Bashkir activist’s jailing: is Kremlin afraid of ethnic separatism? 

The jailing of a rights activist by a court in Russia’s Bashkortostan region on Wednesday triggered protests, which escalated into clashes with riot police. 

Fail Alsynov was sentenced to four years in a penal colony on charges of inciting ethnic hatred by allegedly insulting Central Asian migrants by calling them ‘black people’.  

Riot police used tear gas and batons to suppress the protests outside the court building in Baymak, which is close to the Kazakh border. Dozens of protesters were reportedly injured and detained. 

Local authorities said they had opened criminal cases against some of the protesters on charges of mass rioting. 

A few thousand of Alsynov’s supporters have defied temperatures of around –20C to protest in the days leading up to his sentencing. 

Alsynov is accused of insulting labour migrants, most of whom come from Central Asia, at a demonstration against plans to mine for gold by calling them ‘black people’.  

“Armenians will go to their own homeland, ‘qara halyk’ [black people in Bashkir] will go to theirs, Russians to their Ryazan [city], Tatars – to their Tatarstan. We [Bashkirs] cannot go anywhere, we have no other home, our home is here,” he said in the remarks in question. 

Russians use the word ‘black’ as a derogatory term for Central Asians and Caucasians. 

But, in Turkic languages, to which the Bashkir language belongs, ‘black’ is used to describe ordinary, or ‘real’ people. It carries no offensive or derogatory connotation. 

Alsynov’s supporters say his prosecution is revenge for his activism in preventing soda mining in a place that the Bashkirs consider sacred. 

However, Alsynov is also known for criticising the Russian government’s mobilisation of Bashkirs for the war in Ukraine as «genocide». 

He also led the Bashkort movement that fought for preserving the Bashkirs’ ethnic identity before it was banned as extremist in 2020. 

Pro-government media outlets have portrayed the protests in support of Alsynov as part of a Ukrainian-Western plot to stir up ethnic discord in Russia. 

Bashkiria Online Telegram channel described Alsynov as “a Nazi-extremist”, and said those behind the alleged plot were using “the same information techniques as last year in Dagestan, where khokhly [derogatory term for Ukrainians] managed to remotely trigger protests there”.  

“Bashkort [movement] needs to be maximally purged of Nazis, who are propagating Bashkiria’s separation from Russia and making it part of some ‘Turkic world’.  

“We have to act mercilessly and decisively against that vermin. We have to go after all of Alsynov’s associates!” it said. 

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