INTRODUCTION
Former Soviet Central Asia, officially called 'Middle
Asia and
Kazakhstan', is a land mass east of the Caspian Sea framed
by the
frontiers of Iran and Afghanistan in the south, Siberia
in the north,
and the Xinjiang province of China to the east.
Russia's domination of the area came about in two stages:
the
capture of the Kazakh steppes from 1731 to 1854;
and the conquest of
the rest of the region during the period 1865-81. Expansion
in the Trans-
Volga region in the early eighteenth century by the Tsars
set the scene
for Russian control over the Asian steppes used for grazing
by
Kazakhs, the largest of the nomadic cattle breeders, who
were divided
into three major groups - Hordes - often at loggerheads
with one
another. The Small Horde was based between the Caspian
Sea and the
Aral Sea, the Middle Horde in the central Hungry Steppe,
and the Great
Horde in the Semirechie region stretching towards the
Chinese border.
Through trade and diplomacy the Russians accentuated differences
between the Kazakh Hordes and weakened them. The Hordes
sought,
and secured, agreements with the Tsar- the Small Horde
signing a
treaty in 1731, followed by the Middle Horde (1732) and
the Great Horde (1742).
However, the Russian-Kazakh relationship proved uneasy,
and
led to periodic uprisings by Kazakhs, which invariably failed.
Gradually
tightening their grip over Kazakh land, Tsars Alexander
I (1801- and
Nicholas I (1825-55) deposed Kazakh rulers, called Khans,
starting with
that of the Middle Horde (1822) and ending with the Great
Horde
(1848).
This prepared the ground for further Russian incursions
into Asia.
Having staged an abortive campaign against the Khanate
of Khiva in
1839, Tsar Nicholas I opted for a long-term strategy.
In 1853 the
Russians mounted a slow two-prong attack - marching from
the west
up the Syr Darya River and from the east along the lower
slopes of the
Tien Shan Mountains - which was to last until 1864
(during the rule of Tsar Alexander 11, 1855-81), and which
yielded
Kzyl Orda and Alma Ata (then Verny) to them in the first
two years.
Having encircled the Kazakh territory, the Russians embarked
on
their next stage of empire-building in Asia. They confronted
the
Khanates of Khiva and Kokand, and the Emirate of Bukhara,
comprising
a region with a long and glorious history, which was now
in
comparative decline. After taking Tashkent (literally
City of Stones), a
part of Kokand, in 1II865, they defeated the Khan of Kokand
the
following year. In 1867 Tsar Alexander II set up the Turkestan
Governor-Generalship, with Tashkent as its capital, which
also included
his new protectorate of Kokand under a nominally independent
Khan.
Next year he expanded Turkestan by incorporating the Emirate
of
Bukhara as a protectorate. The same fate befell the Khanate
of Khiva in
1873. Three years later the Tsar annexed Kokand
thus ending its nominal independence. With the remaining
area of
Central Asia, known as Trans-Caspia, the land of Turkmen
tribes falling
into Tsarist hands in 1881 Russia completed its control
of the region.
Five years later Tsar Alexander III (1881-94) renamed
the enlarged
Turkestan Governor-Generalship as Turkestan Territory.
To consolidate their new acquisitions the Russian authorities
extended the Trans-Caspian railway to Samarkand (1888),
Tashkent
(1889) and Andijan in the Fergana Valley (1899). By connecting
Tashkent with Orenburg by railway in 1906 the imperial
government
increased contacts between Central Asia and other parts
of the empire.
The region was populated mainly by races that were admixtures
of
Europeans, Mongols and Iranians, with European-Mongol
interbreeding having created Turks/Tatars, and Iranian-Mongol
interbreeding Tajiks; and the admixture of Turks and Mongols
having
resulted in Kazakhs/Kyrgyzs, and that of Turks and Iranians
in Uzbeks.
While the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Turkmen tribes were predominantly
nomadic, others had a long history of sedentary life in
the fertile valleys
and oases.
When the Russians arrived as conquerors, they found Samarkand,
Bukhara, Khiva, Kokand, Tashkent and Mary (then Merv)
possessing a
rich heritage of historical monuments, and functioning
as eminent
centres of Islamic learning. They refrained from interfering
with the
traditional way of life of the Muslim community, which
was determined
by the requirement of the Sharia, the Islamic law.
The Russian colonization centred around urban settlements,
with the
settlers including not merely the usual contingents of
civil servants,
traders and troops but also skilled and semi-skilled workers
to operate
the railways and industrial plants. Among local peoples,
sedentary
Uzbeks were foremost in supplying indigenous labour for
railways and
cotton-ginning factories. With this, Tashkent, hitherto
a city of
secondary significance, became the leading industrial,
commercial and
administrative hub of Central Asia.
Russian colonization imposed an alien layer on the traditional
Muslim social order, noted for its close family and clan
ties and strong
religiosity. Indigenous society consisted chiefly of nomads
and
landless peasants who received their wages in kind from
landlords or
cattle-owners, who lived mainly in urban centres. Only
a minority of
peasants, tending cotton fields, received its remuneration
in cash.
Together, these peasants and nomads maintained not only
landlords,
craftsmen, civil servants, money-lenders and soldiers,
but also the
religious hierarchy of prayer leaders, mullahs and kazis
(religious
judges). Such public services as schools and post offices
were scanty
or non-existent.
The strong religiosity of the traditional Muslim community
was well
illustrated by the statistics of the nominally independent
Bukhara on
the eve of the First World War (1914-18). This emirate
of about two
million Muslims had 2600 mosques. Girls aged four or more
had to
wear the paranja (veil). The clergy were in cahoots with
feudal lords
and impressed on their impoverished congregations the
value of a
spartan existence, a key to God's affection and entry
into heaven.
Like the rest of their co-religionists in the Tsarist
empire, especially
in the Caucasus, Central Asians considered themselves
as Muslims
first and foremost. 'The settled peoples of Central Asia
regard
themselves first as Muslims and then as inhabitants of
any given town
or region; ethnic concepts having virtually no significance
in their
eyes,' noted Vasiliy V. Barthold, Russia's leading specialist
on Islam.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Central Asian leaders analysed
the
unmistakable decline of their community in a religious
context,
pondering also the reasons for the growing strength of
Tsarist
Christian Russia. Either Russians had devised a system
better than
Islam or their community had failed to follow true Islam.
One school, to
be known as Qadimian or Qadims (i.e. Precursors), much
favoured by
the Islamic hierarchy, advocated strict application of
the Sharia, while
the other, called Jadidian or Jadids (i.e. Innovators),
proposed
innovation in the light of a fast-changing world which
they saw from a
predominantly westernized perspective.
Qadims too wanted to change but within the framework of
Islamic
tradition and not Western thought or practice. Since their
ranks were
filled with clerics and ishans (guides) of the Sufi (i.e.
mystical Islam)
orders, who were scattered throughout the countryside,
Qadims had a
mass appeal. They were opposed to the Russian rule but
refrained from
confronting it, aware that the call to jihad, holy war,
by a leading Sufi
leader in 1861 had not led to a widespread uprising. Their
caution was
well advised. A jihad by the Muslims in Andijan, a Fergana
Valley city,
in 1898, inspired by Muhammad Ali, a local leader of the
Naqshbandi
Sufi order, resulted in the deportation of the participants
to Siberia and
the transfer of their lands to Russian settlers.
While most Jadids were graduates of Quranic schools or
Islamic
colleges, they were also well versed in one or more Western
languages,
an asset which gave them an understanding of Western political
theory
and practice. However, lacking political power as well
as access to the
faithful, who were under the sway of predominantly Qadim
clergy, they
focused on socio-cultural reform. They established reformed
schools
which offered Russian and modern sciences along with religious
instruction, the standard fare at the traditional madressas
(theological
schools), and demanded better rights for women. They toyed
with the
ideas of adopting Western dress and changing the Arabic
script of their
languages to Latin. But because they went along with Russian
dominance, describing it as nothing more than 'a necessary
evil', they
failed to win popularity. Their leader, Shaikh Shahabuddin
Marjani (1818-
89), was noted for his attacks on the practices of Bukhara's
clerics.
Later, another leading figure, Ismail Hasbarali (1851-1914)
- better known
by his Russified name, Ismail Gasprinsky - a Crimean Tatar
aristocrat,
encouraged the founding of reformed schools through his
newspaper
Terjuman-Perevodchik (Interpreter), established in 1893.
The 1905 constitutional revolution in Russia opened up
opportunities for freer political activity in the empire.
Jadids took
advantage of the changed situation. Their leader, Abdul
Rashid
Ibrahimov, secured official permission to hold a pan-lslamic
conference.
Surprisingly, the Qadim leadership opposed the gathering,
dismissing it
as a Tsarist ploy to interfere in Islamic matters. In
the end, 120 Jadid
delegates met aboard a yacht in Nizhniy Novgorod (later
Gorkiy), 400
km east of Moscow. They established the Alliance of Muslims,
and demanded popular participation in politics under a
constitutional
monarch, freedom of expression for Muslims, and an end
to the
confiscation of Muslim land and its transfer to Russian
and other Slav
colonizers.
There were two more such assemblies, the last one in August
1906,
again in Nizhniy Novgorod, where the delegates decided
to transform
the Alliance of Muslims into a political organization,
the Muslims
Party, with its own election manifesto. As before, the
conference was
dominated by Volga Tatars. Eleven of the fifteen central
committee
members were Tatars from Volga, with the only member from
Turkestan
also being a Tatar.
In the late 1890s, Tatar intellectuals from the Crimean
and Volga
regions had begun advocating pan-Turkism as an alternative
to
westernization and pan-lslamism. Turk, a periodical established
in Cairo
in 1902, was active in promoting pan-Turkism - political
unity of all
Turkish-speaking peoples from the Balkans to China. In
his essay 'three
Political Systems', published in 1904, the journal's founder,
Yusuf Aq
Churaoglu, claimed to provide 'scientific evidence' that
all Turkic
peoples 'from Egypt to China' constituted a single nation.
Later, Ali
Husseinzade, one of Churaoglu's disciples, coined a catchy
slogan:
'Turkicization, Islamicization, Modernization'. A variant
of this slogan
came from Ziauddin Goek-Alp. 'We belong to the Turkish
nation, the
Muslim religion and the European civilization,' he said.
The elaboration of pan-Turkism went hand in hand with
efforts to
forge a common version of Turkic, a sub-family of the
Ural-Altaic
languages, to be used by all Muslim subjects of the Tsar.
A pioneer in
this field was Ismail Gasprinsky, who coined the slogan:
'Unity of
language, unity of thought, unity of action'. He arrived
at a suitable
language by eliminating Persian and Arabic loan words
from a
simplified version of the Ottoman Turkish, and used it
for his
newspaper, Terjuman-Perevodchik, where he stressed politico-cultural
commonality of the Turkic peoples. But his experiment
failed. The
reality was that various Turkic dialects had by then matured
as
languages in their own right, Ottoman Turkish being one;
and a
common language failed to take hold. He closed the newspaper
in 1905
In Central Asia, the Emirate of Bukhara was the chief
battleground
for the competing ideologies of pan-Turkism and pan-lslamism.
To meet
the growing challenge to his power from pan-Turkists,
the Emir
promoted the minority Tajik-speaking Shias at the expense
of the Sunni
Uzbek and Kazakh-Kyrgyz notables. This policy led to
bloodshed between Sunnis and Shias in 1910, with the latter
getting the
worst of it. The intra-Muslim violence reflected badly
on pan-lslamic
forces, and weakened the Qadims. This enabled the Jadids,
who
included both Sunnis and Shias, to widen their base. Their
efforts led to
the founding of the Association for the Education of Children,
called
Tarbiyat. It expanded so quickly that by 1914 it could
claim the loyalty
of most of the Muslim intelligentsia.
