Tursanay Gubaidulina

Dr. Tursanay Yunusovna Gubaidulina (b. 13 December 1963, Farghona, Uzbekistan, USSR) is a Uralican scholar and politician, of Uzbek origin. Her husband, Major General Akhmetkhan Gubaidulin, is jointly second-in-command of the Uralican Army. Both are regularly elected members of the Uralican Tribal Council and vote in the Chuvash Tribe because of their Turkic stock.

Born Tursanay Ragibova, she grew up in a staunch Communist (but anti-Stalinist) household in the city of Farghona (then known as Ferghana). Her beauty was noticed early on, as she had barely entered her teens when she was already being asked to pose in pro-Communist posters to be posted throughout Uzbekistan. In reflecting on this, she admitted she wished she hadn't, because she did question the system a lot when she was a teenager, due to war in Afghanistan. This isn't to say she was a huge fan of the United States, either, as she actively criticised their foreign policy in her work.

She was 22 when Gorbachev came to power, and for her, glasnost provided an opportunity to study abroad. Although her marks were solid at home, she decided to spend two years in the United States (which was scandalous to her family at the time) to immerse herself in a different educational system. After a couple fruitful years of adult education, she applied to numerous universities worldwide, eventually being accepted at the University of Wolverhampton, where she did an Honours BA in Media and Cultural Studies.

By 1992, the year she graduated, the Soviet Union had dissolved and Uzbekistan was an independent nation, however the shift in the political climate had caused her parents to instead claim Russian citizenship and move to Bashkortostan, specifically Ufa. A more forgiving family invited Tursanay to live with them in Ufa, and she would do a Master of Arts in History at Bashkir State University, which she completed in 1996. It was here that she met her eventual husband, Akhmetkhan (a Bashkort from southern Perm Kray, which would later become Permski Rayon) who was also studying history.

After garnering a massive grant from Bilkent, a Turkish private university, Tursanay went to Istanbul and studied there for three more years, gaining a PhD in history. She was nicknamed "Doctor of Glamour" because of her good looks combined with her intelligence.

After returning to Bashkortostan in 1999, Gubaidulina was hired by Bashkir State University as a sessional instructor, and she received tenure at the same in 2005, but this was short-lived. The Cataclysm all but wiped out the campus (and most of the city to boot), and the Ragibov family was forced to flee the city because of the violence and anarchy in the area. Although they tried moving to Sterlitamak, that city was no better off. Akhmetkhan led them to his hometown of Chernushka, where they stayed until New Year's Day 2006, when the wave of violence reached even that area. They saw no choice but to flee to Siberia.

Even after the New Pacific Order pacified the Bashkortostan region, Tursanay, her family, and Akhmetkhan's family all remained in Siberia, in the smaller city of Ulan-Ude, where Tursanay taught history at the University of Central Buryatia. It was during the early days of 2006 where Akhmetkhan proposed to Tursanay. It came as a shock to the agnostic Tursanay that a Christian would propose to her, but her standoffishness didn't faze the Bashkort one bit.

Something making her decision considerably easier, though, was her parents' decision to convert to Christianity. They were moved by the Gubaidulin family's unprecedented compassion towards theirs, and found out along the course of their journey that the whole lot of them were in fact Evangelical Christians. Tursanay would follow suit, and the three were baptised on the same Sunday, after which Tursanay publicly accepted Akhmetkhan's week-old marriage proposal.

In early 2007, both families moved to Kuyeda, a medium-sized town close to Bashkortostan but not quite in it. During Great War III, though, Akhmetkhan was drafted by the New Polar Order (who controlled the area at the time) to fight against NAAC in Western Russia. It was during his trip to the front that Akhmetkhan witnessed systematic persecution of Uralics by Russian extremists. Furious, he wrote home asking for his fiancée to forward his e-mail directly to the Bashkort authorities.

In April, the persecution hit closer to home, with an extremist group claiming responsibility for the deaths of 162 Udmurts in a bombing attack on a cultural centre in Chaykovsky. This was the furthest east any persecution got, and the perpetrators were eventually all killed in a retaliatory action by a group of locals of mixed ethnicity, backed by the NpO, this set Tursanay off. She wrote a letter to the leaders of various nations within the CCC asking them to do something about it. One actually wrote back and referred her to the Uralicist Movement, which they were backing by the time the letter reached her, in late May.

