Ufa, with its significant Bashkir population, was one of three ARA districts inhabited largely by Muslims.
Bashkir is spoken principally in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan.
Initially, Bashkirs sought to realize their aspirations by turning to the Whites, but it was not long before reform-minded Muslims and political radicals turned to the communists.
While Felix Cheremnykh is an ethnic Russian, Renat Udarov and Marat Mimlikeev seem to be ethnic Tatars or Bashkirs .
He attracted a following of peasants, Old Believers, Ural mineworkers, and non-Russians such as Bashkirs and Kalmyks.
Today, Islam is the second largest religion, after Russian Orthodoxy, with at least 19 million practitioners, and among ethnic minorities most Tatars, Bashkirs , Kazakhs, Chechens, and Avars, are Sunni Muslim.
A Rosneft spokesman did not deny the company was interested in the Bashkir assets, the paper said.
Ufa, the capital of the Bashkir republic, became the wartime seat of the Soviet Ukrainian government.
The paper cited a source close to the Bashkir leadership as saying that Kremlin chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev had organized the Sistema deal.
Moscow deliberately employed non-Russian troops to fight in Central Asia - Tatar, Bashkir , Kazakh, Uzbek and Turkmen detachments were pitted against the anti-Bolshevik invaders.