Riding a wave of popularity, the Jadid leadership formed
an alliance
with the heads of the Qadims and Kazakh-Kyrgyz tribes
on an anti-
Russian platform, and convened a clandestine congress
in Samarkand
in June 1916 It resolved to organize an armed insurrection
against
Russian rule in Turkestan. The clergy issued calls of
jihad against the
Tsar. Their efforts received a boost when, responding
to the pressures
of the First World War - fought between the Allies (Russia,
France,
Britain et al.) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary
and
Ottoman Turkey) - the Tsar signed a decree drafting Turkestani
Muslims, previously exempted from military service, into
non-
combatant army units. The order was highly unpopular,
and acted as a
trigger for the anti-Russian insurrection, which erupted
on 13 July. But
the Russian army crushed it promptly. It was all over
by 20 July.
AZERBAIJAN
As in Central Asia, the social order in Muslim-dominated
Azerbaijan in
Trans-Caucasia in the early twentieth century was feudal,
with eighty
per cent of the population being peasant, five per cent
merchant, and
2.5 per cent aristocrat. Following the same policy as
in Central Asia, the
Tsars had transformed several khanates in TransCaucasia,
including
Karabakh (originally Karabagh, meaning Black Garden) and
Shirvan,
into protectorates by 1805. The campaign by Iran to recover
Georgia
from the Russians in 1804 led to the First Russo-lranian
War, which
lasted nine years. According to the 1813 Treaty of Gulistan,
Iran
surrendered to Russia most of its territory in the Caucasus
to the north
of its present frontier. However, the ill-defined territorial
clauses of the
treaty became a source of bitter disputes between the
two sides. Efforts
at reconciliation failed. The result was the Second Russo-lranian
War in
1826. This too ended in an Iranian defeat. According to
the Treaty of
Turkmenchai in 1828, Iran surrendered to Russia all of
the territory west
of the Caspian
Sea and north of its present border along the Aras River
(except in the
east where the frontier moved southwards), including the
Khanates of
Yerevan and Nakhichevan.
Following this, the Tsars proceeded to incorporate the
Trans-
Caucasian territories into the empire. By 1883 Baku was
linked to the
Black Sea coast and central Russia through the Trans-Caucasian
railway. The region, associated with oil and gas since
ancient times,
fostered the petroleum industry in the early nineteenth
century with
hand-dug pits. The output increased to the extent that
by 1901 this
region provided half of Russia's oil needs and became
one of the
leading industrial centres of the Tsarist empire with
a growing working
class. Baku was a cosmopolitan city with a large population
of
Armenians, Russians, Jews and Poles.
In contrast the hinterland was overwhelmingly Azeri and
Muslim.
The hold of Islam was strong, with the clergy, often of
Iranian or
Turkish origin, moulding public opinion along anti-Russian
lines. This
was a matter of concern to the viceroy of the Caucasus,
I. Vorontsov-
Dashkov, who reported to the Tsar in early 1905 that though
there was
as yet no separatist movement among local Muslims at the
popular
level, a nationalist feeling was emerging within the influential
Muslim
intelligentsia.
At about the same time, a minority of Muslim intellectuals
began
taking an interest in socialism. In 1904 Muhammad Amin
Rasulzadeh, a
journalist from Baku, the Azeri capital and a leading
oil producing
centre, founded a socialist study circle. It drew such
local intellectuals
as Nariman Bey Narimanoglu (later Narimanov) and Ahmed
Azizbekoglu. Out of this emerged the Himmat (i.e. Effort)
Party, linked
to the Russian Social-Democrat Labour Party (Bolshevik).
By 1906 it
had become a significant entity in Baku and other Trans-Caucasian
cities. The government kept it under surveillance, and
finally banned it
in 1912.
The subsequent vacuum was filled by nationalist
and pan-
Islamic trends among Muslim intellectuals, the two merging
into
the Musavat (i.e. Equality) Party, a nationalist organization
with
Islamic overtones, formed in late 1912. Among its founders
was
Muhammad Amin Rasulzadeh, who had by then broken with
the
Russian Social-Democrat Labour Party (Bolshevik). Musavat
called
for the unity of all Muslim peoples irrespective of nationality
or sect,
restoration of independence to all Muslim nations, and
assistance
to all Muslim peoples and countries 'in offence and defence'.
The
vagueness of the party objectives was symptomatic of its
lack of a
clear political philosophy, which made it vulnerable to
exploitation by
opportunists.
THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION
The protracted bloodiness of the First World War, which
erupted on 1
August 1914 led to a revolution in Russia on 27 February
1917 The
abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March was followed
by the official
inauguration of the Provisional Government under Alexander
Kerensky
of the Social Revolutionary Party. Kerensky declared that
he would
maintain Russia's territorial integrity.
Internally, the revolution produced favourable conditions
for the rise
of the Russian Social-Democrat Labour Party (Bolshevik)
under the
leadership of Vladimir I. Lenin (1879-1924), then in exile.
At its seventh
congress in April, the party reiterated its backing for
the right of 'all
nations forming part of Russia' to 'free separation and
the right to form
their own independent states'. At the same time m his
report on the
nationality question, Joseph V. Stalin, the party's specialist
on the
subject since 1903, reaffirmed Lenin's position that recognizing
this
right did not mean the Bolsheviks would support every
demand for
separation.
As for Russia's Muslim citizens, their representatives
met in Moscow
under the aegis of the First All Muslim Conference to
forge a common
position. But this did not happen. The delegates from
Turkestan split
along the Jadid-Qadim divide, the progressive Jadids forming
the
Islamic Council, and the conservative Qadims the Council
of Ulema
(Religious-legal Scholars). The Kazakh-Kyrgyz delegates
kept out of the
fray, and decided to establish Alash Orda (i.e. Group),
a party named
after Alash, the legendary ancestor of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz
people. Its
main demand was that the Kazakh lands given to Slav colonizers
be
restored to their original possessors In contrast, the
Islamic Council
backed the slogans of 'Land to the Landless' and 'Expropriate
Feudalists
and Capitalists' raised by the Bolsheviks. As expected,
the Council of
Ulema focused on religion urging the Kerensky government
to replace
the Russian law with the Sharia in Turkestan.
Following the revolution, Tashkent, the administrative
headquarters
of Turkestan, became the scene of two competing centres
of power: the
Provisional Government's Turkestan Committee and the Bolshevik-
dominated Soviet (i.e. Council) of Workers' and
Peasants' Deputies. Both were Russian in composition.
The uneasy co-
existence of the two bodies could not be sustained for
long. In mid-
September 1917 the Bolsheviks staged strikes and demonstrations
as a
prelude to capturing power, but failed.
In late September the Second All Muslim Conference, led
by local
intellectuals, met in Tashkent, and demanded the formation
of a
Muslim government and autonomy for Turkestan in a federated
Republic of Russia. But nothing came of it.
In Azerbaijan, the industrial city of Baku witnessed the
rise of a
Soviet of Workers' Deputies, consisting of various parties,
including
the Musavat, within a week of the February revolution.
In May the All-
Caucasus Muslim Congress pledged its support to the Provisional
Government. In the October election to the Baku Soviet,
almost forty
per cent of the vote went to the Musavat, but it did not
take up its
seats.
All this happened against the background of the war between
the
Allies and the Central Powers, which had necessitated
the deployment
of half a million Russian troops in the Caucasus to frustrate
Turkish
plans to mount an offensive.
The war had created such acute political and economic
crises that
the Russian government had become weak and vulnerable.
Sensing
this, the Bolshevik leader, Lenin, thought the time had
come to deliver
a fatal blow to the system.
THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION OF
OCTOBER 1917
According to the Julian calendar then in vogue in Russia,
the
Bolshevik revolution occurred on 24-25 October 1917 when
the
Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolshevik
forces. But
with the changeover to the Gregorian calendar (on 1 February
1918),
these dates were transformed into 6-7 November. Within
hours of the
revolution, power passed to the 650 delegates to the Second
All-
Russian Congress of the Soviets of Workers', Peasants'
and Soldiers'
Deputies which assembled in St Petersburg (then Petrograd).
They
elected the Council of People's Commissars, the new Soviet
government, headed by Lenin.
On 25 October (7 November) the Presidium of the Tashkent
Soviet,
which had secretly won over the loyalties of the local
Russian military
unit, the Siberian Second Reserve Rifle Regiment, resolved
to stage
an armed uprising. The commissar-general of the Pro
visional Government in Tashkent got wind of this. On 27
October (9
November) he declared martial law, and tried to disarm
the soldiers
suspected of disloyalty. Fighting broke out the next day,
with a
workers' combat unit of 2500 joining the mutinous troops
against the
Provisional Government's loyalist forces. The Bolsheviks
achieved
victory in Tashkent on 1 November (14 November).
The next day the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian
Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in St Petersburg
issued
a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia.
It included equal
sovereignty for all the nations of the former Tsarist
empire; their
right to self-determination up to and including the right
to secede
and form independent states; an end to the privileges
and limitations
of a national or religious nature; and recognition of
the right to
development for all national and ethnic minorities.
Following the lead of the centre, the Third Regional Congress
of the
Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies
assembled in
Tashkent on 15 November (28 November) and declared Soviet
rule in
Turkestan. It elected the regional Council of People's
Commissars
under the chairmanship of F. I. Kolesov. On 19 November
(2 December)
it decided by ninety-seven votes to seventeen to give
Muslims four
places on the Regional Council, two on the Regional Executive
Committee, but none on the Council of People's Commissars.
Concurrently, the Third All Muslim Congress, led by intellectuals,
gathered in another district of Tashkent. Reiterating
its demand for
autonomy for Turkestan, it called for the immediate formation
of a
Muslim administration. It came out against the Bolshevik
revolution.
Later it received the support of clerics when their petition
to the
Tashkent Soviet to base its civil administration on the
Sharia was
rejected.
On 25 November (8 December) 197 delegates - 150 from the
Fergana
region, twenty-two from the Syr Darya region, twenty-one
from
Samarkand and four from Bukhara - assembled in Kokand
under the
auspices of the Fourth Extraordinary Regional Muslim
Congress. Declaring Turkestan to be autonomous, they appointed
a twelve-member Kokand Autonomous Government under Mustafa
Chokaioglu, a Kazakh, and elected a council of thirty-six
Muslims
and eighteen Russians.
The Muslim leadership saw a glimmer of hope when, on 3
December
(16 December) 1917 the Council of People's Commissars
of the RSFSR addressed an appeal, signed by V. I. Lenin,
and J. V.
Stalin, the commissar of nationalities, to 'All Muslim
Toilers of Russia
and the East': 'Muslims of Russia! Tatars of the Volga
and the Crimea!
Kyrgyzs and Sarts of Siberia and of Turkestan! Turks and
Tatars of
Trans-Caucasia! Chechens and mountain peoples of the Caucasus!
All
you whose mosques and prayer houses used to be destroyed,
and
whose beliefs and customs were trodden underfoot by the
Tsars and
oppressors of Russia! From today, your beliefs and customs,
and your
national and cultural constitutions, are free and inviolate.
Organize your
national life freely and without hindrance. You are entitled
to this.
Know that your rights, like the rights of all the peoples
of Russia [i.e.
RSFSR],~ are protected by the whole might of the Revolution
and its
agencies, the Soviets of workers', soldiers' and peasants'
deputies.
Support, then, this Revolution and its sovereign Government
. . .
Comrades! Brothers! Let us march towards an honest and
democratic
peace. On our banners is inscribed the freedom of all
oppressed
peoples.
On 13 December (26 December), Prophet Muhammad's birthday,
the
Muslim leadership in Tashkent proclaimed Turkestan's autonomy.
They backed it up by staging a big demonstration in the
city, and
organizing a gathering of Muslim workers and peasants
in Kokand in
early January 1918. On 10 January (23 January) 1918 the
Kokand
Autonomous Government urged the authorities in Tashkent
to
convene a Turkestan constituent assembly, a demand which
went
unnoticed.
In his speech to the Fourth Regional Congress of Soviets,
F. I.
Kolesov put the Kokand Autonomous Government in the same
adversarial column as the troops of General A. I. Dutov
- a
counterrevolutionary officer then responsible for cutting
communications between Central Russia and Turkestan -
and promised
to quash the 'counterfeit autonomy' of the Muslim nationalists.
The
reasoning behind his stance was that conflict between
different nations
had arisen on a class, not a national, basis, and that
self-determination
for a nation meant self-determination for its toiling
masses, not its
bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks argued furthermore that their
proletarian
revolution had destroyed Tsarist imperialism in order
to end
exploitation by all national bourgeoisies, and not to
create
opportunities for Turkestan's national bourgeoisie to
exploit Turkestani
workers and peasants. The scene was thus set for an armed
confrontation between the Tashkent Soviet and the Kokand
Autonomous Government.
