Russia’s Ethnic Minorities and the Shrinking Scope for Activism

For a few days in mid-January 2024, a small town in the south of Bashkortostan, one of the Russian Federation’s national republics, became the site of the largest protests since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In spite of the cold, around 5,000 people gathered in the snow-covered town of Baymak to protest the conviction of local activist Fail Alsynov, an ethnic Bashkir. In the spring of the previous year, he had made a speech during a protest against a gold-mining project in a neighbouring village and now stood accused of inciting ethnic hatred. At the Baymak courthouse, Alsynov was sentenced to four years in prison. The police dispersed the crowd outside using teargas and arrested 76 protesters.

According to the Russian NGO OVD-Info, most criminal prosecutions in the Russian Federation in 2024 were initiated in Bashkortostan and were related to the ‘Baymak case’. This is part of a larger trend to criminalise even the mildest forms of public protest based on Articles 205.2 (‘Incitement to carry out terrorist activities’) and 212 (‘Participation in mass riots’) of the Russian Criminal Code. The growing repressions in Russia seem to leave little room for any critical opinions and views at odds with the Kremlin. Yet in Bashkortostan, the traditional homeland of the Bashkirs, the convictions also have a strong ethnic dimension.

The multi-ethnic state?

Russia is home to considerable ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. According to the most recent census in 2021, ethnic Russians constitute 71 per cent of the population, with Tatars, Chechens and Bashkirs forming sizeable Muslim minorities. Critics speculate that the Russian state manipulates population statistics to understate the number of people from ethnic minorities, thus making them seem insignificant in comparison with ethnic Russians.

In the religious sphere, non-Orthodox religious communities are acknowledged to a certain degree. Apart from Orthodox Christianity, three other denominations – Islam, Buddhism and Judaism – are recognised as ‘traditional’ for Russian society. The so-called muftiates, representative bodies of the Muslim communities, are perceived to be completely loyal to the Russian regime. State-funded Muslim elites have demonstrated their close relations not only with the state but also with the Russian Orthodox Church and have spoken out in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Uniformity rather than diversity

In today’s Russia, a new national identity centred on the country’s Slavic heritage and affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church obscures the role of ethnic and religious minority groups in Russian history and their contributions to a shared culture. In history books and exhibitions, they are often rendered invisible in a process of ‘whitewashing’. A case in point is the exhibition ‘Russia, My History’, which was held in various Russian cities and represents Russia as a state devoid of ethnic or religious diversity. On official occasions, the authorities present a façade of cultural diversity and equality, but behind that there is a tendency towards uniformity and unequal relations between the centre and the national republics.

Russian legislation, which had until 2010 supported the development of regional and national cultures and languages, is nowadays more restrictive towards speakers of non-Russian languages. A homogenising language ideology prevails, particularly in education and the media. Under a new federal law ‘On Education in the Russian Federation’, the teaching of the national languages of the republics is no longer compulsory at schools and should not be to the detriment of the teaching and study of Russian. In schools where it still takes place, instruction in the languages of the national republics has been reduced to two hours per week. And in many regions, there are no public kindergartens or preschools where children are educated in their mother tongue.

Furthermore, non-Russian parents now have the option of registering Russian as their children’s mother tongue. This means that the official number of speakers of other languages will steadily decrease, leading to a structural dismantling of bilingualism. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, legislative changes associated with the official monolingual policy provoked numerous protests, particularly in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Subsequent amendments to the constitution in 2020 declared Russian to be the language of the ‘state-forming nation’, and amendments to the law ‘On the State Language’ in 2022 emphasise the unifying role of the Russian language in a multi-ethnic state.

From political activism to cultural expression

Alsynov became known and widely respected among his fellow Bashkirs as a founder of the group Bashkort, which campaigned to protect the environment in the region and to preserve the Bashkir language and culture. Other demands linked more explicitly to ethnic minority rights – e.g. a call to keep natural resource revenues within the republic – led to Bashkort being declared an extremist organisation by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation and in effect banned in 2020.

More generally, we observe a gradual shift in ethnic minority politics in Russia. For fear of being stigmatised as opponents of the regime and convicted as ‘extremists’ and ‘separatists’, some ethnic minority activists are abandoning political action in the classical sense in favour of expressions of cultural identity. They are joining forces with other proponents of ethnic minority culture who have always been more inclined towards what may be called decolonisation by other means. By presenting a different view of particular places or entire regions, activists and ordinary citizens in the multi-ethnic Volga-Ural region undermine dominant narratives that suggest they are peripheral and therefore less important than Moscow or St. Petersburg.

In 2018 and 2020, Alsynov and other representatives of the local population were involved in protests to protect the Shihan Hills Toratau and Kushtau in Bashkortostan from being demolished by a company intent on mining limestone in the area. With their interpretations of the hills, the protesters renegotiated the meaning of this site as cultural heritage. From insignificant structures in the landscape measured solely in terms of financial profits, the hills became sacred sites and symbols of a shared Bashkir identity. The protesters were able to drive away the mining company from Toratau and Kushtau, and so far no one has dared to lay a finger on the Shihan Hills again. A group of entrepreneurs has even decided to establish a national park by the name of ‘Geopark Toratau’ that should help to secure the protected status of the Shihan Hills now and in the future.

Given the current threat of severe repressions, local activists and volunteers avoid most political issues and have become more careful in how they address environmental problems. Their demands are now multi-layered and their politics of negotiation ‘softer’ in form and expression, but they can still be effective in fostering other forms of belonging.

Yasin Chulmani is a pseudonym. The author's name is known to the editorial team.

Tsypylma Darieva is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at ZOiS, where she heads the Migration and Diversity research cluster.