Bash of Bashkiria – Newspaper Kommersant No. 4 (7449) dated 01/12/2023

On Wednesday, the first president of Bashkiria, Murtaza Rakhimov, who led the republic for 20 years, passed away. Under his leadership, in the 1990s, Bashkiria, following Tatarstan, became one of the main beneficiaries of the “parade of sovereignties”, but subsequently – and also thanks to Mr. Rakhimov – turned into a reliable political and electoral support of the federal government.

Murtaza Rakhimov died on January 11 in Ufa after a long illness at the age of 89. “Murtaza Gubaidullovich is gone. We bow our heads before the great son of the Bashkir people, who devoted himself entirely to serving the republic and Russia, ”wrote the current head of Bashkiria, Radiy Khabirov, on his Telegram channel.

Prior to his entry into “big politics”, which was obviously facilitated by perestroika, Mr. Rakhimov worked for almost 35 years at the Ufa Oil Refinery named after the XXII Congress of the CPSU, where he went from a simple operator to the director of an enterprise. In the spring of 1990, he was elected chairman of the Supreme Council of Bashkiria and held this post until 1993. It was during this period (in October 1990) that the Declaration on State Sovereignty of the Bashkir ASSR was adopted, which, in fact, followed from the position of the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR and the future President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, voiced by him in the legendary phrase: “Take so much sovereignty, how much you can swallow.

However, unlike Tatarstan, which in 1992 refused to sign the Federal Treaty, seeking a special status in relations with the federal center, Bashkiria approved this document. But soon after the first direct elections of the Bashkir president, in which 63% of voters voted for Murtaza Rakhimov on December 12, 1993, Ufa, following Kazan, also legalized its special relations with the federal center, signing on August 3, 1994 an agreement on the delimitation of jurisdiction and mutual delegation of powers between the state authorities of the Russian Federation and Bashkiria.

After that, Mr. Rakhimov was re-elected twice more to the post of president of the republic in direct elections (in 1998 he received 70.2% of the vote, and in 2003 – 78%), and at the federal level gained fame as a regional leader quite loyal to Moscow. This was confirmed, for example, by his inclusion in the political council of the pro-Kremlin movement Our Home is Russia, headed by the then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (in the 1995 State Duma elections, it acted as the ruling party). True, on the eve of the 1999 Duma elections, Murtaza Rakhimov joined the Fatherland gubernatorial bloc organized by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, which opposed the pro-Kremlin Unity movement. But after the failure of the Luzhkovites, who lost in the 1999 elections to both Unity and the Communist Party, the head of Bashkiria, along with other leaders of the Fatherland, joined the winners, becoming a co-founder of the United Russia party.

In 2006, after the abolition of direct elections of the heads of Russian regions, Mr. Rakhimov was approved for a new five-year term on the proposal of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but in July 2010, already under President Dmitry Medvedev, he announced his early resignation. After that, Murtaza Rakhimov headed the board of the Ural Charitable Foundation, which controlled the proceeds from the sale of Bashneft, Ufa refineries and Bashkirnefteprodukt, and also periodically spoke out on current political issues. But his statements did not produce much effect on the current policy of the republican authorities.

Dmitry Kamyshev