Instead of waiting for the Russian Soviet forces to attack
them, some
ministers of the Kokand Autonomous Government led an assault
on the
Kokand citadel, where their adversaries were garrisoned.
The Russians
repulsed the attack, and called for reinforcements from
other garrisons
while engaging the enemy in truce negotiations. The military
commissar
of the Tashkent Soviet, leading a large Russian force,
arrived from
Tashkent on 5 February (according to the Gregorian calendar
in use
since 1 February), followed by further reinforcements
from the
Orenburg front a week later. Backed by the local Russian
Soviet
detachments, the new arrivals encircled the Muslim Old
City and
breached its walls on 18 February. For the next three
days the attackers
went on a rampage, looting and massacring some 14,000
Muslims who
had not managed to flee, and finally setting the settlement
on fire.
By then the Soviet authorities in the region had already
solved
another irredentist problem militarily. At the Third All
Kazakh National
Congress sponsored by Alash Orda, meeting in Orenburg
(then in
counter-revolutionary hands) from 5 to 13 December 1917
the delegates
declared the Kazakh-Kyrgyz region autonomous, and elected
its
government, called the Provisional People's Council of
Alash Orda,
under the leadership of Muhammad Buyuki Khanev, a Kazakh
chieftain.
But the autonomy proved short-lived. On 18 January (31
anti
SovietJanuary) the Bolshevik militia, the Red Guards,
from St
Petersburg, the Volga region and Central Asia, expelled
the anti Soviet
forces from Orenburg, and dispersed the Alash Orda government.
In contrast, the developments in Trans-Caspian/Turkmenistan
Oblast
(i.e. Province) went against the Bolsheviks, whose Congress
of Soviets
had established a Council of People's Commissars in Ashqabat
(then
Ashkhabad) on 2 December (15 December) 1917 A nationalist
movement
backed by local intellectuals, and centred around Turkmen
army
officers, emerged under the aegis of the Regional Turkmen
Congress
and its National Committee, headed by Colonel Oraz Sirdar.
It assigned
itself the task of helping famine victims. But it overstepped
its objective
when one of its delegates joined the Kokand Autonomous
Government.
In February 1918, to improve its military preparedness,
the National
Committee formed the Turkmen National Army, with the existing
Turkmen Cavalry Squadron forming its core. In response,
the Soviet
regime set up a Turkmen section within its administration,
convened an
All Turkmen Peasant Congress, and established the Turkmen
Red
Guards.
It despatched party cadres into the countryside to recruit
partisans for
social revolution. The Soviet of Ashqabat, a Russian majority
town,
appealed to F. I. Kolesov in Tashkent for military assistance.
At home it
ordered a census of all arms-bearing males in the town.
On 17 June
1918, the scheduled date for the census, rioting broke
out. It went on
for two days. On 24 June an armed detachment under Commissar
V.
Frolov arrived from Tashkent, and disarmed the Turkmen
Cavalry
Squadron. But after Frolov had departed for Kyzyl Arvat
in early July to
suppress an uprising there, a rebellion by an anti-Soviet
alliance
erupted in Ashqabat on 11-12 July. It resulted in the
overthrow of the
local soviet, and the emergence of a nationalist government.
Frolov's
attempt to pacify Kyzyl Arvat failed too. The administration
in
Tashkent - the capital of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet
Socialist
Republic (ASSR), encompassing Trans-Caspian Oblast, established
in
April 1918 - declared the nationalist Trans-Caspian government
illegal.
But that made little difference. By fate duly 1918, the
latter had secured
the assistance of General Sir W. Malleson, the British
commander at
Mashhad, Iran, who had been posted there to foil any Turkish-German
designs to open a war front in the Middle East. In exchange
for the right
to destroy the usefulness of the Trans-Caspian railway,
and mining the
Caspian port of Krasnovodsk, to spike any plans by the
Central Powers
to mount an offensive in the region, Malleson despatched
a detachment
of Indian troops under his command to Ashqabat.
By mid-1918 Russia was in the midst of a civil war, with
the
Bolsheviks being opposed by regular and irregular armed
men called
the White Guards, local nationalist elements, and Russia's
erstwhile
allies in the First World War, including Britain, France,
America and
Japan. Prominent among those leading the White Guards
were Admiral
Alexander V. Kolchak, General Anton 1. Denikin (1872-1947)
and
General A. 1. Dutov, a Cossack chief. After the Bolshevik
revolution,
Admiral Kolchak, who commanded the Russian Black Sea fleet
in the
First World War, declared himself commander-in-chief of
Russia, and
was so recognized by the Allies. He took up arms against
the
Bolsheviks in Siberia. He was joined by General Dutov
whose forces
conquered Orenburg in November 1917. In January Rumanian
troops
captured Moldova (then Bessarabia). Two months later British,
French
and American forces seized the port of Murmansk in north-west
Russia,
and established the Government of Northern Russia. Soon
the
Japanese occupied the Russian port of Vladivostok; and
the Germans
occupied Kiev, and then Odessa.
France and Britain armed the Austro-Hungarian prisoners
of war
detained in Siberia to fight the Bolsheviks. Riding trains
along the
Trans-Siberian railway, they seized Samara and Kazan.
Britain was also
active along the southern borders of Russia. It combined
the sending of
Cossack troops from Bojnurd, northern Iran, to the Trans-Caspian
Oblast, with the despatch of British (Indian) troops from
Mashhad to
Ashqabat in July to help the nationalist forces topple
Soviet rule.
General L. C. Dunsterville, the British commander of the
Allied Supreme
Command, based in Iran, led an expeditionary force to
Baku in August
1918, on the pretext of safeguarding oilfields that happened
to be partly
owned by British capital. In the spring and summer of
1918 most of the
territory in the Kazakh-Kyrgyz region fell to the anti-Soviet
alliance of
Kolchak's White Guards, Dutov's forces and Kazakh-Kyrgyz
nationalists, resulting in the emergence of the Kazakh
Autonomous
Region based in Orenburg, which in early July had come
under the
control of Dutov, enabling him to sever Turkestan from
Central Russia.
Thus, within a year of the October 1917 revolution, over
three-fifths of
former Tsarist Russia was out of Bolshevik control.
Then the tide began to turn against the anti-Soviet camp.
In
November 1918, Admiral Kolchak proclaimed that he was
the Supreme
Regent of Russia, and repeated his vow that he would fully
restore the
Russian empire. He ordered the abolition of the Kazakh
Autonomous
Region and put Kazakh fighters under his command. This
caused a split
between them and the White Guards.
The repeated statements by Kolchak and other counter revolutionary
leaders that they wanted to recreate the old Tsarist empire
went down
badly with Russia's Muslim citizens. Such influential
Muslim leaders as
Sultan Galiyev threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks,
since the latter had
combined their promise of self-determination for all nationalities
of the
former empire with land to peasants and an end to the
war. Soon Stalin,
the head of the Commissariat of Nationalities, appointed
Galiyev to a
high position in the Muslim section of the commissariat
in Moscow -
where the Soviet government had moved from St Petersburg
on 12
March 1918, - and instructed him to attract Muslims to
the party. Aware
of the impending trend, the Fifth Regional Congress of
Soviets, meeting
in Tashkent in late April 1918, conducted its proceedings
in Russian
and Uzbek. On 30 April the assembly announced the formation
of the
Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, incorporating
Trans-
Caspia/Turkmenistan Oblast- thus renaming
the Turkestan Territory - within the RSFSR; and decided
to nationalize
land, water resources, railways, banks and industrial
enterprises in the
newly created ASSR.
Nationally, Galiyev was active. Starting with the founding
of the
Muslim Communist-Socialist Party independently of the
Russian
Communist Party (RCP) in March 1918, he transformed it
into the
Russian Party of Muslim Communists (RPMC). His move was
in line
with developments elsewhere, with the Russian Communist
Party
breaking up into smaller units based on territorial, religious
or ethnic
loyalties - a matter of grave concern to Stalin. He attended
the First
Congress of the Russian Party of Muslim Communists, held
under the
chairmanship of Galiyev in November 1918, as the representative
of the
RCP. He rejected Galiyev's proposal for autonomy for the
RPMC by
stressing the need for 'democratic centralism within a
single united
party capable of acting as the vanguard of the international
proletarian
revolution'. His argument won, and the delegates elected
him as their
representative in the Central Committee of the RCP.
This occurred against the background of growing difficulties
for the
Soviet authorities in Turkestan ASSR, the most populous
Muslim-
majority area in the RSFSR, stemming from the fact that
the counter-
revolutionary forces had once again severed it from the
remainder of
the RSFSR in July 1918. Encouraged by this, the anti Soviet
forces
staged an uprising in Tashkent on 19 January 1919, killing
fourteen
Turkestan Soviet commissars. But they failed to overthrow
the
government, which crushed them in two days.
Overall, in the continuing civil war, as the Red Army,
created and led
by Leon Trotsky nationally, and by General Mikhail V.
Frunze
regionally, began gaining the upper hand, various Muslim
groups
abandoned the counter-revolutionary Whites and joined
the Reds. By
late 1918 many Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh-Kyrgyz and Tatar units
were
fighting alongside Red Army contingents.
To tackle the nationality problem politically, Stalin
created the
Central Bureau of Muslim Organizations (CBMO) and put
it in charge
of party organization in the Muslim areas of the RSFSR.
In Turkestan
ASSR its task was to reshape the Russian-controlled party
into a
Muslim-dominated body. However, its fast progress along
these lines
was to prove problematic for Stalin. At the First Conference
of the
Muslim Organizations in Tashkent in May 1919, organized
by the
CBMO, the representatives of 108 organizations demanded
the
establishment of the Soviet Republic of United
Turkestan to include the Turks of Russia and the Caucasus.
They thus
revived the pan-Turkic scenario of the Muslim reformists
of Central
Asia before the Bolshevik revolution, an undesirable development
from
Stalin's viewpoint.
By then the CBMO's programme of indigenizing the regional
Communist Party, formally founded in dune 1918, had worked
so well that
more than half of the 248 delegates to the Third Regional
Congress of
the Communist Party, held in Tashkent from 1 to 15 June
1919, were
natives. This boosted the confidence of the Muslim Communists.
At
the Second Conference of the Muslim Organizations in Tashkent
in
September 1919, T. Ryskulov, a forceful Muslim leader,
reiterated the First
Conference's proposal for a United
Turkestan. When no positive response came from Moscow,
the
Third Conference, held a few months later, demanded that
Turk-
estan be transformed into the Autonomous Turkish Republic
and
that the Turkestani Communist Party affiliated to the
RCP be
reconstituted as an independent Turkish Communist Party.
Much angered, Stalin dissolved the CBMO. But the central
leadership in Moscow realized that there was a severe
problem in the
region which needed to be tackled. On 8 October 1919,
the RSFSR
government and the RCP's Central Committee appointed a
special
Commission for Turkestan Affairs, consisting of six Russians
including
General Frunze, to oversee the soviets in Turkestan. Its
dual mandate
was to rid the soviets of 'rationalist deviants', and
conciliate the Russian
colonizers and Central Asians. The establishment of the
Commission
came soon after the units of the Turkestan front, led
by General Frunze
and V. V. Kuibyshev, had routed the White Guards of Kolchak
in the
northern and eastern parts of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz region,
and linked up
with the contingents of the Red Army of Turkestan ASSR
at Muhajar
(Mugodzhar) on 13 September. Also by then, thanks to the
peasant
alienation engendered by the forced requisitions of food
grains by the
nationalist Trans-Caspian government in the middle of
a famine, and the
success of the Bolsheviks in setting up underground cells
in urban
areas, the Red Army offensives in the Trans-Caspian region
had
resulted in the capture of Mary in May 1919, culminating
in the
expulsion of the anti-Soviet forces from Ashqabat on 9
July following
the withdrawal of the British force in June.
