For this episode, we’re going to leave the Alash Orda in the Steppe with their Bolshevik and White Movement problem and return to the Jadids in Turkestan. Things were not going well for the Jadids. The Tashkent Soviet strangled the Kokand Government before it could breathe, the Bukharan and Khivan Emirs showed no interest in reform. Famine swept the land and the Basmachi were organizing themselves in the Ferghana. The Jadids themselves were on the run, without any real power, and the Bolsheviks were determined to spread communism into the region.
Enter Pyotr Kobozev
Lenin understood that the first step in regaining control over Turkestan was to settle the dispute between the indigenous peoples and the settlers. While the Bolsheviks negotiated with the Alash Orda in the Kazakh Steppes and the Czech Legion made their way to Vladivostok, the Bolsheviks appointed Pyotr Kobozev as plenipotentiary commissar for Turkestan.
Kobozev is an interesting figure of the Russian Civil War. He was born on August 4th, 1878, in the village of Pesochyna, Russia. He was born to a Moscow railroad employee but fell in love with theology and attended the Moscow seminary. He either left (or was expelled for taking part in a student uprising) and attended the Moscow secondary school of Ivan Findler. He frequented Marxist circles and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 while attending the Moscow Higher Technical School before being expelled once more for taking part in a student strike. He was exiled to Riga, Latvia. He remained involved with Marxist and Communist circles, making it almost impossible to find work. In 1915 he moved to Orenberg where he worked a railroad engineer and the leader of the city’s Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
During the February Revolution he organized an agitation train along the Orenburg-Tashkent route, urging for support of the Bolsheviks. He would have been the Commissar of the Tashkent Railroad if the Provisional Government had not blocked his appointment. Instead, he was appointed the chief inspector over the educational institutions of the Ministry of Transport. Then the October Revolution.
Ataman Alexander Dutov took advantage of the revolution to claim power in the Orenburg region, which the Bolsheviks opposed. Kobozev was appointed the extraordinary commissar for the resistance to Dutov’s counterrevolution. He spent the rest of 1917 planning an assault on Dutov’s forces, reclaiming the city in January 1918. It is said he drove one of the armored trains himself.
After he reclaimed Orenburg, Kobozev was sent to Baku to nationalize the local old industry. With 200 million rubles, he was able to prop up the Bolsheviks in Orenburg, Baku, and Tashkent, successfully re-establishing the oil flow to Russia. In early 1918, Lenin sent a telegram to the Tashkent Soviets, announcing the arrival of Kobozev and two members of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities in Tashkent. One of his travel companions was Arif Klebleyev a former member of the Kokand Autonomy. In fact, he was the one who sent a telegram to the Tashkent Soviet asking they recognize the Kokand Autonomy as a legal authority in Turkestan. Now he was working with the Soviets.
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Lenin’s telegram read:
“We are sending to you in Turkestan two comrades, members of the Tatar-Bashkir Committee at the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs, Ibrahimov and Klebleyev. The latter is maybe already known to you as a former supporter of the autonomous group. His appointment to this new post might startle you; I ask you nevertheless to let him work, forgiving his old sins. All of us her think that now, when Soviet power is getting stronger everywhere in Russia, we shouldn’t fear the shadows of the past of people who only yesterday were getting mixed up with our enemies: if these people are ready to recognize their mistakes, we should not push them away. Furthermore, we advise you to attract to [political] work [even] adherents of Kerensky from the natives if they are ready to serve Soviet power-the latter only gains from it, and there is nothing to be afraid of in the shadows of the past”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 94
Kobozev arrived in April 1918 and made the following changes:
- First, he forced the inclusion of indigenous peoples in governing bodies, including the Fifth Congress of Soviets that convened in Tashkent on April 21st, 1918.
- He also elected himself as chair of the presidium during the Congress.
- During the same congress, he created the Central Executive Committee of Turkestan (TurTsIK) as the supreme authority in the region. He ensured that nine of its 36 members were Muslims.
- Second, he proclaimed a general amnesty for everyone involved with the Kokand Government.
- Third, he created the Communist Party in Turkestan (KPT) in June 1918. By 1920, it would consist of 57 thousand members.
- Fourth, He forced a re-election to the Tashkent Soviet, winning a “brilliant victory of ours in the elections to Tashkent’s proletarian parliament has decisively crushed the hydra of reaction…White Muslim turbans have grown noticeably in the ranks of the Tashkent parliament, attaining a third of all seats” (Adeeb Khalid, making Uzbekistan, pg. 94)
The Rise of the Jadids
Jadids were not enthused at first. Between the bloodbath that followed the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Kokand Autonomy, they had little reason to trust the Bolsheviks. Abdurauf Fitrat would write in 1917:
“Russia has seen disaster upon disaster since the [February] transformation and now a new calamity has raised its head, that of the Bolsheviks!”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 95
G’ozi Yunus, another Jadid, would write about the Tashkent Soviet:
“Muslims have not seen a kopek’s worth of good from the Freedom [i.e., the Revolution]. On the contrary, we are experiencing times worse than those of Nicholas”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 95
For a moment, they looked to the Ottoman Empire as a source of salvation and G’ozi Yunus even traveled to Istanbul to petition the Ministry of War. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated during the world war (and Russia leaked the secret treaty between Britain and France divvying up Ottoman land amongst themselves), the world lost the last independent Muslim empire and the Jadids were forced to turn internally and to their neighbors for support.