Akhmetkhan did not return directly home after GW3 had ended, either, but instead, he went first to Yoshkar-Ola to head up a CCC-led peacekeeping operation in the area, then to Syktyvkar, where he vowed to Vaido Kuik that he would get Bashkort support for those who are persecuted, since the Bashkorts themselves had faced the same oppression in the past.

It would be August 2007 before Akhmetkhan finally returned to Kuyeda. Not wanting to put either family in danger, he asked Tursunay to marry him soon, then move with him to Syktyvkar, because it was "out of the way" and because of the Uralicist Movement. She obliged, and by the end of the Unjust War, Mrs. Gubaidulina was in the city. She found out not too long after the fact that she was pregnant, and by January 2008, she knew she would be having twins.

Although not Uralic herself, Tursanay identified with the ideals of the nation, being Christian and wanting to see an end to persecution of minorities in Old Russia. She literally served as a poster-woman for the Uralicist Movement's non-ethnic Uralic contingent while serving as a sessional instructor at Uralikan Yliopisto's predecessor, Syktyvkar State University. She was literally starting a class on regional history when the Syktyvkar Riots broke out further downtown. The riots failed to reach the university campus, but students could hear the fighting from where they were, and in fact, some actually partook in the fighting.

A few days later, the Three-Day Revolution brought the cities of the area to a screeching halt as non-violent protests and prayer vigils showed the most Uralic unity seen since they were one ethnic group. Ten days later, she was in the audience with her husband as the Uralican Constitution was made official, bringing Uralica into existence. The two initially voted in the Russian Tribe.

On 1 April 2008, Tursanay was asked by Dr. Ovdey Shlomov to become part of the initial faculty of Uralikan Yliopisto, the Uralican state university. She accepted, but asked that her tenure be stayed for maternity reasons. She was initially listed as a member of the Faculty of Humanities, in the Department of History.

Her twins, son Taras and daughter Murata, were born in mid-June. While her stay of tenure ended at the end of July, she didn't actively teach right away, instead working with Bashkorts, Tatars, and even the odd Chuvash that was living in Uralica to develop a Turkish and Central Asian Studies program. When universities in Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia got wind of this, they were tripping over themselves to get support to the program.

The War of the Coalition did put a kink in the development process, but the CCC was only at war for four days, so Turkish support was only interrupted for a week.

In spite of Uralica's dissolution in September of 2008 (which proved temporary), Tursanay would begin teaching, plus she also would take Dr. Shlomov's place as Dean of Humanities, as Shlomov began to focus on the bigger picture as UY's President.

In February 2009, she and her husband began running for alternating terms as Council member, first for the Russian Tribe, then, starting in October 2009, for the Chuvash Tribe. The alternation allowed one to attend meetings and the other to stay at home with their young children. They currently live in Sluda-Chasovo, which is across the Vychegda from where Syktyvkar Unitary Authority's northern boundary is, and she runs for government in January, March, May, July, September, and November. She has only missed being elected in two terms since first running.

Trivia

 * Tursanay was asked to pose for Playboy in 1998. She considered the offer "simultaneously flattering and creepy." She refused.
 * Her favourite movie and book are both Sense and Sensibility. She is a major fan of Jane Austen, and also Shakespeare, William Blake, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Orhan Pamuk, classical Turkish literature, and the odd book in Armenian, which she can read well but has trouble speaking.
 * Not much of a sports fan.
 * She is a regular patron of the Uralican Symphony Orchestra and the Syktyvkar Philharmonic Orchestra, and she herself plays an alto clarinet. She also likes Uralican rap artists The Bashkir Bwoyz.
 * She speaks eight languages fluently - English, Russian, Finnish, Turkish, Uzbek (mother tongue), Bashkort, Chuvash, and Komi. She is learning Tatar, which she says is "remarkably similar" to Bashkort. She is one of only fifty-three Uralican citizens who speak Uzbek.
 * Even at 36 years of age, she still occasionally models.