In the autumn of 1919, the Red Army prepared to regain
the rest of
the Kazakh-Kyrgyz region from its adversaries. In early
November the
Military Revolutionary Soviet under the leadership of
Frunze
combined its amnesty offer for those Alash Orda partisans
who
detached themselves from the White Guards with open sympathy
. for
the Kazakh-Kyrgyz aspiration for autonomy. This encouraged
Alash
Orda members to sever their links with the White Guards
and join forces
with the Red Army, now poised to retake the western part
of the Kazakh-
Kyrgyz region. It completed this mission in early 1920,
and capped it with
the recapture of the Semirechie region in March. The surrender
of some
6000 White troops in early April signalled the final victory
of the Reds.
On 30 April the RCP's Central Committee formed the Kyrgyz
Regional
Bureau of the Russian Communist Party, paving the way
for the
formation of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
within
the RSFSR on 26 August, with its capital in Orenburg.
However, despite Moscow's improved military position and
growing
confidence, Muslim Communists refused to yield to its
pressure to
give up their Turkic aspirations. At the Fifth Regional
Congress of the
Turkestani Communist Party in mid-January 1920 they found
themselves in a majority. Following Ryskulov's lead, the
delegates
changed the name of their organization to the Turkish
Communist
Party and called on the RCP to recognize it as such..
Moscow responded on 8 March, declaring that the only Communist
Party in the area was that of Turkestan ASSR incorporated
as a
regional organization into the Russian Communist Party.
Its hard line stemmed partly from the fact that by now
the Red Army
had turned the tide decisively in the civil war in the
region. Responding
to a petition from the Young Khiva Movement in late January
1920, the Red
Army marched into the Khanate of Khiva, which had been
enfeebled by
inter-tribal violence. There followed the deposition of
the ruler, and the
establishment of Soviet power in April in the form of
the Khorezm
People's Soviet Republic which, being less socialistic
than a soviet
socialist republic, guaranteed private ownership of land.
In early
February the Red Army drove out i the anti-Soviet forces
from
Krasnovodsk, their last stronghold in Trans-Caspia; and
two months
later it entered Baku, another important Caspian port.
In late August,
responding to a call from the
Young Bukhara Movement, the Fourth Army under General Frunze
attacked Bukhara, much weakened by peasant revolts triggered
by
famine and repression, and conquered it. On 2 September
Emir Said
Alam Khan, the last ruler of the Mangit dynasty, fled
to the eastern
corner of Bukhara. As in Khiva, Soviet power was established
under
the aegis of the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic.
Bolshevik military and political ascendancy led to the
members of the
major Muslim parties, from the Himmat in Azerbaijan to
Alash Orda in
the Kazakh-Kyrgyz region to the Young Bukhara Movement
and Young
Khiva Movement, enrolling themselves into the Communist
Party. Also,
the Communists/Bolsheviks had gained popularity by their
actions,
especially in rural areas where most Central Asian Muslims
lived.
Contrary to the Muslim clergy's dire warnings that the
Bolsheviks
would introduce wife-sharing and rape women in the countryside,
they
had concentrated on confiscating the lands of feudal lords
and
distributing them to landless and poor peasants, thus
swiftly fulfilling
their most far-reaching promise.
Their major problem in the region now was how to tackle
the
continuing nationalist Basmachi (i.e. bandit, in Uzbek)
movement. This
armed movement had emerged in the winter of 1919-20 when,
following a
sixty-two per cent drop in the cultivated area of Turkestan
ASSR and
the government's policy of feeding the military at the
expense of
civilians, nearly half of the population had faced starvation.
It was led
by those who had been prominent in the Kokand Autonomous
Government. Their partisans, operating from mountain bases,
resorted
to attacking Red Army supply convoys and outposts. Since
the
Basmachi movement drew its ideological inspiration from
Islam, it
succeeded, by the summer of 1920, in acquiring popular
backing in a
sizeable part of the Fergana Valley, a traditional bastion
of Islam.
Following his flight from Bukhara in September, Emir Said
Alam Khan,
now based in the village of Dushanbe in the mountainous
eastern part
of his former emirate, joined the Basmachi movement, with
two of his
generals raising a militia of over 30,000 men.
The authorities decided to combine their military campaign
against
the Basmachis with socio-economic reform to improve the
condition of
local peasants. A decree issued in March 1920 ordered
the return to
Central Asians of the agricultural land taken from them
by Russian
settlers. The speed and efficiency with which this fiat
was implemented
could be judged by the fact that some 280,000 hectares
of land were
redistributed to Central Asian households in little over
a year. Moscow
despatched the powerful Commission for Turkestan Affairs
to Tashkent
with a mandate to tackle Russian chauvinism in the region.
It repatriated
to Russia those Russians who were blatant chauvinists
and exponents
of the superiority of the Slavic race. It actively encouraged
Central
Asians to join the Communist Party
and government organs. The revival of private trading
as part of the
New Economic Policy also helped to regain Muslim confidence.
Altogether these measures diminished the appeal of the
Basmachi
movement which had its own internal problems, the chief
among them
being the lack of a centralized political-military command.
This enabled
the Red Army to overpower the Basmachis led by the former
Emir of
Bukhara.
The movement was saved from extinction by the arrival
in the region
of General Enver Pasha, a former Turkish war minister.
An exile in
Moscow after the end of the First World War, he convinced
the Soviet
government that he could conciliate the warring parties
in Turkestan.
However, after his arrival in eastern Bukhara in the spring
of 1921, he
abandoned the task. Instead, he sought and forged an alliance
of
conservative and liberal Muslim leaders and mountain tribal
chiefs
under the twin slogans of pan-Turkism and pan-lslam with
the aim of
creating a single Islamic state in the region. In November
1921 he
succeeded in having the former Emir of Bukhara, Said Alam
Khan,
appoint him commander-in-chief of the Basmachis. He transformed
the
poorly led Basmachi groups into a professional army of
16,000 and
launched a series of campaigns that brought a considerable
part of the
Bukhara People's Soviet Republic under Basmachi control
by early 1922.
Little wonder that in October 1921 the Soviet government
and the
RCP's Central Committee described crushing the Basmachi
rebellion as
the most pressing task of the local party and soviets.
They sent the
commander-in-chief, S. S. Kamanev, to Tashkent to oversee
the anti-
Basmachi campaign. The result was a two-prong strategy:
political and
economic reconciliation with the indigenous people, and
the use of
Muslim fighters to confront Basmachi partisans. The New
Economic
Policy, launched in late 1921, signalled much-needed pragmatism:
it
alleviated the material and political situation in the
region. The
government returned mosques and waqf (i.e. religious trust)
properties
to Islamic authorities, and allowed religious schools
and Sharia courts
to re-open, thus securing the neutrality of the clergy
in its anti-
Basmachi campaign. It established a militia of indigent
Muslim
peasants, called the Red Sticks, and engaged them and
regular Muslim
soldiers to fight the Basmachis. So, when in May 1922
Enver Pasha
issued an ultimatum to Russia to withdraw from the region,
Moscow
was well prepared for a confrontation.
In a battle at Kafrun the Soviet units defeated the Basmachi
forces
of Enver Pasha, who retreated. On his flight to Afghanistan,
he was
killed in an ambush on 5 August near Khovaling in the
Kulyab Valley
of east Bukhara. This marked a virtual end to the Basmachi
movement.
In late 1922 there were only about 2000 Basmachis, mainly
in the
Fergana Valley. Within two years the movement was to become
virtually extinct in Turkestan ASSR.
Addressing the Tenth All Russian Congress of Soviets on
the
formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
on 22
December 1922, Stalin, now the First Secretary of the
RCP, pointed out
that the independent soviet republics of Khorezm (previously
Khiva)
and Bukhara- being people's, but not socialist, republics
remained
outside the framework of the USSR solely because they
were not yet
socialist. However, he added: 'I have no doubt . . . that,
in proportion to
their internal development toward socialism, they [Khorezm
and Khiva]
likewise will enter the structure of the Union state now
being formed.
'Internal development toward socialism' meant downgrading
the 'non-
toiling' sections of society at the expense of workers
and peasants.
Much needed to be done in that direction. At the Fourth
Conference of
Responsible Workers of the National Republics and Regions
in June
1923, Stalin noted that while Bukhara's Council of People's
Commissars
had eight merchants, two intellectuals and one cleric,
it had no
peasants.
The Communist Party in Bukhara as well as Khorezm took
note. In
September, the Third Congress of the Bukhara Communist
Party
disenfranchised the 'non-toiling' citizens in its march
towards socialism.
And, a year later, the next congress of the organization
transformed the
Bukhara People's Soviet Republic into the Bukhara Soviet
Socialist
Republic (SSR). In early October 1924, the Fourth Congress
of the
Khorezm Communist Party altered its constitution to deprive
its non-
toiling members of voting rights, and changed Khorezm
People's Soviet
Republic to Khorezm Soviet Socialist Republic. With this
Bukhara and
Khorezm joined the family of soviet socialist republics.
However, the
union was short-lived. On 27 October 1924, as part of
the administrative
reform coincident with promulgation of the first USSR
constitution, the
multi-ethnic Khorezm and Bukhara SSRs and Turkestan ASSR
underwent territorial reorganization. None of them contained
an ethnic
group that was in a clear majority. In Bukhara, Uzbeks
were forty-five
per cent of the population; Tajiks, forty per cent; and
Turkmen, eight
per cent. In Turkestan, Uzbeks formed forty-one per cent
of the
population;
Kazakhs, nineteen per cent; Kyrgyzs, eleven per cent;
Russians, ten
per cent; and Tajiks, eight per cent.
Following the Tsarist practice of calling Kazakhs Kyrgyzs,
and
Kyrgyzs Kara-Kyrgyzs, the Soviet authorities named the
Kyrgyz-
majority areas of Turkestan the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous
Province
(later, in May 1925, the Kyrgyz Autonomous Province, subsequently
renamed Kyrgyz ASSR in February 1926), and retained it
within the
RSFSR. Its population was just under one million. The
Kazakh-majority
provinces of Syr Darya and Semirechie of Turkestan were
transferred to
the existing Kazakh (officially called Kyrgyz) Autonomous
Province
within the RSFSR. It was to be given its historically
correct name,
Kazakh, and upgraded to the status of an ASSR in May 1925,
and its
capital moved from Orenburg (which went to the RSFSR)
to Kzyl Orda.
It had nearly 6.5 million inhabitants.
The predominantly Turkmen areas of Trans-Caspia - Ashqabat,
Krasnovodsk, Tejand and Mary districts - were combined
with the
Turkmen-majority districts of Khorezm and Bukhara to form
the
Turkmenia Soviet Socialist Republic. Its population was
about 950,000.
The remainder of Turkestan and parts of Bukhara and Khorezm
were
reconstituted as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic with
a population
of 5.2 million. It included Tajik-majority areas - the
Pamir mountainous
region, eastern Bukhara and parts of the Samarkand and
Fergana
provinces - which were given an autonomous status as the
Tajik
ASSR. It had some 700,000 inhabitants."
Carving up the region into separate units broadly along
ethnic-
linguistic lines stemmed as much from administrative as
political and
ideological considerations. With Stalin in the ascendancy,
following
the death of Lenin in January 1924, his theory on nationalities
acquired
an official stamp, and he now began putting it into practice.
According to Lenin, nationalism (as a form of social relations)
emerged during the early period of capitalism as a response
to national-
social oppression caused by capitalism. However, the later
period of
capitalist development, dominated by monopoly capital,
spawned a
trend towards internationalism. With the internationalist
trend in
ascendancy, as late capitalism gives way to socialism,
nationalism will
wither away and be replaced by class loyalties under socialism.
As a
practical politician, Lenin came to grips with particularist
nationalisms
which had emerged in response to Tsarist expansion, and
backed the
right to national self-determination vis-a-vis Great
Russian imperialism (which he considered as 'the highest
form of
capitalism'), even extending its interpretation to mean
'the right to free
secession'. At the same time he believed that the policies
designed to
build a socialist society would result in the dissipation
of particularist
nationalisms and the rise of proletarian internationalism.
Stalin, a
Georgian, accepted Lenin's thesis. Within its parameters
he developed
his own definition of nation (natsiya, in Russian) which,
he argued, was
different from people (narod, in Russian). According to
him, a nation
was 'a stable and historically developed community' based
on four
criteria: a common language, a united territory, a shared
economic life,
and a shared psychological outlook manifested in a common
culture.
