But who was this guy and why did the Bolsheviks do so much to discredit him? Mustafa was a Kazakh born in Perovsky, in modern-day Kazakhstan, on December 25^th, 1890. He was born into an aristocratic family with connections to powerful Warlords of the Steppe Hordes and maybe the Khiva Khanate. Thus, he was able to study at a Tashkent gymnasium before earning a law degree at the University of St. Petersburg. True to other Kazakh activists such as Alikhan Bokeikhanov (who heavily influence Mustafa’s political development) and Akhmet Baitursynov, Mustafa’s first foray into reshaping his society was to work within the Muslim Faction of the State Duma. This is different from Jadid activists who focused on the cultural and educational dimensions of activism and social rewiring. Mustafa served as a secretary to the Muslim Faction and wrote several speeches for deputies while also running his own liberal Kazakh newspaper the Birlik Tui (Banner of Unity).

Interestingly, while Mustafa was in Tashkent, he met the Russian Opera singer Maria Gorina. Maria was married to a lawyer at the time, but would divorce him and leave her old life behind to marry Mustafa on April 16^th, 1918. They remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives and Maria worked hard to preserve Mustafa’s writings and memory after he died in 1941.

Kokand Autonomy

When the Russian Revolution occurred, Mustafa was in Tashkent and involved with the growing Turkestan Autonomy movement. He would sit in the Shuro and take part in the multi-Muslim conferences as the people of Turkestan struggled to establish a government strong enough to weather the storm that was the Russian Civil War.

Interestingly, despite being involved with the Alash Orda movement, Mustafa chose to serve as Minister of External Affairs for the Kokand Autonomy (if we remember correctly, many members of Alash Orda actually returned to the Steppe to create the Alash Autonomy because they felt Kazakh interests weren’t be heard or represented in Tashkent). As Minister, Mustafa took part in efforts to raise funds, such as his January 14^th trip to fundraise in Andijan, and also to raise troops for Kokand’s non-existent army. But, like many other Kokand Ministers, Cho’qoy often met disappointment and frustration in carrying out his governmental duties.

When Kokand’s neighbors, the Tashkent Soviet sent an army to overthrow the Kokand Government, Cho’qoy fled. He escaped Tashkent into the Ferghana where he stayed for a few months. Following the fall of the Kokand autonomy, he would write:

“the core of the autonomists remaining after the defeat at Kokand called upon its supporters to work with existing authorities in order to weaken the hostility directed at the indigenous population by the frontier Soviet regime”.

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 72

Which may explain why he initially fled to Moscow to negotiate with the Bolsheviks where he was arrested by the White General Kolchak as “enemy of the Russian state”. He escaped and went to Ashgabat where the Russian Mensheviks just overthrew Soviet power and was setting up its own autonomous government.

While in Ashgabat, he met Vadim Chaikin, a Socialist Revolutionary lawyer, and together they sent a telegram to the Paris Peace Conference. The telegram, titled “Committee for the Convocation of the Constituent Assembly of Turkestan asking for the congress to recognize Turkestan’s unity and its right to a “Free and autonomous existence in fraternal friendship with the people of Russia.” (Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 82). The telegram went nowhere, but condemned Cho’qoy, in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, as a class traitor willing to sell out his own people to capitalists and imperialists. Cho’qoy stayed in Ashgabat for two years before fleeing the oncoming Red Army. He eventually resettled in Turkey for a few years before traveling to Paris, with help from former President of the Russian Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kerensky.

The Archdemon of Paris

While in Paris, Cho’qoy would become active in the Russian emigre circles as a writer of newspapers edited by Kerensky and Miliukov. At first, he found a home amongst the Russian immigrant community, but, given his experience during the civil war and being cut off from his homeland, he grew increasingly anti-Bolshevik and nationalistic in view and so he found refuge in the Turko-Tatar immigrant community within Europe and Turkey. He associated with other Bolshevik bogeymen such as Ahmed Zeki Veldi Togan and Usmon Xojao’g’li. While in exile, he published several papers such as Yosh Turkistan (Young Turkestan), his own memoirs, and lectured widely. He settled in Nogent-sur-Marne, a village outside of Paris, but traveled throughout Europe, setting himself as the spokesman for Turkestan. Tensions within the Turkestan immigrant community grew and eventually Mustafa split from Togan, who seemed to have been going down a more pan-Turkic path as opposed to Mustafa’s more nationalist, Turkestan forced approach.

Because of whom Cho’qoy was associating with, his writing, and his outspokenness, he became foreign enemy number one in the mind of the Bolsheviks. Any known or suspected association with him often meant a death sentence for those he left behind in Turkestan. Despite his supposed influence, Cho’qoy struggled in exile, trying to get his work published and trying to get the world to notice what was occurring in Turkestan. While Cho’qoy was able to find other immigrants within Paris and around the world, he was cut off from Turkestan itself. So Cho’qoy wasn’t connected to what was happening on the ground nor could he shape what was occurring within Turkestan. He ended up being an immigrant that could only speak on situations as they were before he fled, unable to connect with the people most affected by the Soviet Union, fighting with other immigrant writers and spokesmen, and taking to a European audience that had long forgotten Turkestan.

Cho’qoy, like the Kokand Autonomy, was a danger to the Bolsheviks because of what he could have been. He offered an other option to disgruntled Turkestani immigrants and citizens of Turkestan, he provided uncensored and uncontrollable critique of a Soviet system the Bolsheviks were struggling to implement within Central Asia, and was connected with many other bogeymen that haunted Bolshevik dreams. While it is questionable what Cho’qoy could have achieved for Turkestan from Paris, the fact that he was out there at all was enough for the Bolsheviks.

In a Nazi Prison

World War II led to the fall of France to the Nazis and in 1941, they arrested Cho’qoy. He was placed in a camp in Compiegne with other Russian emigres. He was summoned to Berlin to work with other Central Asian POWs brought from the front and created a German Turkestan Legion. This would be the first time Cho’qoy spoke to someone from Central Asia since he fled Turkestan. He was astonished by their conditions, but also traumatized by Nazi brutality. He wrote:

“It is not possible to relate all the various cases of senseless executions in Debica. Every time I left the camp, I saw several corpses with smashed skulls…One wonders how much of this is because of the “Asiatic” contagion about which the loudspeakers scream everyday all over Germany.”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 275

He had no sympathy with the Nazis but understood that a Nazi victory could mean the fall of the Soviet Union. He wrote:

“Yes, we have no path, other than the anti-Soviet path, other than the wish for victory over Soviet Russia and over Russian Bolshevism. This path, regardless of our will, is laid through Germany. And it is strewn with the corpses of those executed in Debica.”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 275

This was a “small and pitiful speculative trade in human misfortune” necessary for national liberation. (275, Khalid) He discussed the idea of a Turkestan Legion and the future of Muslim states with Nazi General Alfred Rosenberg, laying down conditions that would save the lives of Muslim Russian POWs. After realizing the Nazis were negotiating in bad faith, he declared to lead the Turkestan Legion. Mustafa died on December 27^th, 1941, supposedly from typhus he contracted while in the Compiegne Camp.

References

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid

Central Asia: a New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present by Adeeb Khalid

The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform by Adeeb Khalid