Bashkir people

“ The southern portion of the Altaic mountains has long been inhabited by the Bashkirs, a race considerably mixed with Mongolic blood, savage and ignorant, subjects of Russia, and Mohammedans by faith. Their land is divided into four Roads, called the Roads of Siberia, of Kasan, of Nogai, and of Osa, a place on the Kama. Among the Bashkirs, and in villages [pg 304] near Ufa, is now settled a Turkish tribe, the Mescheräks who formerly lived near the Volga.
The tribes near the Lake of Aral are called Kara-Kalpak. They are subject partly to Russia, partly to the Khans of Khiva. ”

“ By mode of life the Bashkirs are divided into settled and nomadic. The former are engaged in agriculture, cattle-rearing and bee-keeping, and live without want. The nomadic portion is subdivided, according to the districts in which they wander, into those of the mountains and those of the steppes. ”

“ The Bashkirs are usually very poor, and in winter live partly on a kind of gruel called yûryu, and badly prepared cheese named skûrt. 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. ”

“ Touching the Bashkirs, another irregular and half-savage militia, serving to swell the ranks of Russia's enormous army, Mr Erman, who made some stay at Yekaterinburg, the northern limit of their residence, gives curious particulars. They are the only aboriginal Siberian tribe whose mode of life regularly alternates from the nomadic to the fixed. Their winters are passed in permanent villages of wooden huts, erected usually upon the skirt of a forest. But when spring approaches, they collect their flocks and herds, strap hair tent-cloths upon their saddles, and are off to the plains. ”

“ They were then settled east of the old Bulgarian kingdom, the capital of which, the ancient Bolgari, on the left of the Volga, may still be traced in the ruins of Spask. If these Pascatir—the portion of the Ugric tribes that remained east of the Volga—are identical with the [pg 321] Bashkir, as Klaproth supposes, it would follow that, in later times, they gave up their language, for the present Bashkir no longer speak a Hungarian, but a Turkic, dialect. ”

“ When they clamour for the necessity of a "popular," "all-national" Constituent Assembly, they do not consider the Soviets as all-national, because the Russian bourgeoisie is lacking to complete the full representation of the Russian people. ”

“ On the other hand, the competent people are keenly alive to the interests of their professions, and if we could organize our politics, as the Russians have sought to organize theirs, on the basis of occupations, that is, in soviets, it might be possible to awaken in our intelligenzia a more than dilettante and sporting interest in local politics and the problems of the local community. ”

“ Bakunin's hope is therefore fixed upon the spirit of revolution, which will speedily manifest itself and will soon hold its assize. On all hands, and especially in France and England, socialistic—religious unions are coming into being. The people, whose rights are recognised in theory, but who by birth and circumstance are condemned to poverty and ignorance, and therewith also to practical slavery, the people, comprising the great majority of mankind, begin to number the thin ranks of their enemies and to demand the realisation of the rights which have already been theoretically conceded. ”

“ Pupils were at first attracted by its novelty, but decamped the moment they felt they had learnt enough, and the attempt to found fourteen establishments of the same sort in other places failed for want of public support, whereupon Tolstoi abandoned the scheme altogether, and buried himself in the steppes inhabited by the nomadic Bashkirs, in order to "breathe fresh air, drink kumiss, and live the healthy, natural life of the brute beasts." To this residence among the Bashkirs we are indebted for that piercingly vivid story: "How much land does a man want?" ”

“ Herzen agrees with Bakunin as to the goal, which is the transformation of the bourgeois state into a folk-state, but he considers that the revolutionaries are mistaken in their tactics. The folk, the entire people, the masses, cannot be educated for the folk-state by a coup d'état or by a coup de tête. Property, the family, the church, and the state have been and still are means for the education of mankind towards freedom—freedom in rationality. ”

“ It is not the first time thou playest the rebel, or thy head would not be so well shaven. Come nearer; speak; who sent thee?"
The old Bashkir remained silent and looked at the commandant with a vacant stare.
"Why dost thou not speak?" continued Ivan Kouzmitch. "Dost thou not understand Russian? Youlaï, ask him in your language, who sent him into our fortress?"
Youlaï repeated the question in Tartar. But the Bashkir looked at him with the same expression, not saying a word in reply.
"Yakshee!" [3] said the commandant. "I shall make thee speak. ”

“ The government continues to exact taxes in the plundered districts, sends zaptiehs, or Turkish soldiers, to abide in the villages, and eat the people out of provisions until in some way they manage to secure the money. In the Bashkalla region many of the men find, on returning, that the government has taken possession of their property and refuses to restore it or allow them to remain in their old homes. ”

“ Ivan Ignatitch went to fetch the Bashkir, who was confined in the loft, under lock and key, and a few minutes afterwards he was led prisoner into the ante-room. The Commandant ordered the captive to be brought before him.—
The Bashkir stepped with difficulty across the threshold (for his feet were in fetters) and, taking off his high cap, remained standing near the door. I glanced at him and shuddered. Never shall I forget that man. He appeared to be about seventy years of age, and had neither nose nor ears. His head was shaved, and instead of a beard he had a few grey hairs upon his chin ”

“ Socially Bolshevik Russia, ten years after the Revolution, is a country where no man can enjoy political security or economic independence, where the hidden hand of the G.P.U. is always at work, terrorizing the people by sudden night searches, arrests for no known cause, secret denunciation for alleged counter-revolution out of personal revenge, imprisonment without hearing or trial, and year-long exile to the frozen North of Siberia or the arid wastes of Western Asia. ”