The 'national delimitation', effected in 1924- signified
implementation of
the policy of national self-determination in Stalinist
terms, providing
each of the major nations with 'a united territory'.
Stalin's linguistic policy was to give each delimited
Union or
Autonomous Republic its own language. This was best achieved,
so it
was thought, by exaggerating the differences between several
Central
Asian languages which were written in the Arabic script
and mainly
rooted in Turkic. Out of this arose the three-prong process
of
enrichment and completion of the local language, the replacement
of
Arabic and Persian loan words with Russian, and the changeover
from
the Arabic script to the Roman (on the grounds that the
Arabic script
was difficult to learn). The alternative of a switch-over
to the Cyrillic
alphabet was considered and rejected: such a move would
have
smacked of Russian supremacy, vehemently decried by Lenin,
being institutionalized.
Often the Soviet regime acted as a catalyst for the creation
of a
nation out of a group of nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes.
Of the Kyrgyz-
Kazakh family of tribes, Kyrgyzs, being totally nomadic,
had proved
immune to conscription. Therefore Moscow quickened the
process of
separating them from Kazakhs, partly by providing them
with a written,
standardized language of their own. This occurred in 1922
when the
Kyrgyz dialect, belonging to the Central Turkic group,
was written
down in the Arabic alphabet. As for Turkmens, a largely
dispersed and
unassimilated ethnic group, they forged a common written
language (in
the Arabic script) out of two tribal dialects, belonging
to the South
Turkic group, in 1921. In their case the Soviet policy
of nation-building
coincided with the aspiration of a recently settled tribal
society to
differentiate itself from Azeri Turks to the west and
Iranian tribes to the
south.
While policy-makers in Moscow were quick to recognize
Turkmens
and Kazakh-Kyrgyzs as the minorities which the ruling
Uzbeks held in
contempt, they took several years to define correctly
the relationship
between the Uzbek majority and the Tajik minority. Thus
the Uzbek
SSR came to accommodate sedentary and semi-nomadic Uzbeks
speaking Uzbek, belonging to the East Turkic group, and
Tajiks,
possessing a long settled history and speaking Tajik,
which is akin to
Persian. This was so because until the 1917 revolution
Tajik had also
been the cultural and political language of Uzbeks, and
Tajik and Uzbek
were seen as complementary. However, since they had different
roots,
and since the Uzbek literary language had come into vogue
by the mid-
1920s, it dawned increasingly on the authorities in Moscow
that the
anomaly of the two nations with distinct languages living
in a single
Union republic needed to be resolved.
Politically, too, the Tajik ASSR proved different from
the rest of the
Uzbek SSR. In early 1925 there was a revival of the Basmachi
movement, whose activists managed to infiltrate the soviets
in the
countryside. The Red Army, assisted by the local auxiliary
force,
managed to suppress the movement, thus enabling the government
to
declare an official end to the civil war on 14 August
1926. In December,
the founding Congress of the Soviets of Tajik ASSR nationalized
land,
forests and water resources, and freed women from the
restrictions
imposed on them by the Sharia. Progress towards socialism
continued,
as did the evolution of Tajik as a modern language containing
many
technical terms.
In the spring of 1929 Stalin concluded that the Tajik
ASSR had
progressed sufficiently along the socialist path to become
a candidate
for Union republic status. While it possessed the geographic
and
ethnic requirements - being on the periphery of the Russian
Federation,
thus geographically capable of seceding from the Union
as allowed by
the constitution of 1924, and having its leading nationality,
Tajiks, form
a compact majority - it lacked the population requirement
of one million.
The solution lay in transferring the Uzbek SSR's Leninabad
(Hojand)
Province to the Tajik ASSR on the ground that its 'primary
population'
was Tajik, thus boosting the population of the enlarged
republic to just
over one million. In foreign policy terms, Stalin considered
it politically
expedient to create a socialist republic 'at the gates
of Hindustan
[India!' to provide a socialist model to the eastern countries.
On 22 June
1929 therefore, the USSR's Central Executive Committee
(CEC) decided
to upgrade
the Tajik ASSR to a Union republic, followed by the transfer
of
Leninabad to it in early October. The Third Congress of
the Soviets of
Tajikistan endorsed the CEC's decree on 14 October, and
the final CEC
approval came on 5 December 1929.
However, Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs, the two other nations of
the region,
had to wait until after the mass collectivization of cereal,
cotton and
cattle-breeding farms had been virtually completed in
their autonomous
republics (within the RSFSR) in 1934 to have their territories
upgraded
to the level of a Union republic by the new constitution
promulgated in
December 1936.
For Moscow the delimitation of the region along ethnic-linguistic
lines had the additional merit of eroding any potential
for the unification
of Central Asia around the twin banners of pan-Turkism
and pan-lslam,
with Jagatai, a Turkic language, as the cement. With this
worrisome
political prospect out of the way, the planners in Moscow
concentrated
on effecting a rapid socio-economic transformation of
this
predominantly rural region heavily dependent on agriculture
and cattle
breeding.
The Soviet regime followed up its 1920 policy of distributing
the
lands of Russian colonizers to poor and landless Central
Asian
peasants with a programme to hand over the landholdings
of local
landlords and mullahs (in charge of managing the religious
trust lands)
above a certain ceiling to poor peasants. This plan went
into effect in
1925. By early 1926. all farms above fifty-five hectares
in Uzbekistan had
been confiscated and redistributed. The process continued
elsewhere in
the region until 1929 The Communists' overall objective
was to use the
agrarian reform and the accompanying propaganda to emasculate
landlords of their traditional political, economic and
social power, and
free the peasantry from the deprivations of the past.
The landless, poor
and middle-income peasants, forming the bulk of the population,
benefited economically and politically. For instance,
in the 1927-28
elections to the soviets in Tajikistan, the landless,
poor and middle
peasants accounted for eighty-seven per cent of the deputies.
They
were also the primary beneficiaries of the literacy campaigns
mounted
by the Communists.
Alongside the drive against illiteracy went the campaign
against
religious superstitions and archaic customs throughout
the USSR. The
Communist Party decided to wage a struggle against religion
through a
planned reorganization of socio-economic activities of
the masses,
socialist re-education of peasants and workers, expansion
of
educational facilities, and anti-religious propaganda.
During the
first decade of Soviet rule the anti-religious movement
was directed
chiefly at the European population. At the First All Union
Conference
of the Atheist Movement in 1926, of the 123 Slav and non-Slav
nationalities in the USSR only six non-Slav nationalities
were
represented.
The Communists implemented the anti-religious campaign
in the
Muslim-majority areas with considerable caution, partly
because
Muslim society was largely feudal, lacking a revolutionary
industrial
proletariat, and partly because of the all-pervasive nature
of Islam. It
impinged on every facet of life, individual and social;
viewed the state
and mosque as two sides of the same coin; and considered
the right to
private property sacrosanct.
As a result, anti-religious propaganda in Central Asia
was limited to
verbal attacks delivered in school classrooms, and at
trade union and
Komsomol (Kommunisticheskiyo soyuz molodyezhy - Communist
Youth League) meetings. The main thrust of the anti-lslamic
argument
was along the following lines, which took into account
Islamic
doctrines and practices as well as Islamic history in
the region. It was
argued that Islam was an alien faith which had been imposed
on the
local population by invading Arabs, Iranians and Ottoman
Turks. Since
Islam discriminated against women, upheld the power of
male elders,
and encouraged intolerance and fanaticism, it was conservative,
even
reactionary. Since it divided the world strictly into
believers and
infidels, it was presented as a barrier to fraternization
among different
peoples of the USSR. Such Islamic practices as circumcision,
fasting
during Ramadan and self-flagellation (by Shias during
Ashura
ceremonies) were portrayed as primitive, barbaric or unhealthy.
Islamic
art, architecture and literature were perceived as static,
having failed to
move with the times. The root cause of the malaise, according
to party
ideologues, was that Islam belonged to a feudal era and
had not even
caught up with the capitalist stage of human development,
much less
the socialist. The overall purpose of the anti-lslamic
campaign was to
engender a new Muslim 'Soviet man' who, having released
himself from
the influences of the reactionary socio-religious traditions
of Islam, was
ideologically and culturally ready to join forces with
his Russian
counterpart, freed from his socio-religious traditions,
to construct a
socialist order.
Given the paucity of literate adults and the sensitivity
of the subject,
much stress was laid on personal example. The party strategy
was to
convert a few inhabitants of a Muslim village to atheism,
and let them
quietly deflate the importance and relevance of Islam
in
modern times. While refraining from challenging Islam,
these converts
tried to explain natural phenomena and social problems
in scientific
terms with a view to undermining superstitious beliefs
rooted in Islam.
Equally importantly, the takeover of religious trust properties
by the
state, initiated in 1925, had the effect of depriving
mullahs of their income
and starving mosques and theological schools of funds.
This process
was still in train when the socialist family code, giving
equality to men
and women, was promulgated in 1926 throughout the USSR.
This caused
much upheaval in Central Asia, Daghestan and the Muslim
areas of the
Caucasus, and as a result Moscow exempted the Soviet Union's
Muslim
regions from the socialist family code. However, this
slack was
promptly taken up by the governments at the republican
level. In 1926-28
the authorities in the Muslim-majority Union and Autonomous
republics abolished the practices of polygamy, bride purchase
and veil,
and closed down the Sharia and Adat (customary) courts.
Also they
forbade religious propaganda, and religious education
to minors in
groups larger than three. This meant the closure of the
last of the 8000
Islamic schools which had functioned in Turkestan Territory
before the
Bolshevik revolution. A ban on the Arabic script in 1929
struck at the
root of Islamic scriptures and commentaries, making clerics
wholly
dependent on the religious material that the Soviet authorities
deemed
fit to be printed in the Cyrillic or Roman alphabet. Thus
what was left of
the once powerful Islamic infrastructure and tradition
in the late 1920s in
the USSR was only a part of the 26,000 mosques and 45,000
(severely
handicapped) mullahs originating in pre-revolutionary
times.
During the First and Second Five Year Plans (1929-38)
Stalin
concentrated on destroying this religious network in the
course of his
campaigns aimed at obliterating Islam and promoting scientific
atheism.
What drove him was his commitment to vest all economic
power in the
state, and to eliminate any creed capable of challenging
Marxism-
Leninism. A firm believer in historical materialism, he
tackled the
economic foundation of society first before dealing with
its religio-
cultural superstructure. In 1925 soon after he had emerged
as the leading
light of the USSR, he argued that the peasantry provided
the main
fighting force to the national movements because the 'peasant
question' lay at the root of the 'national question'.
Among peasants he
perceived kulaks (rich farmers) as prime adversaries of
Marxist-
Leninist internationalism since they were not only powerful
economically but were also the carriers of national consciousness.
To
break the power of kulaks, Stalin initiated a drive for
farm collectivization
on a voluntary basis in 1927, mainly in the European sector
of the USSR.
But he found progress patchy. So on 29 December 1929 he
introduced
compulsory collectivization of farms - a decision that
became part of the
First Five Year Plan (1929-33) which he had launched earlier
in the year
after discontinuing Lenin's New Economic Policy. His aim
was to
eliminate not only the power of kulaks - known in Central
Asia as bats,
beks or manabs, used as suffixes in names - but also the
authority of
tribal notables, clan chiefs and village elders, and make
the Soviet
system the sole guiding force in the countryside where
a majority of
Soviet citizens lived. Stalin operated in an environment
where the
authority and size of the Communist Party were on the
rise. The 1924,
Soviet constitution, bearing his stamp, had enabled the
Russian
Communist Party, renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union
(CPSU) in 1925, to emerge as a powerful instrument of
unity. The party
had territorial and functional dimensions. Since it functioned
in all herds
of activity open to citizens it became all-pervasive.
Its territorial
organization ran parallel to the Soviet Union's administrative
divisions,
with a major exception: whereas each of the republics
had its own
Communist Party, the RSFSR had none. The CPSU was also
the party of
the RSFSR.~" While each of the Union republics was nominally
independent, with its own constitution and foreign minister,
its
Communist Party was not. A cross between a territorial
body and an
affiliate of the CPSU, a republican party was subject
to the authority of
the CPSU, which was committed to cementing republican
divisions into
an ideologically and administratively centralized Soviet
Union.
