Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Bashkirs are a Turkic ethnic group indigenous to Russia, primarily concentrated in Bashkortostan, a republic of the Russian Federation located on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Smaller communities live in Tatarstan, Perm Krai, and several oblasts including Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, and Tyumen, with sizeable minorities in Kazakhstan. The ethnic Bashkir population is estimated at around 2 million people.
The most widely accepted interpretation translates Bashqurt as "leading wolf," derived from bash meaning "head" or "leader" and qurt, an archaic word for wolf. This etymology connects to a founding legend in which a wolf guided the first seven Bashkir tribes from the Syr Darya valley to the Volga-Ural region. Other proposed meanings include "beekeeper," "distinct nation," "five oghurs," and a possible Iranian compound meaning "wolf-children" or "descendants of heroes."
Bashkirs began converting to Islam in the 10th century. The Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan, writing in 922, noted that Islam had already begun spreading among them. The final assertion of Islam among the Bashkirs occurred in the 1320s and 1330s during the Golden Horde period. Today Bashkirs are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi madhhab.
Ural Batyr is an epic poem that tells of the hero Ural, who defeats the forces of death, obtains "living water," and sacrifices himself by sprinkling it around him so that the withered earth turns green. His body becomes the Ural Mountains, which take their name from the poem. The work is rooted in pre-Islamic Bashkir Tengrist cosmology and depicts a three-tiered world of sky, earth, and underworld.
During Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Bashkir battalions fought alongside the Russian army and later served on the north German and Dutch plateau. Dutch and German populations called them "Northern Amurs" and regarded them as liberators from French occupation. The same regiments participated in the Battle of Paris and the subsequent coalition occupation of France.
On the 15th of November 1917, the Bashkir Regional Shuro led by Äxmätzäki Wälidi Tıwğan proclaimed the first independent Bashkir Republic, covering areas of the Orenburg, Perm, Samara, and Ufa provinces. This made Bashkortostan the first democratic Turkic republic in history, preceding Crimea, Idel-Ural, and Azerbaijan. The Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was subsequently formed in March 1919.