“ Thus, long before the days of Peter, the German Sloboda of Moscow came into existence. Nevertheless, the entry of foreigners into Muscovite Russia seems to have been comparatively difficult when we remember that there had been almost no obstacle to their influx into the petty principalities of earlier days.
During the sixteenth century, thoughtful Russians gave frank expression to the need for far-reaching reforms. Prince Kurbskii, with good reason denominated the first "westerner," was one of the earliest to give a clear demonstration of Moscow's poverty in point of morals and civilisation. ”

“ The Bolsheviks, albeit numbering less than five per cent of the population, have been able to seize and retain power in Russia because they were and are the only body of people in this vast spectacle of Russian ruin with a common faith and a common spirit. ”

“ This type of mind is far more common than is generally recognized; that is why so many people quite seriously believe that the Bolsheviki have really established in Russia a society which conforms to the generous ideals of social democracy. ”

“ Agriculture certainly requires less land than sheep-farming, but it requires very much more labour, and to hard work the Bashkirs were not accustomed. They could bear hardships and fatigues in the shape of long journeys on horseback, but the severe, monotonous labour of the plough and the sickle was not to their taste. At first, therefore, they adopted a compromise. They had a portion of their land tilled by Russian peasants, and ceded to these a part of the produce in return for the labour expended ”

“ All political activity is essentially bourgeois. Bakunin had an immoderate hatred of Bismarck, regarding Bismarckism as nothing but "militarism, police economics, and financial monopoly, united into a system." In agreement with Bismarck, Bakunin considered the Germans to be a state-loving race. In 1874 he declared that his hope was in the Slavs and the Latins, who were to react against pangermanism, not by the establishment of a great Slav state, but by the social revolution, which would bring into being a new, lawless, and therefore free world. ”

“ Soon unmistakable signs of trouble appeared in Russia, but the government was on the alert and took strong means of suppression. Nicholas I, the man with the iron will, had sent an average number of 9,000 persons annually to Siberia; this number under Alexander the Liberator increased to from 16,000 to 20,000. Bakunin urged his followers to "go among the people," and a host of young persons, male and female, many of them belonging to the wealthy classes, adopted the life of the moujik in the villages. ”

“ As often as the Bashkirs collected into 'globes' and 'turms' as their only means of meeting the long line of descending Chinese cavalry—so often did the Chinese governor of the fort pour in his exterminating broadside; until at length the lake at the lower end, became one vast seething cauldron of human bloodshed and carnage. The Chinese cavalry had reached the foot of the hills: the Bashkirs, attentive to their movements, had formed; skirmishes had been fought: and, with a quick sense that the contest was henceforwards rapidly becoming hopeless, the Bashkirs and Kirghises began to retire. ”

“ Bashkala, which will be found upon the map, is the seat of government for the district; and this place is inhabited mainly by Jews, who are, as always, the financiers and merchants of the land. It is a postal centre, principally remarkable for the fact that the post goes to that point from Van, for distribution to such centres as Julamerk, Neri, and Diza; but only strays on to them, when a zaptieh or policeman happens to be going in that direction. ”

“ Those, however, who desire to bring about revolution and to set the peasantry against the Emperor fight tooth and nail for the retention of this communism, as if it were a palladium. It is said to be a genuinely national and primitive Russian institution. In doing so, however, the gentlemen manifest gross ignorance. The common ownership of the land was formerly a traditional custom here, except in a few districts, as, for instance, in parts of Westphalia up to the Stein-Hardenberg legislation. A similar custom prevailed in France up to the First Revolution. ”

“ In this way tens of thousands of Russian villages have been, no doubt, managing their own petty business with reasonable amity and success for centuries, and the political philosophy of Russian writers like Bakunin and Prince Krapotkin, who have propagated anarchism in the west of Europe, is merely the naïve suggestion that the form of government which answers not intolerably for the few trivial concerns of a primitive Russian village would answer best for the whole complex business of a great developed modern society. ”

“ The Russians are apt to forget that their goal is not revolution, but democracy; and Russian revolutionism readily lapses into anarchism and nihilism. Bakunin was perfectly right in demanding a new ethic for Russia and for Europe, but he was unable to guide his own actions consistently in accordance with the doctrines of this new ethic. ”

“ As an anarchist, he cares nothing for the parliamentary institutions brought into being by the revolution, but he delights to note how the lower strata of the population, the peasantry no less than the urban proletariat, were won over to the revolution. Obviously, he is thinking of the possibility of an extensive peasant uprising in Russia, such a movement as that of which Bakunin had dreamed. ”

“ As the base of the government of Bokhara is the Koran, and the whole community are, or desire to be, considered spiritual, it will fully account for the exception in favour of the church. That engine and the state go heart in hand in Toorkistan, and give mutual support to each other. There is no shadow of popular government; but still, there is no evidence of discontent under such a system of rule, though people could not be more thoroughly enslaved than the Uzbeks. ”

“ Near their western frontier, it is true, they annually let patches of land to the Russian peasants for the purpose of raising crops; but these encroachments can never advance very far, for the greater part of their territory is unsuited to agriculture, on account of a large admixture of salt in the soil. This fact will have an important influence on their future. Unlike the Bashkirs, who possess good arable land, and are consequently on the road to become agriculturists, they will in all probability continue to live exclusively by their flocks and herds. ”

“ The cruel Bashkir was affected by the same misery, and manifested the same symptoms of his misery as the wretched Kalmuck; the murderer was oftentimes in the same frantic misery as his murdered victim—many indeed (an ordinary effect of thirst) in both nations had become lunatic—and in this state, whilst mere multitude and condensation of bodies alone opposed any check to the destroying scimitar and the trampling hoof, the lake was reached ”