One of the side-effects of the collectivization campaign
was to revive
the Basmachi movement, with its self-exiled leaders returning
from
Afghanistan and Iran to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. However,
their
renewed struggle proved short-lived. It collapsed in mid-193
1 in the
face of the offensives by the Red Army, assisted by the
Russian-
dominated militia and political police. The same fate
befell those who
resisted farm collectivization. Some 2100 kulak households
from
Turkmenistan were deported to Siberia. Turkmenistan was
also the
scene of two major anti-collectivization uprisings: in
the Karakum
desert in 1931 and near Yangi-Tuar Oasis in 1932. In Tajikistan,
there
was resistance to collectivization even from within the
Communist
Party. This led to purges of the soviets in
1927-28 and the party in 1929-30. The collectivization
went ahead none
the less and - following its completion in 1934 - was
capped with a
major purge in the party, reducing its membership from
14,329 in
January 1933 to 4791 two years later. The purged Tajik
officials were
often replaced by newly arrived party activists from Russia.
The nomadic Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribes, chiefly engaged
in cattle
breeding, suffered most. For them the new state policy
meant both
settling down and giving up their herds. Instead of letting
their cattle be
included in the collectives being formed, many Kyrgyzs
and Kazakhs
either slaughtered them or drove them into China. During
the First Five
Year Plan (1929-33), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan
experienced the loss of about half of their livestock,
and migration of
whole clans to Iran, Afghanistan or China. According to
some
specialists, between fifteen and twenty per cent of the
Kazakh
population of 4.5 million crossed over into the neighbouring
countries,
and about the same number died due to collectivization
and the ensuing
famine in the mid-1930s. Moscow surmounted the resistance
of local
kulaks, peasants and livestock breeders through force,
mass
deportations, propaganda and the despatch of Russian-dominated
Communist Party brigades from the European part of the
USSR to
Central Asia to provide manpower and technical and managerial
skills
for the newly established collective farms. These settlers
were a sizeable
part of the 1.7 million Russians who migrated from the
European Russian
Federation to Central Asia between 1926 and 1939.
Those who became
members of a collective farm, called kolkhoz, signed regular
contracts
with the elected management to lease land and equipment
belonging to
the collective, which also ran schools, clubs, libraries,
cinemas and
agrobased industries. Though supervised by the local party's
central
committee, a collective farm had considerable freedom
of manoeuvre. A
typical collective farm in Central Asia was centred around
an existing
village, and had a tendency to attract extended families
and even whole
clans. Thus the feudal relationship was transplanted into
a socialist
system, which over decades created its own hierarchy,
and led to
strange distortions - especially in the cotton-growing
areas of
Uzbekistan, which became a major source of revenue to
the state.
Towards the end of the First Plan, Stalin mounted a concerted
five-
year (1932-36) anti-religious campaign. The Soviet authorities
placed
the control of all places of worship into the hands of
the Union of
Atheists, which transformed them into museums, places
of entertainment or factories. They forbade the Muslim
practice of
going on a pilgrimage to Mecca; the collection of a religious
tax, zakat,
to provide funds to the needy and for maintaining mosques
and
religious monuments; and the printing and distribution
of the Quran.
The banning of some 3500 books on the grounds of propagation
of
Islamic superstition was accompanied by highly publicized
burnings.
Muslim women were encouraged to burn their veils in public,
and did
so in their thousands. When the faithful took to the streets
in protest,
their marches were suppressed, and their leaders, often
clerics,
arrested. Thousands of mullahs fled to Afghanistan and
Iran.
The Communist governments in Central Asia consolidated
social
reform by incorporating it in the republican constitutions
which were
modified in the light of the new constitution for the
USSR adopted on 5
December 1936, which was accompanied by the establishment
of the
Kazakh SSR - with its capital moved from Kzyl Orda to
Alma Ata - and
the Kyrgyz SSR with its capital in Bishkek (then Frunze).
For instance,
Article 109 of the new constitution of Tajikistan, promulgated
in March
1937, explicitly forbade 'giving minors in marriage, bride
purchases,
resistance to women going to school or engaging in agricultural,
industrial, state or other social or political activities'.
In 1937 there were large-scale expulsions from the party
and
government in the region. These were part of the Great
Purge named
Yezhovshchina after N. 1. Yezhov, the head of the NKVD
(Narodnyi
Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del - People's Commissariat of
Internal
Affairs) - directed against 'enemies of the people', which
occurred
throughout the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. The source
of the
purge in Central Asia was an alleged nationalist conspiracy
in
Uzbekistan which involved the heads of two of the three
centres of
Soviet power: the Communist Party, headed by the First
Secretary of
the party's Central Committee; the government, led by
the chairman of
the Council of People's Commissars; and the state, headed
by the
chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which
issued
legislation between the (often brief) sessions of the
Supreme Soviet.
Following an accusation that he had buried his brother
according to
Islamic custom, Faizullah Khojayev (Hojayev), the chairman
of
Uzbekistan's Council of People's Commissars, was dismissed
at the
Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan
(CPU) in June
1937. In September a local newspaper accused Akmal Ikramov,
the
party's First Secretary, of being a
nationalist. Khojayev and Ikramov were arrested. In March
1938 they
were tried along with twenty-one other accused, including
Nikolai
Bukharin, a leading Russian Communist based in Moscow,
as members
of the 'bloc of Rightists and Trostkyites', found guilty
of various
charges, and executed.
Their positions were taken over by Abdujabbar Abdurakhmanov
(Abdul Jabbar Abdul Rahman), aged thirty-one, and Usman
Yusupov
(Yusuf), aged thirty-eight. Moulded by the Bolshevik regime,
they
represented that generation which had been mobilized by
the Soviet
system in the earlier phase of its assault on traditional
society. A similar
process was at work in Kazakhstan, the largest and the
second most
populous SSR in the region, and Kyrgyzstan. The party's
membership
campaigns in the 1920s had brought many young Kazakhs
and Kyrgyzs
into its fold, thus giving an increasing number of Kazakhs
and Kyrgyzs
a stake in the new system. The mortal blow that nationalization
of most
rural property and collectivization delivered to the power
and prestige
of traditional leaders opened up opportunities for young
party cadres.
They moved up steadily in the party and government hierarchy
in a
milieu where literacy campaigns, laced with ideological
education and
propaganda, and directed at adults, had a dramatic impact
on
predominantly nomadic and rural societies with literacy
rates of below
five per cent.
In Tajikistan the disgraced Tajik leaders included the
chairmen of the
Council of People's Commissars and the Presidium of the
Supreme
Soviet. Following their expulsion from the party in 1937.
the job of the
First Secretary of the Communist Party was given to a
Russian, Dmitri
Z. Protopopov, who had initially arrived in Dushanbe,
the Tajik capital,
as a representative of the CPSU's Central Committee. This
illustrated
the failure of Moscow to implement fully its earlier policy
of
indigenization.
Over the years, as Stalin became more and more obsessed
with the
idea of creating a highly centralized Union, the party
and government
authorities increasingly refused to make allowances for
local traditions
and interests. This led them to put a high premium on
unquestioned
loyalty from the republican capitals. Consequently, Russian
party
members either domiciled in the region or sent from Moscow
rose in the
republican hierarchy. Lacking indigenous roots, they were
not
susceptible to local lobbying, and remained loyal to Moscow.
One of the major consequences of centralization was accelerated
Russification of the non-Slavic parts of the USSR. In
1938. Russian was
made compulsory in all non-Russian schools in the Union.
The
following year the script of Azeri was changed from Latin
to Cyrillic. In
1940 Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek underwent
the same
change. The switch-over to the Cyrillic alphabet for the
native
languages made it easier for indigenous pupils to learn
Russian,
especially when the Arabic and Persian loan words in their
languages
had been replaced earlier by Russian grammatical forms
and loan
words, which were also used to build up a fresh technical
vocabulary.
By depriving the regional people of their ability to read
foreign
publications published in the Roman alphabet, the authorities
were able
to control further their reading material. The full impact
of these
changes could be gauged fully only against the backdrop
of virtually
universal illiteracy that prevailed. The literacy rate
in Central Asia, as
measured by the first post-revolution census in 1926.
varied between
2.2 per cent (in Tajikistan) and 7.1 per cent (in Kazakhstan),
confined
almost wholly to men. The census of 1939 showed that the
literacy rate
had jumped to 71.7 per cent in Tajikistan, the most backward
republic in
the USSR. The dramatic rise in literacy was accompanied
by a rapid
growth in the mass media, newspapers, periodicals and
radio
broadcasts.
By then major road and rail projects in the region, as
well as the
massive Fergana Canal, had been completed, enabling Moscow
to
tighten its grip over Central Asia as well as accelerate
socio-economic
development.
But the Second World War, which erupted on 1 September
1939 and
gave an impetus to the Soviet conscription drive initiated
a year earlier,
severely interfered with Moscow's plans for building socialism.
The
USSR, which had concluded a non-aggression pact with Nazi
Germany
under Adolf Hitler in August 1939 stayed neutral until
June 1941 when
it was invaded by Germany. This was the beginning of the
Great
Patriotic War for the Soviets in which they joined Britain
and France to
fight the alliance of Germany and Italy.
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR AND AFTER
Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR on 23 June 1941 caused
massive
material damage to the country. At the same time it enabled
the Soviet
leadership to create a symbiotic relationship between
patriotism and Marxist socialism, thus enabling the Bolshevik
revolution to be absorbed into the socio-psychological
fabric of the
public at large a generation after it had been launched
in the midst of
violence and chaos.
Since the Russian Federation was at the core of the USSR
accounting for seventy-eight per cent of its area and
fifty-eight per
cent of its population - Stalin considered it expedient
to encourage a
revival of Russian nationalism to mobilize the populace
to fight the
powerful invader. He compared the current German aggression
to the
1812 attack on Russia by France's Napoleon Bonaparte,
and described
the latest hostilities as 'The Great Fatherland/Patriotic
War'. Shortly
after the celebrations of the Bolshevik revolution on
7 November, he
revived the military titles used during Tsarist times.
In order to placate
traditional forces in the USSR, he virtually deactivated
the Union of
Atheists. Ending his persecution of the Russian Orthodox
Church, he
co-opted it to raise patriotic feelings. In September
1943 he publicly
received the Church hierarchy, and allowed it to elect
a new synod and
patriarch.
Stalin executed a similar about-turn in his policy towards
the Islamic
hierarchy, which had seen the number of functioning mosques
in the
USSR in late 1941 reduced to five per cent of the pre-revolution
total of
more than 26,000. Having ordered an end to the persecution
of Islamic
clerics, often on charges of sabotage, spying for Germany
or Japan, or
counter-revolutionary activities, and the re-opening of
some major
mosques, Stalin permitted Muslim leaders to hold a pan-lslamic
conference in Ufa, capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Region
in the
RSFSR, in 1942. It urged Muslims at home and abroad to
back the Allies
(now including America, which joined the war in December
1941) and
assist the Soviet Union to overpower Nazi Germany.
The next year Shaikh Abdul Rahman Rasulayev, the Mufti
of Ufa,
reached an accord with Stalin similar to the one which
the latter had
signed earlier with the Patriarch Sergius for the Russian
Orthodox
Church. It marked the end of anti-lslamic propaganda and
accorded a
legal status to Islam along the lines followed by Tsarist
Russia in the
form of the Central Spiritual Muslim Directorate (Tsentral'noe
Musul'manskoe Dukhovne Upravlenie) for European Russia
and
Siberia established in Orenburg in 1783. The result now
was the
formation on 20 October 1943 of the Official Islamic Administration
divided into three Muslim Spiritual Directorates (Musul'manskoe
Dukhovne Upravlenie) based at: Ufa (Sunni sect), for the
Muslims in
the European
sector of the USSR; Tashkent (Sunni sect), for the
Muslims of Middle
Asia and Kazakhstan; and Baku (Sunni and Shia sects),
for the
Muslims of Trans-Caucasia. The overall function of these
directorates
was to manage that part of Islamic life that centred around
working
mosques and officially registered clerics and religious
communities. In
return, the leaders of the Official Islamic Administration
saw to it that
the mosque served the political interests of the Soviet
regime at home
and abroad. This concordat between mosque and state had
a healing
effect in the Muslim-majority region of Central Asia.
