https://doi.org/10.21697/bts.16336
The article examines the motif of personal freedom in The Farewell Letter to the Bashkir Nation (1923), written by Ahmet Zeki Velidi Togan – one of the most influential ideologists of the Bashkir national movement in the early twentieth century. Composed during the author’s forced exile, the letter functions as a political and spiritual testament in which personal freedom is presented as a fundamental category that transcends institutional forms of statehood. In Togan’s narrative, freedom becomes the foundation of the nation’s survival, linking individual, moral, religious, historical, and political dimensions. The article shows how Togan reinterprets his own life experiences – military defeats, the collapse of Bashkir autonomy, and emigration – as elements of the broader, universal cycle of rebirth characteristic of Turkic nations. Special attention is given to the role of religion as a source of spiritual resilience and as a sphere in which personal freedom may be endangered or preserved. The analysis demonstrates that, for Togan, personal freedom has an active and ethical nature: it constitutes the basis of historical responsibility, a tool of service to the nation, and a means of sustaining collective identity under conditions of external domination. As such, the letter stands as a unique testimony to the political thought of Turkic peoples and an example of literary and political testamentary writing.
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