Babich, Shaikhzada Mukhametzakirovich

Born Jan. 2 (14), 1895, in the village of Asianovo, Birsk District, Ufa Province; died Mar. 28, 1919. Bashkir and Tatar poet; one of the founders of Bashkir national literature. Born into the family of a mullah.

Babich graduated from the Galiia madrasah in Ufa. He went through a period of ideological waywardness of a bourgeois-nationalist character, which he later overcame. He saw the poet’s calling as serving the interests of the toiling masses (the poem “For the People,” 1914) and called for a struggle for social ideals (“Spend Your Short Life in the Struggle,” 1915; published 1922). Babich exalted the working class that had risen up against autocracy (“Long Live the Workers!,” 1917) and castigated traitors (“To the Socialist Traitors”). In his “Address to the Bashkir People in Verse” (1919), Babich called for the defeat of the enemies of revolution.