Islam, Estate Status, and Russian Orthodox Authority in Bashkiria, 1735–1917

This paper addresses interrelations of Islam, Russian Orthodoxy, and imperial authority in Bashkiria, an overwhelmingly Muslim region about the size of Colorado located in and just west of the Ural Mountains.  Bashkiria takes its name from the semi-nomadic, Muslim Bashkirs who controlled most of the region’s land.  Beginning in 1735, the tsar’s forces and Bashkiria’s population waged five years of war, and violent unrest affected the region about every twenty years until the 1780s.  From then until 1917, inter-communal and inter-ethnic violence was infrequent and of low intensity until the pan-Eurasian violence of 1914-1921 came to the region.   This paper will examine how imperial officials used categories of religious confession and estate status to build Russian Orthodox authority among a non-Russian population.  Although imperial officials used missionary activity and, at times, force in an effort to ensure the tsar’s rule, I will argue that the state’s recognition of Muslim elites and granting them status in the imperial system was crucial to making imperial rule of the region generally stable over its final 150 years.  With the participation of Muslim religious elites, the imperial officials built tsarist authority into Islamic communities through the creation of the Orenburg Muslim Ecclesiastical Assembly.  The regime’s recognition of privileged status for Muslims in the form of noble or Bashkir status has been little-studied, and yet was crucial to the legitimation of the imperial regime.  The declining influence of Muslim nobles and Bashkirs after 1905 resulted in the waning of imperial authority among the Muslims of Bashkiria