Hitler's invasion of the USSR had come at a time when
Stalin had
concluded that the basic economic objectives in Central
Asia of
increased output of cotton, cereals, fruit and animal
products could be
achieved without further assaults on the traditional way
of life. He was
therefore resigned to accepting what Donald S. Carlisle,
an American
academic, calls 'the continued co-existence of traditional
and modern
society with a semi-permeable wall separating and connecting
the
Central Asian and European worlds'. But the pressures
of war and
country-wide conscription helped to erode the semi-permeable
wall
between the Asian and European sectors of the USSR.
The course of the war was partly determined by the efficient
maintenance of the Ashqabat railway and the Caspian port
of
Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan, which connected the southern
fronts and
the Trans-Caucasian republics with Central Russia, which
fell under
German occupation. It was the uninterrupted operation
of this crucial
transportation link during late 1941 and early 1941 that
enabled the
Soviet forces to expel the German troops from the Volga
region and the
foothills of the Caucasus, and finally break the German
siege of
Volgograd (then Stalingrad). Little wonder that over 19,000
soldiers
from Turkmenistan, a republic with a little over one million
inhabitants,
received military honours. The corresponding figure was
20,000 for
Azerbaijan, a Muslim-majority republic which also helped
the war effort
crucially by keeping open the rail link with Iran's Persian
Gulf ports,
where massive military supplies were unloaded by the United
States for
delivery to the USSR. During the war the Baku region produced
seventy per cent of the total Soviet oil output.
Central Asia's industrialization received a boost due
to the wartime
policy of transferring factories from the frontline zones
in the
European USSR to peripheral regions. As a result, Kyrgyzstan
gained
more than thirty industrial enterprises, Kazakhstan 140,
and
Uzbekistan about 100, of them pertaining to heavy industry
In addition,
Uzbekistan obtained dozens of military and civilian educational
and
scientific institutes and hospitals. During the war, 238
new factories
were opened in Uzbekistan, and seven hydro-electric plants
commissioned.
Equally impressively, Uzbekistan, with a population of
a little over six
million, contributed about a million men and women to
the military and
its auxiliary units. In Kazakhstan two-thirds of the members
of the
Communist Party (125,600) and Komsomol (347,000) joined
the military.
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan impinged far more on the Soviet
psyche
because their 3 16th Infantry Division, commanded by 1.
V. Panfilov,
participating in the combat near Moscow, fought bravely.
Both the
troops and civilians of Tajikistan also performed well,
with more than
50,000 winning awards and medals. Kazakhstan received
a million
evacuees from the European USSR, as did Uzbekistan. The
figure for
the much smaller Kyrgyzstan was 139,000.
The aggregate effect of these wartime developments was
to unify the
many nationalities living in Union republics in more ways
than one. In
the process of working with Russian troops, the hundreds
of
thousands of indigenous Central Asians improved their
Russian, and
this reinforced the politico-economic unity of the USSR.
The transfer of
hundreds of factories from European Russia to Central
Asia accelerated
the region's industrialization. This, and the conscripting
of the local
manpower, opened up unprecedented employment opportunities
for
women, thus furthering women's emancipation.
Victory in the Great Patrioric War, which ended in May
1945 with Soviet troops capturing Berlin, was a great boost to the Soviet
system. The warfare had created a USSR more united than ever before,
with its many nataionalities sharing pride in their hard-earned victory which
had cost them twenty-two million lives.
The task of constructing a new socialist order - rapid
economic development and cultural sovietization - began in earnest since
the two preconditions for success had now been satisfied. The masses
had been exposed to political education, and the leading party cadres had
been properly trained ideologically as a means of creating organic unity
between the Russian core and the non-Slavic periphery - as well as professionally
to perform managerial and executive jobs in the economic and administrative
spheres. Indeed, a new generation of such Soviet-educated, war-hardened
party cadres, totally loyal to the regime, had begun rising up the hierarchical
ladder in the Central Asian republics.
To the economic planners in Moscow, a special feature
of Central
Asia was its cotton, the leading raw material for clothing,
a basic need
of any society; and all efforts were made to increase
its output. In
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, irrigation and switch-over
to cotton
cultivation had emerged as complementary aspects of collectivization,
an all-pervasive achievement of the Communists in the
countryside.
The central government in Moscow had a special minister
for cotton, a
job to which Usman Yusupov was promoted in April 1950.
Following
the transfer of Yusupov and Abdurakhmanov from Tashkent
to
Moscow, Amin Niyazov, aged forty-seven, was elected First
Secretary
of the CPU, and Sharaf Rashidov (1917-83), who had been
a journalist
before the Great Patriotic War, elected chairman of the
Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet. In April 1951, Nuritdin Mukhitdinov (Nuruddin
Muhyiddin), aged thirty-three, became the chairman of
the Council of
People's Commissars. Thus, in the trio of party chief,
prime minister and
head of state, two were in their early thirties.
This set of new regional leaders had to establish their
credentials as
party loyalists by carrying out purges which, though not
on the same
scale as the 1930s, occurred in 1951 and 1952, and were
coordinated with
similar moves by Moscow. The victims in Central Asia were
those
party activists who had been found to have displayed one
or more of
the failings of 'local favouritism' (mestnichestvo)
'bourgeois nationalism' and 'archaic customs' (meaning
Islamic
rituals or practices).
The end to these intermittent purges came only when Stalin
died
on 5 March 1953.
AZERBAIJAN
Following the Bolshevik revolution, the Baku Soviet called
upon the people
of Azerbaijan to support the new regime. The Musavat
Party did so,
but did not extend its backing to the Baku Soviet which,
it pointed out,
had not been elected on a democratic basis. In late December
1917, a
conference of Trans-Caucasian Muslims decided to convene
a
constituent assembly of Azeris and Caucasian Mountaineers.
a step
which soured relations between the Musavat
and the Baku Soviet.
Tension between the two sides built up in March 1918 when
the
Azeri Savage Division, controlled by the Musavat, arrived
in Baku from
the hinterland. Faced with an ultimatum by the Baku Soviet,
the
Musavat leadership agreed to withdraw its force by the
deadline of 1
April. But from a practical viewpoint it was too late.
Its fighters and
their adversaries had taken up positions in the streets.
In the
subsequent violence, which lasted three weeks and involved
20,000 men,
the Dashnaktsutiun, an Armenian nationalist group, sided
with the
local Soviet, and transformed the struggle into a series
of attacks on
Muslims irrespective of their political loyalties or social
standing.
Thousands of people perished, with both camps being guilty
of
massacres. In the end the Baku Soviet emerged as the most
powerful
force, absorbing part of the Armenian National Council's
army into its
own military. The local Council of People's Commissars,
formed on 25 April,
claimed sole authority in the Baku region, containing
more than a
million peasants, and nationalized the vital oil industry.
However, elsewhere in the Caucasus developments went against
the
Bolsheviks. Fearing a takeover by the powerful Ottoman
Turkish
empire, the Trans-Caucasian Assembly (Sejim) decided on
22 April 1918,
by a majority vote to establish an independent Democratic
Federative
Republic of Trans-Caucasia (DFRTC). On 26 April a government
of
twelve ministers, four each from Azerbaijan, Armenia and
Georgia, was
formed. To its relief, the new republic, which excluded
the oil-rich Baku
region, found itself recognized by Ottoman Turkey on 28
April.
But the DFRTC lasted only a month. Angrily pointing
out that Trans-Caucasian Muslims had welcomed the Turkish invaders, the Georgian
Assembly declared Georgia independent on 26 May. Two days later the
Azeri members of the Trans-Caucasian Assembly and the members of the Muslim
National Council declared Azerbaijan independent, and named Fatah Ali Khoiskiy
as the premier of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (DRA) with its capital
in Ganja. The new republic signed a treaty with Turkey, hoping to capture
Baku with its assistance.
At the end of July, DRA and Turkish forces reached the
outskirts of Baku, compelling the leaders of the Baku Soviet to flee along
with their weapons by ship. But they were intercepted and thrown into
jail. Responding to the pleas of the Armenian and Russian residents
of Baku, who were afraid of the advancing Turks, General L. C. Duntersville,
the British head of the Allied Supreme Command based in Iran, arrived in
Baku with a force of 1400 on 17 August.
But when the Turks managed to break the city's main defence
line on
14 September, Duntersville's force set sail for its base
in the Iranian
port of Anzali. The next day DRA and Turkish forces entered
Baku
and, according to the Armenian National Council, killed
8988
Armenians. The Baku Soviet was replaced by the Centro-Caspian
Dictatorship, which was dominated by the anti-Bolshevik
Social
Revolutionaries, and backed by the Armenian nationalists.
On 17
September the Azeri government under Premier Khoiskiy
moved from
Ganja to Baku.
In early November the Turkish military command informed
the DRA
that its forces would soon leave Azerbaijan. The DRA government
approached General V. Thomson, the British head of the
Allied
Supreme Command in the region, to fill in the vacuum.
They reached an
agreement whereby, once the Turkish and Azeri forces had
left Baku,
the city and surrounding oilfields would be occupied by
Allied forces.
with General Thomson acting as the governor-general of
the Baku
region, followed by the representatives of Britain, France
and America
establishing relations with the de facto government of
Azerbaijan.
Elections were held to the DRA parliament in late November
1918, on
the basis of universal suffrage, including women, the
first such
instance in the Islamic world. Of the 120 deputies, eighty-five
were
Azeris, twenty-one Armenian, ten Russian and the rest
Polish and
Jewish. The parliament met on 7 December and elected Ali
Mardan Beg
Topchibashev its chairman. He called on Fatah Ali Khoiskiy
to
Khoiskiy led a Musavat-dominated coalition government
where
Musavat's intellectuals shared power with the feudal lords
of western
Azerbaijan and wealthy oil magnates of Baku. With the
feudalists
providing the bulk of the 50,000-strong Azeri army, they
soon emerged
as the most powerful element in the government. Unsurprisingly,
the
administration postponed implementing the agrarian reform
law
adopted by the parliament, ordering the return of the
estates, seized
earlier by landless peasants, to their owners. It also
found itself unable
to balance the books in the wake of the soaring
costs of maintaining an inflated army and state bureaucracy,
a steep
decline in petroleum revenue due to sharply reduced demand
from a
war-ravaged Russia, and lack of fiscal backing by Russia.
On top of this the DRA found itself embroiled in a dispute
with the
Dashnak Republic of Armenia over the possession of the
mountainous
region of Karabakh. Soon after declaring its independence,
Armenia made excessive territorial claims on Turkey and
also soured
relations with Georgia, paving the way for a war with
the latter.
The Khanate of Nagorno Karabakh, an extension of the Armenian
plateau, inhabited by Armenian farmers and traders and
semi-nomadic
Azeri herdsmen, was captured by the Russians in 1805 -
twenty-one
years before the Armenian territories around Yerevan -
and attached
to the eastern section of Trans-Caucasia. Though ruled
by Muslim
potentates since the eighth century, its Christian Armenian
inhabitants had resisted all attempts by their Muslim
rulers to embrace
Islam. In 1846 the Tsar incorporated this territory of
4400 square
kilometres (1700 square miles) into the Baku Province,
and then into the
Ganja Province in 1868. Following the founding of the
DRA in May
1918, the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh set up their own
National
Council in late August 1918 - an enterprise in which they
were aided by
the Dashnak Republic of Armenia. The basic problem was
that the Azeri
nomads had for centuries taken their livestock up the
Karabakh
Mountains in summer and brought them down to the plains
in winter.
With Armenia now claiming the Karabakh Mountains and insisting
on
regulating the Azeri nomads' movements, the stage was
set for a
confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. General
Thomson in
Baku sided with the DRA, and appointed Khosrobeg Sultanov
the
governor-general of Karabakh, thus confirming Azerbaijan's
suzerainty
over the area. This occurred against the background of
deep turmoil in
1919.
