Within today's Russian Federation, ethnic Bashkirs total less than two million, or barely thirty percent of the Autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan (Bashkiria), their ostensible homeland. Since the tenth century or so, they have identified mostly as Muslims, as have their close neighbors, the Volga Tatars, who have typically overshadowed them in the regional historiography they share. Never in their recorded history have the Bashkirs lived within a political organization of their own making; for that matter, since Ivan IV's conquest of the Volga region in the early 1560s, they have been subjects or citizens of one Russian state after another.
Adding to the latest scholarship on “Russia's Orient” from the fall of Kazan to the eve of the twentieth century, Charles Steinwedel has written a major study, the first in English, of the Bashkirs. By taking the long view, he seeks to unravel the ways by which this small population evolved under Russian rule, secured sometimes conflicting forms of identity (not least, acquiring estate status), engaged in often lengthy periods of dispute over land usage and ownership with Russian peers and authorities, found itself vacillating between marginality and fuller inclusion as loyal subjects, and yet, to a degree greater than any other Turco-Muslim community inhabiting the Russian Empire, increasingly formed a class of Russianized noble and/or military officer subalterns over the long nineteenth century. These are all part of the complex “local” story of the Bashkirs that Steinwedel weaves effectively through seven chapters in chronological order, but there is more to this heavily researched, deeply detailed, and theme-driven contribution to the flourishing “imperial turn” characterizing the recent historiography of Russia.
The “more” stems from Steinwedel's imaginative efforts to challenge certain enduring assumptions and methods that have often colored studies of Russia's long imperial history and imposed unwarranted analyses and conclusions on other ethnic groups and regions. On the one hand, he respects both the differences among Russia's many Turkic populations as much as he does the commonalities most if not all shared. Yet, he carefully avoids letting either override the other without cause, preferring to balance the purely local, that is, Bashkirs, against not only the neighboring Tatars, but against others more removed. For Steinwedel, although Bashkirs comprise a small population with their “own” history, understanding that history can be improved by situating it in larger contexts that are regional and national—the imperial Russian for starters, but also imperial Austrian, Ottoman, or Qing, with which comparisons can be quite informing.
On the other hand, Steinwedel insists that we not project upon all ethnic Turkic groups that which occurred in the history of one or another, as if a template produced all of their communal pasts. All too often, many aspects of Tatar history, for example, continue to be treated in just such a way, serving too frequently as the unquestioned handbook for that which happened elsewhere, in Crimea or Azerbaijan, as examples. “Elsewhere” may as well have been another part of the world, where the local turns out to be little related to anything remotely imperial in a general sense.
Moreover, Steinwedel reminds us that the imperial metropole never imposed consistent and enduring policies for any ethnic group. Rather, it engaged in repeated policy reassessments based upon changing times, the self-conscious reshaping of the empire's very identity, the perceived needs of the empire—at home and abroad—as viewed from the center, and even what other imperial systems practiced. More complicating is the remarkable extent to which the edicts from Moscow or St. Petersburg were modified or completely ignored by local officials, whether bureaucratic, military, or religious, ironically in the furtherance of stability.
If one imperial goal for the Bashkirs endured, it was the state's hunger, never fully satiated, for their loyalty and respect. Steinwedel locates loyalty at the core of policymakers' concerns, making the implicit case that it defined the meanderings through which generations of administrative organizers wandered in hopes of finally reaching their objective, even if they seemed to be in pursuit of other goals and felt no compunction at sacrificing everything else. Beyond loyalty, however, Steinwedel dismisses notions of empires as monolithic and unified; rather, as he presents it, the Bashkir case serves as a reminder that by their nature they are as manifold as the number of different communities they harbor and divided by unequal spaces of dialogue, each of which has its own unique voice.
