Cultural and Political Alliances
Bashkortostan, a “republic” or province of the Russian Federation, is located between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, just north of Kazakhstan. A million Bashkirs, a Turkic-language speaking group, live in the region, alongside Tatars (whose language Tatar is closely related to the Bashkir language) and ethnic Russians.
I’ve been learning a lot about this region because of one Der Nister friend who comes from there. She is part of an international committee of Bashkirs who advocate for an independent Bashkortostan, freeing of political prisoners, and promotion of Bashkir language and culture — all of which came to the fore with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian government is well known for disproportionately drafting ethnic minorities and sending them to the front lines, and young Bashkirs are certainly not exempted from this.
Part of the Russian pressure on its republic is its oppressive behavior towards the Bashkir language and culture. This is what makes a recent #1 hit in Russia and chart topper in much of that region of the world so surprising:
At a time period when Russian nationalism is hitting new heights, a song like this should not have swept Russia with the ferocity it has. But this isn’t the first time music from Bashkortostan took over Russian charts: the half-Jewish half-Bashkir rapper Morgenshtern, who was exiled from Russia for promoting peace with Ukraine, was once considered far and away the most popular rapper in Russia.
I’ve been monitoring online reactions to Homay, a song about the pre-Islamic myths of the Bashkir people and the purity of Bashkir girls.
Here’s an excerpt of the lyrics:
Тамырҙарым минең һорай
Йәнем дә, ҡаным да һорай
Боронғо хәтер һорай
Кем була ул Һомай?
Һомайҙың әсәһе лә Ҡояш
Йәншишмәлә индергән
Атаһы уның Самрау
Яҡшыға күндергән
My roots ask
My soul and my blood ask
The ancient historical memory asks
Who is Homay?
Homay's mother The Sun
Bathed her in the spring of living water
Her father Samrau
Instilled kindness in her
While the reactions generally amount to “this is a great song,” there are different takes on what the song means to people. I would classify them as follows:
1. Bashkirs who are proud of the song’s success, and the promotion of the Bashkir language and culture that was for so long sidelined.
2. Russians who don’t understand why they are attracted to the song, but happy to get into it.
3. Russians who are proud of one of Russia’s republics, Baskortostan.
4. Turks who are excited that their ethnic/linguistic Turan/Turkic brethren have come up with a hit, and cover the song in Turkish as well as subtitle it in Turkish.
5. Tatars who cover the song in Tatar, to the moderate annoyance of Bashkirs.
6. Kazakhs who cover the song in Kazakh.
These reactions, in certain ways, demonstrate the different cultural universes that Bashkirs inhabit. While our friend would rather Bashkirs stick to an independent conception of self, she related to me that she finds it disturbing that other Bashkir independence activists gravitate to Turanism, or the idea of pan-Turkic nationalism, because of that ideology’s recent entanglement with political Islam, among other reasons.
Bashkirs, being a small group with only a million people — in contrast with Tatars, who as the result of being less adversarial with the Imperial Russian government, now greatly outnumber Bashkirs — cannot easily stand alone. While there are massive oil reserves in the region, and an independent Bashkortostan could thrive economically if their natural resources weren’t sent off to Moscow, that day is not now. Stuck between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan (though not quite reaching Kazakhstan), Bashkir political independence leaders feel the pull of reaching out to Russia’s historical rivals in Turkey as well as countries pulling out of the Russian orbit like Kazakhstan. The EU, while capable of arming the Bashkir legion fighting for Ukraine, doesn't have the ability to have much influence in the region.
How Bashkirs define themselves culturally is part of the political puzzle. Given their varied history,one political path that the Bashkirs might take would be to pull into the orbit of pan-Turanism to counter pan-Sovietism, which was developed as an idea to liberate Turkic peoples from Russian influence.
A brief history of Turanism.
French-Jewish historian and traveller David Leon Cahun wrote an influential book in 1890 about the History of Asia, which Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk voraciously read. In it, the idea that Turkic peoples were ethnically connected was built, and Turanist intellectual father Ziya Gökalp wrote the seminal books celebrating the purity and goodness of Turkic peoples. He made the claim that uniting the lands where Turkic peoples live is ultimately the goal of the Turkish state. This was modelled after other pan-nationalist movements of the time, like pan-Slavism.
These ideas evolved into the Nationalist Party (MHP) and their paramilitary group the Gray Wolves, who are understood to be a terrorist organization and viciously anti-Kurdish as a result of the hundreds of politically-motivated murders they committed in the early 70s. Their founder, Alparslan Türkeş, was previously imprisoned by the Turkish government as part of diplomatic maneuverings to improve Soviet-Turkish relations.
The core of the political issue of Turanism is that groups that are identified as Turkic live in the former Soviet Union and China. Part of the reasons for the oppression and imprisonment of the Uyghurs in China, for example, is that the Turkistan Islamic Party, a nationalist and Islamist paramilitary organization, had committed many attacks in China and later joined Islamist militant groups the world over. Of course, the Chinese government did not bother to distinguish between them and the more secular and peaceful East Turkestan groups. In either case, Turanism is identified as an active threat to imperial systems in Central Asia.
An odd aspect of this is the simultaneous rejection and embrace of Islam. Turanism has strains in it that praise pre-Islamic Tengrism (as in the song above) and other strains that champion Turkic people as better Muslims than anyone else. This is, in either case, known to publicly be a contradictory idea that people no less than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a reader of Gökalp’s and promoter of political Islam, tries to resolve as part of his political moves. (Gökalp himself believed in this synthesis.)
Cultural identification is much more ambiguous than first meets the eye. Cultural groupings that seem obvious now fall apart under closer examination.
