and was written down much later by Bashkir folklorists and collectors of oral literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, the poetic voice associated with Salavat emerged through processes of oral transmission and later textualization rather than through direct authorial preservation.[iii] Bashqorttarım appears in a short lyrical poem in which the speaker declares his symbolic survival after death and addresses the Bashkir people directly:
Min ülmänem, bashqorttarım!“I have not died, my Bashkirs.”[iv]
The line is striking not only for its defiance, but for its form of address. It invokes a people directly, naming them simultaneously as audience and collective subject. Yet the conditions of its survival complicate this immediacy. The poem stages a paradox: a voice reaching outward while remaining historically inaccessible.
This distance is significant because Salavat himself emerged from a world in which “Bashkir” did not yet function as a modern national identity. Andreas Kappeler has observed for the peoples of the Russian Empire more broadly, premodern identities were often structured through overlapping estate, confessional, regional, and dynastic affiliations rather than through modern national categories. Within this framework, Bashkirs were understood primarily as a legally distinct estate tied to hereditary landholding, military obligation, and negotiated loyalty to the tsarist state.[v] Bashkir elites had sworn loyalty to Ivan IV in exchange for guarantees protecting local customs, religion, and land rights.[vi]
The rebellion in which Salavat participated therefore cannot be understood simply as an early nationalist uprising. Steinwedel emphasizes that many Bashkirs joined Pugachev not because they rejected imperial authority altogether, but because they believed the empire had violated older arrangements governing land, taxation, and religious autonomy.[vii] Pugachev’s proclamations to the Bashkirs promised “land, water, and forests” alongside protection of “faith and your law.”[viii] For many participants, rebellion represented an attempt to restore a prior balance rather than abolish empire itself.
Seen in this context, the later transformation of Salavat into a national voice becomes especially revealing. The phrase bashqorttarım becomes attached to him not because it can be historically verified as his speech, but because it corresponds to the form through which later generations imagined him speaking.
The historical Salavat disappears behind the reconstructed voice.
Poetry in Circulation
A century later, the poetry of Miĭfṭakhetdin Akmulla (1831–1895) offers a clearer view of how such forms of address operated in practice. Akmulla, a poet, educator, and itinerant teacher, composed poetry for oral performance across the Bashkir and Kazakh regions.[ix]
The same expression appears in the first line of his well-known poem:
Bashqorttarım, uquy kerek…“My Bashkirs, you must study…”[x]
The difference from Salavat's declaration is clear. Here the phrase is not presented as a statement of symbolic survival directed toward future generations, but as an imperative addressed to a contemporary audience. The tone is didactic, reformist, and immediate. The speaker urges listeners toward education, self-improvement, and social transformation.
The phrase bashqorttarım therefore operated less as symbolic memory than as a form of social address, exhorting listeners to learn, reform themselves, and participate in a changing social world. The continuity of wording masks a shift in function.
Akmulla’s poetry emerged during a period of significant change in Bashkortostan. Throughout the nineteenth century, the imperial authorities increasingly sought to create a bilingual Muslim elite capable of serving as intermediaries within the empire. Institutions such as the Nepliuev Cadet School and Kazan University trained Bashkir and Tatar students in Russian, Tatar, Arabic, and Persian preparing them for administrative and military service.[xi] These developments formed part of wider Muslim intellectual and educational networks that connected the Volga-Ural region with the Urals, Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe, facilitating the circulation of texts, teachers, and cultural authority across imperial space.[xii]
This educational transformation reshaped local intellectual life. “Service, noble status, and education,” Steinwedel writes, “combined to create a small but influential Muslim elite in Bashkiria in the mid-nineteenth century.”[xiii] The emergence of reformist voices such as Akmulla’s cannot be separated from this broader imperial project of modernization and cultural integration. In Salavat-associated texts, the phrase survives as memorialized address; in Akmulla’s poetry, it functions as immediate social intervention.
From Speech to Canon
The transition from oral tradition to written literature transformed poetic forms of address. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bashkir folklore and poetry were collected, published, edited, and standardized by folklorists, literary scholars, and cultural institutions. Oral variants narrowed, language became standardized, and authorship hardened into literary fact.
In this process, certain phrases acquired emblematic status. Bashqorttarım, appearing in both Salavat-associated texts and Akmulla’s poetry, became recognizable as a specifically “Bashkir” mode of poetic address.
Canonization produces coherence retrospectively. The past begins to sound unified: a sequence of voices addressing the same people in the same language of collective intimacy. Yet this coherence is itself constructed through editorial practice, literary institutions, and later national culture.
Steinwedel’s broader historical argument helps explain this process. By the early twentieth century, the decline of estate distinctions and the crisis of imperial authority after 1905 encouraged the emergence of new national forms of political identity.[xiv] “Thus, as Bashkir estate status declined in importance,” he writes, “a Bashkir national idea grew.”[xv] Similar processes unfolded across much of the Russian Empire as older corporate identities increasingly gave way to national forms of political and cultural mobilization.[xvi] ee
The reconstruction of literary voice formed part of this wider transformation. This process resembles what Benedict Anderson describes as the transformation of vernacular cultural forms into the basis for imagined national communities.[xvii]
Forms of Address
What kind of relationship does bashqorttarım encode? In oral performance, this ambiguity is productive. It creates a temporary communicative community between performer and audience. But once fixed in writing, the same structure becomes detachable from the social setting that originally gave it meaning.
