BASHKIR REPUBLIC, an Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, created May 1919. Its boundaries are, north and east, the new area of Uralsk (centre Sverdlovsk, formerly Ekaterin burg and quite distinct from the Uralsk of the Southern Ural Prov ince) ; south-east and south-west, Orenburg; west, Samara and the Autonomous Tatar S.S.R. Area 157,00o sq.km. Pop., 2,691, 308, urban 165,755, rural 2,525,553. The area consists mainly of the densely wooded, craggy western slopes and foothills of the Ural mountains (3,9oo-5.23oft.) and the plateau (c. I,000ft.) ex tending south-west from them. The Byelaya, Ufa and Dema rivers and their tributaries have deeply entrenched the plateau, and the town of Ufa is situated in a plain where the entrenched valleys meet. A tongue of the Uralsk area extends south-westwards into the republic and includes the famous Zlatoust mining area : thus the lake and forest dotted canton of Argayash, pop. I oo.581, en tirely rural, is isolated from the rest of the republic. In the south west of the main area the forest is replaced by steppe, while in the west and north-west the forest only remains in patches. From the left bank of the Byelaya, south of its junction with the Ufa, there extends westward a broad belt of thick and fertile black earth soil; eastwards into the hill zone the black earth is degraded and liched and passes into a podzolised type in the forest zone (see RvssIA: Soils). The climate is severe; the rivers being frozen 158 days at Ufa, average temp. Jan. 5.5°, July 68°, and the rain fall is scanty and variable in the west and south-west especially.
During thy civil war following the 1917 revolution, Bashkiria suffered severely: some regions changed hands as many as 15 times and the tribesmen could not follow the course of events, since they were mainly illiterate. Following on the exhaustion of the people and the commandeering of their horses, carts, sheep, goats and food for the purposes of the conflicting armies, came the ter rible famine of 1921-2 2. The number of horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and goats was catastrophically diminished. The following figures illustrate the extent of the agricultural disaster :— The reorganization of agriculture is hampered by the lack of cattle and farm implements and also by the difficulty which the tribesmen find in adapting themselves to the Communist system of land tenure, which is radically different from their own. Many Bashkirs are still nomadic herders of cattle, sheep and horses. Dairying and beekeeping are extensively carried on and honey, wax, butter and eggs are produced. Kumiss (fermented mare's milk) sanatoria are established on the west bank of the Dema. The area of settled agriculture is slowly extending from the west. Bashkiria has much mineral wealth, including gold, copper and coal; iron and copper are smelted at Ufa, and copper in the south, especially at Zilair (formerly Preobrazhensk) . There are several timber mills and glass and crockery factories. Other industries are flour-milling, brandy distilling, the making of cloth, leather tan ning, paper-making, brick-making, etc. Ufa (q.v.), the adminis trative centre, has extensive printing works.
The Bashkirs formerly inhabited the Russian governments of Ufa, Orenburg, Perm and Samara and parts of Vyatka, espe cially on the slopes and confines of the Ural, and in the neigh bouring plains. They speak a Tatar language. The name Bashkir or Bash-kart (a mere nickname) appears for the first time in the beginning of the loth century in the writings of Ibn-Foslan, who, describing his travels among the Volga-Bulgarians, mentions the Bashkirs as a warlike and idolatrous race. Joannes de Plano Car pini (c. 1200-60) and William of Rubruquis (1220-93) are the first European writers to mention them. Hamy considered them to be intermediate between the Turki and the Mongol type. They were independent and troublesome to their neighbours, the Bulgarians and Pechenegs, until the Mongolian invasion of the mid-13th century. In 1556 they submitted to Russia and paid a fur tax, and Ufa was built to protect them against the Kirghiz. They rebelled in 1676 (under Seit), in 17o7 (under Aldar) and again from • In 1786 they were freed from taxes, and in 1798 an irregular army was formed among them. The problem of the Bashkir republic is complicated by the racial diversity of the population, which includes about 51% of Bashkirs and Tatars, 34% of Great Russians and small numbers of Little Russians, Marii, Chuvash, Mordva, White Russians, Votyaks, Latvians, Ger mans, Jews, Poles and Estonians. A further difficulty is that the town population is mainly Russian (77.7%). The general cultural level is low ; apart from the Russian element, the percentage of illiteracy is possibly in places as high as 9o%. The disorganiza tion wrought by civil war and famine is such that it is difficult to provide education. There is a lack of teachers, of school premises and of equipment, and only about 25% of non-Russian children of school age are receiving education. This illiteracy and the di versity of the spoken languages reacts unfavourably on the eco nomic and social life of the republic.
The Bashkirs are divided into settled and nomadic. The former are engaged in agriculture, cattle-rearing and beekeeping, and live without want. The nomadic portion is subdivided, ac cording to the districts in which they wander, into those of the mountains and those of the steppes. Almost their sole occupation is the rearing of cattle; and they attend to that in a very negligent manner, not collecting a sufficient store of winter fodder for all their herds, but allowing part of them to perish. The Bashkirs are usually very poor, and in winter live partly on a kind of gruel called yuryu, and badly prepared cheese named skurt. They are hospitable but suspicious, apt to plunder and to the last degree lazy. They have large heads, black hair, eyes narrow and flat, small foreheads, ears always sticking out and a swarthy skin. In general, they are strong and muscular, and able to endure all kinds of labour and privation. They profess Mohammedanism, but know little of its doctrines and know practically nothing of its scriptures.
See J. P. Carpini, Liber Tartarorum, edited under the title Relations des Mongols ou Tartares, by d'Avezac (Paris, 1838) ; Gulielmus de Rubruquis, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, translated by W. W. Rockhill (London, 'goo) ; Semenoff, Slovar Ross. Imp., s.v.; Frahn, "De Baskiris," in Mem. de l'Acad. de St.-Petersbourg (1822) ; Florinsky, in Westnik Evropi (1874) ; and Katarinskij, Dictionnaire Bashkir-Russe (Iwo). See also Soviet Union Year Book (1927).