The Jadids used their new political power to, first, punish their old enemies the ulama. They used the KPT in old city Tashkent to take land from the ulama and on May 21st, 1918, the commissar of the old city shut down the Ulamo Jamiyati, their journal al-Izoh and took its property. For the next two years, the Bolsheviks would requisition lands once owned by the ulama on the behalf of the new-method schools started by the Jadids and their theatrical groups, empowering one set of indigenous peoples over another. The Jadids also targeted the ulama’s control over the waqf. A waqf is a religious donation of land or money that can be used to support the community. The ulama controlled what could be donated and how it was distributed amongst the community. The Jadids, by taking control, wanted to use the waqf founds to support causes they thought worthy and would help modernize society.
The ulama for their part either found refugee with the more conservative elements of the society, joined the Basmachi, or attempted to win Bolshevik support by proclaiming that socialism had roots in Islam and they were the truly anti-capitalist sect whereas the Jadids were westernized modernizers who would bring about capitalism to Turkestan.
The Muslims of Turkestan were granted the right to use firearms, and, despite Kobozev’s efforts, the old dynamics returned to the city. The newer settlements remained the stronghold of the Russian settlers while the Muslims’ power was confined to the old city. The Jadids recruited Ottoman POWs to serve as teachers where they created clubs and secret societies. Some of these clubs were nationalistic, others were social gatherings. From 1918-1920, the Ottoman POWs became a core facet of Turkestan society as the indigenous peoples tried to survive the tumultuous end of the decade.
Turar Risqulov
The opening of the political world attracted other activists who did not support the Jadid’s version of reform. The Jadids got their start in political activism via the arts and education. This new cadre of politicians entered politics through the radicalization of the famine and violence against Muslim peasants and nomads and spoke the language of Bolshevism and the revolution. Many of these new politicians were younger than the Jadids and had gone through the Russian-native schools, giving them the benefit of speaking fluent Russian (similar to the members of the Alash Orda). Few had ever taken part in the Islamic reform championed by the Jadids.
One of these men, a fascinating person who is my newest obsession was Turar Risqulov (1894-1938) He was born in Semirech’e to a Kazakh family who was poor but had high status. He went to a Russo-native school and worked for a Russian lawyer and then went to the agriculture school in Pishpek. In October 1916 he went to the Tashkent normal school and then the Russian revolution happened. Up to this point he had no public life but in 1917 he returned to his hometown of Merke and founded the Union of Revolutionary Kazakh Youth. He returned to Tashkent in 1918 and was named Turkestan’s commissar for health.
In November 1918, Risqulov was reporting to the Turkestan Sovnarkom about the situation in Avilyo Ota uezd where 300,000 Kazakhs died from starvation, but the settlers levied an additional tax of 5 million rubles on the survivors. Risqulov called this what it was-colonial exploitation This inspired an ideology of communistic anticolonialism. In May 1920, Turar wrote:
“In Turkestan as in the entire colonial East, two dominant groups have existed and [continue to] exist in the social struggle: the oppressed, exploited colonial natives, and European capital.” Imperial powers sent “their best exploiters and functionaries” to the colonies, people who liked to think that “even a worker is a representative of a higher culture than the natives, a so-called “Kulturtrager.” –
Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia, pg. 170.
For Turar the communist revolution was synonym was anti-imperialist in all its forms. If the revolution could not throw off the shackles of imperialism, then it was a failed revolution. While we’ll talk more about his political career, his ideology raises an important question for us: what did communism actually mean to the indigenous people of Central Asia?
A revolutionary example for the Muslim World
The Jadids
For the Jadids, Bolshevism was a revolutionary force they could use to achieve modernization. Even though they adopted Bolshevik language, they could not map the Bolshevik obsession with class to their own society. Instead, they translated class warfare into anticolonialism, conflating Islam, nationalism, and revolution into a singular vision of anti-imperialism with their enemies including the ulama, the emirs, and the British (the conquerors of the Ottomans and the latest colonizer of Muslim lands). Fitrat even went as far as to write that India’s efforts to overthrow Britain’s rule was “as great a duty as saving the pages of the Quran from being trampled by an animal…a worry as great as that of driving a pig out of a mosque.” – Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 103
The Jadids wanted to create a Turkestan that was Muslim, nationalistic, and revolutionary, free of settler dominance and source of revolution for the Muslim world. They discovered that the Bolsheviks shared in their belief in women liberation, economic redistribution, and power of the people (or proletariat). Additionally, the Bolsheviks had the power to do what the Jadids could not: overthrow the settlers and the emirs just as they overthrew the Tsar and the aristocracy of Russia. In 1919, the First Congress of Muslim Communists passed the following resolution:
“To the revolutionary proletariat of the East, of Turkey, India, Persia, Afghanistan, Khiva, Bukhara, China, to all, to all, to all!