Following the suppression of the Baku Soviet in August
1918, the
local Bolsheviks joined the Himmat Party. Six months later
one of their
leaders, Anastas Mikoyan, an Armenian, was released from
jail owing
to poor health. He assumed the leadership of the local
Bolsheviks. The
increasingly assertive Bolsheviks caused a split in the
Himmat between
them and the non-Bolsheviks, and laid the foundation for
the
Communist Party of Azerbaijan (CPA).
From then on the Bolsheviks/Communists, firmly established
in the
industrial region of Baku and in touch with fellow-Communists
in
Moscow, employed a combination of means - political manipulation,
threats of force and military intervention by the powerful
Red Army - to
overthrow the DRA, which derived its legitimacy from a
popularly
elected parliament. They succeeded partly because of the
DRA's failure
to win diplomatic recognition by the Allies.
A DRA delegation lobbied various government representatives
at
the peace conference at Versailles, near Paris, in the
spring of 1919 to
recognize the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan as an
independent,
sovereign state, but failed. This happened partly because
of the bitter
dispute it conducted with its Armenian counterpart on
the ownership
of Karabakh and Nakhichevan, a province where Armenians
constituted forty per cent of the population. Relations
between
Azerbaijan and Armenia worsened.
The disagreements over Karabakh and Nakhichevan were
symptomatic of the long enmity between Armenians and Turks
(an
ethnic term which included Turko-Azeris) - dating back
to the struggle
between the Ottoman, Persian and Tsarist empires, from
the sixteenth
century onwards, for Trans-Caucasia. As devout Christians
the
Armenians in the region preferred Russian hegemony to
Ottoman or
Persian. Those Armenians who came under Ottoman control
suffered
periodic pogroms as they tenaciously resisted the imposition
of Turkic
culture and religion. What compounded their sin, in the
Ottoman mind,
was the fact that their kinsmen in the Russian-controlled
Trans-
Caucasia blocked Ottoman expansion to Baku, the prized
oil city - and
the creation of an unbroken hinterland of Turkic Islamic
communities
from the Mediterranean to the Chinese border. The description
of
Armenia by Arsalan Demirbey, a pan-Turkic intellectual,
as 'a dagger in
the heart of the Islamic world' aptly summed up the popular
Turkish
feeling. During the First World War the Armenian nationalists
in the
Ottoman empire sided with the enemy, the Russian troops,
and, to
settle past scores, participated in massacring Turks and
Kurds in
eastern Anatolia. This in turn led to a series of massacres
of Armenians
by the Ottoman Turks during and soon after the First World
War.
As for the DRA, by late 1919 its standing had deteriorated
considerably at home and abroad. In December a corruption
scandal
caused the downfall of the Khoiskiy government. The next
cabinet was
headed by Nasibbek Yusubbekov (Yusufbek). It split into
anti-
Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik factions, with the latter,
led by M. H.
Hajinskiy, interior minister, arguing that Soviet Russia
would leave
Azerbaijan alone if its government was friendly with the
Bolsheviks.
Enjoying substantial support in parliament and the ruling
party
Hajinskiy convinced President Muhammad Rasulzadeh of the
merits of
a policy of friendship with Moscow.
Responding to Russia's call to Azerbaijan on 2 January
1920 to join in
the campaign against General Denikin's counterrevolutionary
forces,
Azerbaijan averred that it was ready to do so as an independent
state,
and demanded recognition of its sovereignty as a pre-condition.
On 23
January Moscow described Azerbaijan's
stance as a pretext for withholding cooperation. Azerbaijan
denied this.
Unaided, the Eleventh Red Army gained an upper hand over
Denikin's
troops to the north of the Caucasus. By then other contingents
of the
Red Army had captured all of the Trans-Caspian region
to the east of
the Caspian Sea.
At home the DRA faced a rising Bolshevik tide. At its
First Congress
in February 1920, held secretly in Baku, the Communist
Party of
Azerbaijan called on the workers and peasants of Trans-Caucasia
to
overthrow 'the rule of the khans, the begs, the nationalists
and the
capitalists' and establish 'e workers' end peasants' Soviet
regime'.
Moscow's bargaining power with Baku improved when the
Eleventh
Red Army captured Daghestan to the north of Azerbaijan;
and so did
Hajinskiy's position within the ruling Musavat and the
administration.
At the party conference in March he won a majority for
his friendly line
towards Moscow. Premier Yusubbekov resigned. President
Rasulzadeh
called on Hajinskiy to form the next government as reports
poured in of
the Eleventh Red Army units massing along the Azeri frontiers.
Aware
of the military pressure on the DRA, the Armenians in
Nagorno
Karabakh revolted on 22-23 March. The Baku government
rushed most
of its 50,000-strong army to quell the rebellion. This,
and the deliberate
delay in the forming of the new cabinet by Hajinskiy,
heightened public
tension. On 22 April Hajinskiy informed the parliament
of his inability to
constitute the next government.
Having liaised with the Eleventh Red Army Military Revolutionary
Council, the Baku Communists worked out a strategy for
seizing power.
On 27 April at noon the Central Committee of the CPA and
the Baku
Bureau of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the All
Russian
Communist Party gave an ultimatum to the chairman of the
Azeri
parliament that state power be handed over to them by
midnight. They
also circulated reports that the Eleventh Red Army had
entered
Azerbaijan and was advancing towards Baku. The parliament
assembled and decided that power should be transferred
to the
Communists immediately. On 28 April the CPA's Central
Committee sent
a telegram to Lenin, chairman of the Council of People's
Commissars in
Moscow, offering the Russian Soviet Republic 'a fraternal
union of a
common struggle against world imperialism', and appealing
to him to
'give us immediately real help by sending here detachments
of the Red
Army'. This marked the official demise of the two-year-old
Democratic
Republic of Azerbaijan, and the founding of the Azerbaijan
Soviet
Socialist Republic.
Five months later Azerbaijan SSR signed a treaty of military
and
economic union with Soviet Russia. Thus the Azerbaijan
SSR and its
incorporation into the Union evolved differently
from the way the
Muslim-majority regions in Central Asia had evolved
as parts of
the new Soviet entity. Indeed, their paths diverged further
when in
March 1922 Azerbaijan joined Armenia SSR (established
in December
1920) and Georgia SSR (founded in February 1921) to form
the Trans-
Caucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
The question of Nagorno Karabakh, then ninety-four per
cent
Armenian, was debated by the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist
Party during its meeting in early July 1921 in Tbilisi
(then Tiflis),
Georgia. According to one account, its majority decision
on 4 July to
attach Karabakh to Armenia was reversed the next day owing
to the
intervention of Stalin, then the Commissar of Nationalities
in Moscow,
on the urging of Nariman Narimanov, an Azeri leader close
to him. 'In
view of the need to instal national peace between Muslims
and
Armenians, of the economic link between the Mountainous
and
Lower Karabakh, of their permanent links with Azerbaijan,
it is
decided to leave Mountainous [i.e. Nagorno] Karabakh inside
the
frontiers of Azerbaijan, giving it a large measure of
regional
autonomy, and having at its centre the town of Shusha,
forming part
of the autonomous region,' the Bureau's resolution stated.
There was
more to Stalin's decision than friendship with Narimanov.
Stalin, who
had spent the early years of his political life in Baku,
was well aware of
the crucial role that Baku had played as the island of
Bolshevik
strength in Trans-Caucasia during the bloody civil war.
Allocating
Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan was his way of rewarding
the
Bolsheviks of Baku for their loyal support of the revolution.
The fact
that there were no roads to connect Nagorno Karabakh with
Armenia -
only mountain paths through the strip separating the two
territories -
also added weight to the Azeri argument.
In earlier, similar moves, Moscow had strengthened the
hand of
Azerbaijan. In July 1920, after the Red Army detachments
stationed in
Nagorno Karabakh had clashed with the forces of the Dashnak
Republic of Armenia in the Zangezur region, they had occupied
Zangezur and Nakhichevan. Intent on securing its borders
with
postwar Turkey, ruled by Mustafa Kemal, Soviet Russia
signed a
treaty with Turkey on 16 March 1921. It stipulated that
Nakhichevan
must remain part of Azerbaijan, and that its status could
not be altered
without the consent of Azerbaijan. This treaty was endorsed
by the
Kars Treaty of 13 October 1921 between Turkey and the
Trans-
Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
It ceded Kars
and Ardahan districts to Turkey.
In February 1924 the Azeri government gave Nakhichevan,
separated
from the mainland by Armenia's Zangezur district, the
administrative
status of an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The
Armenian
wedge between Azerbaijan proper and Nakhichevan broke
the territorial
continuity of the Turkic people from the Mediterranean
to the Caspian
Sea, thus delivering a body-blow to the concept of pan-Turkism,
a
development that pleased Stalin. Even the Nakhichevan
enclave of
Azerbaijan lacked a common frontier with Turkey - until
January 1932,
when Ankara exchanged territory with Tehran in order to
have a ten-
kilometre- (seven-mile-) long border with Nakhichevan,
thus making for
a tenuous contact with Turko-Azeris.
Regarding the enclave geographically within Azerbaijan,
the
Armenian-dominated Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Province,
the
government published a decree on the subject in July 1923,
and
appointed a joint commission to demarcate its frontiers.
It then moved
the enclave's capital from Shusha to Khankendi (literally
khan's village),
later renamed Stepanakert after Stepan Shahumian, a Bolshevik
hero of
Baku, now the fifth largest city of the USSR. The frontiers
fixed in
August excluded the western corridor of Lachin and Getabek
from the
enclave.
By then Azerbaijan was on its way towards socialism, undergoing
social, political and economic changes along the same
lines as Central
Asia. In 1922 it became the first Muslim republic to alter
the script of its
language, Azeri, from Arabic to Latin. The agrarian reform
benefited the
peasantry which in the pre-revolution era owned only two
per cent of
the arable land. The 3.49 million acres of land taken
from the feudal
lords, Muslim endowment trusts and Christian churches
and
monasteries were redistributed to landless peasants. The
First Five
Year Plan, launched in 1929, placed special stress on
industrialization,
with the government claiming an increase of 111 per cent
at the end of the plan.
Azeri oil was as crucial to the Soviet economy as it was
to the
Tsarist. Its output, down to 2.9 million tons in 1920
from the pre-
revolution figure of 7.7 million tons, needed to be raised
urgently.
Large-scale capital investment and technological modernization,
including offshore drilling, boosted oil production in
1937 to 21.4
million tons, or 430,000 barrels per day, amounting to
three-fifths
of the total Soviet output, enabling the Communist Party
to claim that
Azerbaijan had become an industrialized and collectivized
republic. It
was right to use the term 'republic': following promulgation
of the 1936
constitution the Trans-Caucasian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic
had given way to three separate republics, each of them
becoming part
of the USSR directly. Among other things, this made Nagorno
Karabakh more dependent on Baku.
As elsewhere in the USSR, the purges of 1937-8 had a devastating
effect on Azeri life and society, with many intellectuals
and party
leaders executed or exiled to labour camps in Siberia
for either being
bourgeois nationalists or practitioners of Islamic rituals
and customs.
The young cadres, who replaced the older ones, were totally
loyal to
Moscow. On the eve of the Second World War, therefore,
Stalin was
confident of the local Azeri leaders shoring up Muslim
backing for the
USSR should it find itself engaged in hostilities. He
was not to be
disappointed. Within eighteen months of the Soviet Union
joining the
war in June 1941, more than half of the 79,100 CPA members
had
enrolled in the military.
Of the four Muslim Spiritual Directorates that Stalin
allowed to be
established in the USSR in 1943 the one for Trans-Caucasia
was based
in Baku. Since nearly three-quarters of Azeri Muslims,
forming two-
thirds of the republic's population, were Shia, the chairman
of the
directorate, Shaikh-al-lslam Ali Aga Suleiman, was a Shia,
and his
deputy a Sunni.
By the time of Stalin's death a decade later, Azerbaijan
had been re-
shaped in the same social mould as the republics of Central
Asia, with
the script for its language now altered to Cyrillic, Muslim
women
released from their traditional bondage, taking up more
than forty per
cent of the places at higher educational institutes, and
interest in
religion and religious rituals reduced to a bare minimum.