Bashkirs of Samara Transvolga Region: Inclusion into Russian Imperial Space in the 18th–19th Centuries

Abstract

This article focuses on the participation Bashkirs took in the development of Transvolga Region. The lands in Samara Province were the most western ones in Russia where the Bashkir population lived compactly. Historical studies of the region and the population living there between the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries refer to documents of central and local archives, manuscripts of the Russian National Library, etc. Critical analysis of sources and historiography and the application of modern techniques of local and ethnic history allows the author not only to solve research problems, but also look at the past while constructing historical and cultural memory. In the “imperial period”, the problem of correlating the ethnic and local history was complicated by the resettlement of peoples in different territories over considerable distances. The transformation of Volga Region into an internal Samara province of the empire, on the one hand, was due to the mobilisation of part of the estates of Bashkir lands, which occurred both forcibly and voluntarily. On the other hand, the loss by the Bashkirs of mostly remote and underutilised Transvolga estates was compensated for by receiving the status of a military service class, the presence of self-government, and the possibility of modernising the economy, culture, and life. As a result, the territories of the ethnos’s settlement were preserved and expanded, its undoubted numerical growth took place, amounting to more than a tenfold increase over two centuries nationwide. In the middle of the nineteenth century, about 50 thousand Bashkirs lived in Transvolga Region. The author provides a definition of the “imperial people” on the basis of active participation in the genesis of the empire, especially in the process of including “peripheral lands”. The Bashkirs are certainly an “imperial people” and Samara Transvolga Region is one of the “peripheral lands” included in the economic, political, and multicultural space of the Russian Empire, which was important for the further development of the entire multi-ethnic country.