We the Muslim Communists of Turkestan, gathered together at our first regional conference in Tashkent, send you our fraternal greeting, we who are free to you who are oppressed. We wait impatiently for the time when you will follow our example and take control in your own hands, in the hands of local soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies. We hope soon to come shoulder to shoulder with you in your struggle with the yoke of world capitalism, manifested in the East in the form of the English suffocation of native peoples”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 106
The Jadid’s embrace of an anticolonial revolution coincided with Afghanistan defeating the British in 1919, the wave of Ottoman POWs now free to roam Turkestan as well as an influx of Indian activists via Afghanistan. The Afghan Khan, Amanullah, looked to the Soviets for support against a British return. For their part, the Bolsheviks helped established a modern army in Afghanistan and allowed Afghanistan to open a consulate in Tashkent (but their relationship would always be strained whether because the Bolsheviks feared Afghan intervention in favor of the Bukharan Emir or because Afghanistan made no secret its desire to expand its influence into the rest of Central Asia).
The Indian activists (as well as many Ottoman expats) traveled through Afghanistan and into Turkestan to meet with the Bolsheviks, who represented an anti-colonial revolution about to overtake the world. Sakirbeyzade Rahim, an Anatolian representative would write in 1920 that:
“Turkestan is the path to liberation of the East, [and] the Red Soviets are the way to our natural and human rights. From now on, Turkestan and Turan will live only under the Red Soviet banner”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 105
Yet, despite all of this revolution activity, these efforts never materialized into an organized revolution. Instead, many hopeful revolutionaries came together, talked, and started nascent organizations, but were never able to go further than that.
If the Jadids believed they were the leaders of a Muslim revolution, what did the Bolsheviks believe?
The Bolsheviks
Back in 1917, the Bolsheviks were very anticolonial and Muslim friendly, claiming:
“All you, whose mosques and shrines have been destroyed, whose faith and customs have been violated by the Tsars and oppressors of Russia! Henceforward your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions, are declared free and inviolable! Build your national life freely and without hindrance.”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 91
I don’t think this changed as they marched into 1918, but their understanding of what Turkestan needed conflicted with what the Jadids and Alash Orda were fighting for. The Bolsheviks thought in terms of class and industry and for them nationalism was the form class took in the colonies. So, while they initially supported nationalistic projects, they always intended for nationalism to be a steppingstone to true communism. But for the Jadids and Alash Orda, nationalism was the end goal. The Bolsheviks failed to win the Alash Orda’s trust and support and they were determined now to make the same mistake in Turkestan.
But what made Turkestan so important for the Bolsheviks? There is an ideological and an economic reason.
Ideologically, the Bolsheviks believed that converting Turkestan to communism would open the door for further communist expansion into the East. As Lenin argued in November 1919:
“It is no exaggeration to say that the establishment of proper relations with the peoples of Turkestan is now of immense, world-historic importance for the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. For the whole of Asia and for all the colonies of the world, for thousands and millions of people, the attitude of the Soviet worker-peasant republic to the weak and hitherto oppressed peoples is of very practical significance.”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan pg. 92
This was particularly appealing as communist expansion floundered in the West. Trotsky would argue that:
“The road [to revolution in] Paris and London [lay] via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Bengal.”
Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia, pg. 172
They legitimately believed that Communism would flounder if it didn’t get a foothold outside of Russia and so they turned to the peoples the Tsar once oppressed. As they made overtures to the Jadids (and the Alash Orda) Lenin stressed the importance of not upsetting the indigenous peoples and to put the Russian settlers in their place before they ruined everything.
Economically, the Soviets needed material and economic resources, especially cotton. The Russia the Soviet’s inherited was a stunted version of Tsarist Russia. No longer could they count on the economic and material resources of their western colonies and now the vast lands of the Steppe and Turkestan were at risk of escaping Russian control. The Commissar for Trade and Industry, L. B. Krasin, wrote:
“the recent reunion of Turkestan presents the opportunity…for making broad use of the region as well as of countries neighboring it…for the export of cotton, rice, dry fruits, and other goods necessary not only for the internal market of Russia, but also for its external trade.”
Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 93
The challenge was benefiting from Turkestan’s resources without invoking the greed and bad memories of the Tsars. By the end of 1918, the Jadids and Bolsheviks were working together to rebuild a functioning government in Turkestan. And yet, they both had two very different, clashing visions for Turkestan’s future. The Jadids entered 1919 needing to settle their differences with the Bolsheviks or risk the fate of the Alash Orda: a modernizing movement marginalized by its “allies” and the civil war.
Resources
Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid
Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 by Jeff Sahadeo
Central Asia: a History by Adeeb Khalid