For example, it may be reasonable to say that Turkey, which is made of large groups of ethnically Balkan people who call themselves Turks, should create a greater Yugoslavia. But that would exacerbate conflict in the Balkans, which have fallen apart from its days as Yugoslavia — Turkey would immediately be seen as assisting its co-religionists in Bosnia at the expense of peoples who were once oppressed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Serbia and Croatia.
Turkey is exploring other axis’ of cultural identification. The Turanist identity puts it at odds with Arabs, Kurds and Armenians — not to mention Russia, but unites it with Azerbaijan and Central Asia. The Islamist identity unites it with Arabs and Kurds, but makes the Central Asia connection a little bit more tenuous and puts them at odds with Europe…and there are many more.
A core geopolitical idea of Turkey is to maintain good relations with its neighbors. Constant political shifting due to the pressures of the Cold War really laid bare the hazy borderline that Turkish identity sits astride of. Cultural ties serve as a proxy for political relations, but if relations need to be balanced between different regions and you can’t maintain complete independence, you can’t define what Turkey actually is.
Culture being a proxy for politics is not unfamiliar to Jewish politics. One of the cousins of pan-Turanism is pan-Arabism — and its leading proponent was inspired by Gökalp himself. The constant struggle in Israeli-Arab relations is over how to define the identity of Jews from Arab countries - as Jews who happen to be from Arab countries or Jewish Arabs. Generally speaking, Jews from Arab or Islamic countries call themselves Mizrahi and usually find being called Arab a massive insult. In apologetics from Arab nations, Mizrahi Jews are called Arabs who fell for the sway of Zionism, not people who were oppressed and expelled due to a conflict they had no part in.
But in truth, as far as Arab identity goes, Jews from Arab countries would fit the bill as Arabs — Arab-speaking and culturally part of the same milieu. Religion was made a fault line that expanded into a deeper ethnicity and linguistic difference, all for political reasons: to create the state of Israel on a pan-Jewish and therefore non-Arab (and non-European) identity. This was done on the basis of a political problem that Jews were trying to solve in Europe: how to be safe and stable in a world where nationalist identities were not always inclusive of Jewish people, no matter where they were or with whom they identified themselves.
In my view, Jews from around the different parts of the world are distinctive from each other. Their presentation of their ethnicity and culture make it difficult for Jews to cross those communal lines. The diversity that arose throughout the diaspora is reflected in the ethnic and cultural divisions that have arisen in Israel, not to mention the conflict between Jewish communities in Israel and those around the world. That said, this isn’t an idea that is well received in the broader Jewish community. Doing so would not just undermine cultural identity but political identity.
But I believe we must examine the fungibility of cultural identity and its service of political alliances and aims.
In doing so, I want to suggest that my ideal of creating a Jewish Civilizational cultural ideal is politically rooted. I believe we are too weak to sustain internal Jewish division in countries where Jews are small, vulnerable minorities, and Israel is too politically weak in its alliances to go it alone in the long-run. Jewish Civilization is the idea that Jewish cultural existences are variants of each other, each to be respected in a communion, but not homogenizations of each other. American Jewish, Yiddishist(small but growing!), Israeli, pan-Mizrahi, Russian, etc. are communities and ideas and languages that are modern in their creation, but real and need to be defined in ways that are most current politically, not culturally or religiously rooted.
And I want to look at this pan-national model in the context of globalization.
Globalization is a three-step force, once reserved to empires and their mercantile companies alone, but now a force seemingly compelled by Western domination of technology.
1. Trade liberalization - a force that can be defined in right and left wing terms. It creates a massive wealth gap as the world's resources are mined by the cheapest labor and produced in the cheapest countries, taking away domestic labor in more advanced countries. It raises, ultimately, the living standards of those in poorer countries, though not without severe human rights abuses in the process, much like the labor movements struggles in America in the early 20th century. Goods become vastly cheaper, but the money needed to spend on necessities becomes higher as homes become investment vehicles for those on the narrower winning end of this economic exchange.
2. Cultural homogenization - a force that can override the cultural concerns of local populations while at the same time promote human rights to accommodate the needs of the wealthier classes that benefit from economic liberalization. We find the easily-exploited divide between the poor “conservatives” and wealthy “liberals” over human rights concerning gender and sexuality, as an example. Here we can see that, as Saudi Arabia becomes integrated in the global economy, the rights of women dramatically skyrocket.
3. Political change, which can take the benefits from cultural homogenization and presents them as either dangerous or positive — and depending on the answer, determines the degree of democratic inclination of the country and the nature of its alliances.
Globalization, while ultimately being progressive, is also regressive by nature. It takes away work and self-worth from so many people, and erases uniquenesses in cultural experiences. It is the force that Donald Trump, who took advantage of globalization as a businessman, comes to fight by trying to reverse the course of the cultural and political change by undoing the economic one.
It is too late for him though. Economic liberalization is a norm — few would think to buy a Chevy today at any cost because it is American. And I don’t think, even though some may claim otherwise, that it is possible to roll back certain kinds of acceptance of women and queer people, of non-traditional families, etc., or the idea of easy and frequent international travel, communication and friendship.
Nonetheless, as human beings, we have to be mindful about diving into global homogeneity because of its existential threat to our identity and sense of self. This is why culturally-varied products and projects of all kinds have been thriving, especially among those who are most exposed to this odd black hole.
Hence the rise of a Bashkir Tengrist-themed pop song in the heart of ultra-nationalist Christian Russia.
A Jewish Civilizational idea accomplishes both the maintenance of independent, politically useful identities within a larger whole and establishes boundaries against the excesses and power of both all-consuming cultural homogeneity and antagonism against Jews. It’s an idea that is political in motivation, but cultural in expression — an idea I am watching come to life at Der Nister.
