Abstract:

The Bashkir Turks, who had been under the rule of the Russian Empire since the mid-16th century, began to experience a national awakening with the constitutional monarchy rule adopted after the 1905 revolution. In late 1915, Zeki Velidi Togan, who started his political life by being elected as the Ufa representative to the Muslim Franchise in the Duma, thought that the issue of minorities, who constituted the majority of the population in the Russian Empire, would end with the idea of a federal structure based on land. In line with this view, Togan favored the idea that the intellectuals of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and the peoples that made up the empire should determine their own destiny, and especially believed that the future of the Bashkirs was to act in common with the Kazakh Turks. While the Bolshevik revolution caused by the democratic popular movements that took place in the last periods of the Tsarist regime opened a new era, this process was seen as a light of freedom by the majority of the peoples that made up the Empire, including the Bashkirs. The intellectuals of the Turkic World, especially Togan, who accepted the idea of self-determination of the future of their own people, despite the opposition of the Bolsheviks, did not hesitate to start laying the foundations of an independent life in their countries and organized a number of national and local congresses in order to realize this. In parallel with these developments, the Bashkir Turks in the Idyl-Ural tribes also entered into a struggle for independence and declared the Mukhtar Bashkir Republic on November 29, 1917 under the leadership of Togan, one of the important figures of the Muslims of Russia. When the Mukhtar Bashkir Republic was not approved by the Russians and subsequently disbanded by the military forces, the Mukhtar Bashkortostan Republic was included in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic as a result of the first official agreement with the Bolsheviks on March 23, 1919. In this article, in addition to the studies carried out so far, in the light of Togan's memoirs and information obtained from contemporary sources, the independence struggles of the Bashkirs against the Russians and the formation process of the Bashkir Mukhtar Republic have been analyzed and contributed to the literature.

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