What had once been enacted in speech becomes recognizable as literary form. This shift helps explain why the phrase survives even after its original communicative conditions have disappeared.
Afterlives
In contemporary public discourse, bashqorttarım is rarely used as an actual form of address. Public speakers tend instead to employ either civic or ethnic collective categories depending on the context. For example, during Victory Day commemorations in Ufa in 2023, the Head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, addressed his audience in Russian as “dear comrades” (dorogie tovarishchi), invoking a civic and commemorative register rather than an explicitly ethnic one.[xviii] By contrast, Bashkir opposition activist Ruslan Gabbasov, addressing viewers on his YouTube channel, uses the phrase hörmätle millättäştär (“dear compatriots/fellow nationals”), foregrounding ethnic solidarity without invoking the possessive form “my Bashkirs.”[xix]
Contemporary forms of collective address therefore continue to articulate belonging, but they do so through civic or national categories rather than through the historically charged expression bashqorttarım. When the phrase appears today, it usually does so as quotation. It recalls Salavat or Akmulla, but it no longer functions as either declaration or command.
Reconstructing the Voice
“My Bashkirs” is a single word in Bashqort, but it carries a layered history. It has moved from oral performance to textual inscription, from imperial frontier society to national canon, from living speech to remembered voice.
The reconstruction of the Salavat Yulaev monument makes this process visible. The figure remains recognizable, the gesture survives, yet the monument itself is materially remade. Likewise, the phrase bashqorttarım survives not in its original, but as a form repeatedly reconstructed across changing historical contexts.
Rather than attempting to establish whether Salavat Yulaev actually spoke these words, this article has focused on how the phrase came to stand in for his voice, and why it continues to resonate. Like the monument overlooking Ufa, it is not simply a remnant of the past. It is a carefully maintained way of making the past speak.
Aleksei Rumiantsev is a PhD student in Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His research examines how official mass media in the Chuvash Republic and other regions of the Volga–Ural area manage uncertainty and public sentiment during wartime through narratives of indigeneity, gender, and culture. His broader interests include post-Soviet media, language politics, and the intersections of decolonization and popular culture in Russia’s minority republics.
[i] “Salavat Yulaev Monument Dismantling Has Been Completed in Ufa,” Bashinform, November 7, 2025. https://eng.bashinform.ru/news/culture/2025-11-07/salavat-yulaev-monument-dismantling-has-been-completed-in-ufa-4457648.
[ii] V Ufe idet razborka pamiatnika Salavatu Iulaevu” [The dismantling of the Salavat Yulaev monument is underway in Ufa], Idel.Realii, October 4, 2025, https://www.idelreal.org/a/v-ufe-idet-razborka-pamyatnika-salavatu-yulaevu/33549647.html.
[iii] I. M. Gvozdikova, Salavat Iulaev: Issledovanie dokumentalʹnykh istochnikov (Ufa: Bashkirskoe knizhnoe izdatelʹstvo, 1982), 9–10.
[iv] Fazlyeva, F. N. Uralym — tyuğan töyägem: Metodik qullanma (Öfö: Bashkortostan “Kitap” nashriyäte, 1997), 43.
[v] Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 141–146.
[vi] Charles Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 17–20.
[vii] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 73–74.
[viii] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 74.
[ix] Rashit Shakur, Zvezda poezii: Bashkirskii poet-prosvetitelʹ Miftakhetdin Akmulla (Ufa: Kitap, 2006), 11–13.
[x] Miĭfṭakhetdin Akmulla, Bashqorttarım, uquy kerek! accessed May 6, 2026. http://ebook.bashnl.ru/reader/bookView.html?params=UmVzb3VyY2UtOTUxNg/0JDSodC80YPQu9C70LAgLSDQqNC40pPRi9GA0pnQsNGA.
[xi] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 102–104.
[xii] Danielle Ross, Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 1–6. For broader treatments of Muslim educational, religious, and intellectual networks in the Volga-Ural region, see Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and Azade-Ayşe Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Stanford: The Hoover Institution Press,1986).
[xiii] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 104.
[xiv] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 236–237.
[xv] Steinwedel, Threads of Empire, 237.
[xvi] Kappeler, The Russian Empire, 289–300. For broader discussions of national movements among the Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire, see Rorlich, The Volga Tatars; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).
[xvii] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 56–57.
[xviii] Radiy Khabirov, speech at Victory Day celebrations in Ufa, May 9, 2023, YouTube video, approximately 14:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leC2v3fWpLc.
[xix] Ruslan Gabbasov, YouTube address, accessed June 2026, opening remarks (“hörmätle millättäştär”), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDnvqbGL5hw.
