Protests Are Growing in Russia's Bashkorto-whatever Region

Don't get too excited, nothing will come of them

Courtesy of CNN

It’s called Bashkortostan. They have made throwing snowballs at the police their form of protest. Snowballs, when packed hard and melted a bit, can mess you up, as anyone who has ever been hit can attest. 

If you are in the business of being professionally obsessed with Russia, you call it “one of the ‘stans.’” The “stans,” which are culturally and linguistically similar, are Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tadjikistan, Tatarstan, Dagestan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bashkortostan, and more. There are many stans, and some are really little more than dialects of one of the more major stans like those listed. 

Bashkortostan, a republic within Russia, making it like a state in the U.S., has a population of four million. Most Russians would struggle to identify Bashkortostan on the map. Significant protests have recently kicked off in the little-known city of Baimak. Fail (pronounced Fa-Eel) Alsynov, a 37-year-old activist and Bashkir patriot, was arrested by the local authorities on made-up charges calling him a racist. He used a term in the Bashkir language, “qara halyq,” which means “black people” but is understood by speakers of Bashkir as “ordinary people.” 

Alsynov was protesting about how the Russian army was destroying the Bashkir culture because so many of the “ordinary people” from his country are being sent to die in Ukraine. There has been a disproportionate number of Bashkir men sent off to fight the Kremlin’s war of genocide. 

The Kremlin appreciates that in terms of numbers, disgruntled residents of Bashkortostan will never equal mass protests the size of the ones seen in Moscow in 2012 when it was estimated over 100,000 Russians came out to protest against Putin. Protests as recent as January 23rd, 2020, saw over 200,000 Russians nationwide hit the streets in all major cities (the 23rd of each month used to be considered the protest day because the 23rd article of the Russian constitution permits the right of free assembly). Thanks to the generational poverty in Bashkortostan, the Kremlin looks at the war as a jobs program for the unemployed but proud men. Russia has millions of poor, proud ethnic minorities who can be sent off to die for the “Fatherland.” 

Alsynov disagrees; the Kremlin does not like this, so it went after him. There are also significant chalk mines on cherished lands in Bashkortostan, and the Bashkir people protect them as they view them as part of their cultural identity. The Russian government and sending the men off to fight have been aggressively trying to mine the chalk despite an agreement in 2020 that it wouldn’t.

Alsynov was arrested, and the protests have since spread from Baimak to Ufa, the republic’s capital and a major Russian city. However, the “violence” has not spread to Ufa to date. Videos show the riot police frantically jumping into their vehicles in Baimak and racing out of the area of the thousands of protestors. Yes, if you hate Putin and regard him and everyone around him as criminals who belong in prison, then these images are heartening. 

There is only one thing. Nothing will come of them. These disturbances are little more the zinging-snap heard on summer nights when a mosquito loses its way and flies into the electric zapper — “Ah ha, there are out there. Good thing we got the zapper and spray.” Mosquitoes do not often overwhelm people in modern life.

The reason these protests will amount to nothing and the reason that the gleeful cheers of Russian watchers that the “End is near” are sadly naive is because 90 percent of Russian people have no idea who a “Bashkir” person is. They couldn’t find it on a map, and if you don’t know a people, it is really hard to find a common cause with them. 

Most Russians probably have Bashkir people in their lives. They quietly chip the snow off the sidewalks and remove the trash from office buildings. Russians regard these proud but economically displaced people as “below them.” In Russian, the Bashkir are considered “Blacks (cherniye).” Black has little to do with the color of their skin, but rather just their place in society. “Black” means they come from cultures that are considered inferior to Russian culture. It means they come from areas where the modernizing effects of the Soviet culture never replaced national traditions.

The protests of Bashkortostan will continue for a while and could worsen. Bashkir soldiers have recorded ominous warnings on YouTube, promising to return and wage war against Russia if the oppression of “our mothers and wives” does not stop — take note, “mothers and wives.” For these men, there is little more sacred than the honor of these two women. 

Hotly proud people like in many of the stans, and unlike the cowardly and ball-less Russian men around them, men who would never think to defend the honor of their families, these men will seek revenge and will wage war with Russia. 

Sadly, though, there just aren’t enough of them to overcome the millions of cowards making up the Russian police forces and army.