ters, modes of life and dialects, and explained it mostly as results of their con-tacts with neighboring ethnic groups, he claimed that such contacts had not fundamentally changed the Bashkirs ethnic characteristics.68 His argument was much weaker than Kuzeevs, but his hypothesis about early Turkification was to find many successors later on.
Meanwhile, Chuvash scholars were not satisfied with the results of the conference in 1950, and held another conference in Cheboksary in 1956. They argued that the Bulghars (in particular, their subgroup of Suvars; the name Suvar or Suvaz was thought to be related to Chuvash) played a major role in the formation of the Chuvash. Smirnov claimed that the Bulghars in-habited not only the southeastern part but also other areas of Chuvashia.69 Al-though Smirnov was an ethnic Russian and had advocated the Bulghar-Tatar theory at the 1946 conference, thereafter he often defended the position of Chu-vash scholars.
As archaeological and linguistic researches progressed, more detailed works on the relations between the Bulghars, the Chuvash and the Tatars ap-peared. Chuvash archaeologist Vasilii Kakhovskii wrote in his book in 1965 that the ancestors of the Chuvash who originally lived in the Baikal region were separated from other Turkic and Mongolian communities already in the first millennium B.C. and migrated to the West. At the same time, he admitted that the Maris also took part in the formation of the Upper Chuvash.70