The Red Army’s Military Campaign Against the Basmachi

The Basmachi as of 1920

The Basmachi operated in the Ferghana Valley, the Lokai Region south of Dushanbe, Bukhara, and the Turkmen Steppe around Khiva. Their most frequent targets were the Red Army outposts and trains. The Basmachi of the Ferghana favored hit and run tactics while Turkmen groups preferred larger actions and ambushes. The Basmachi enjoyed local “support” as well as alliances with Russian Settlers groups who were anti-Bolshevik (like Basmachi leader Madamin Bey and the Russian General Konstantin Monstrov which we talked about in Episode 39).

By 1920, the Russians were reporting 12 separate Basmachi groups with a total of 5,560 fighters. However, these fighters were poorly equipped, carrying whatever weapons they could take from the dead. They fought mostly with vintage weapons, including the Berdan rifles of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) and a handful of antique artillery pieces. The Russians were convinced they were being armed by the British, but like their theories regarding a Bukharan-British conspiracy to take over Central Asia, there is little evidence that this is true. It is also doubtful that either Bukhara or Afghanistan provided much material support to the Basmachi, even if it was understood that they had the two emirs’ tacit support.

Despite the efforts of leaders like Madamin, the Basmachi did not coordinate their attacks well and were easily routed by disciplined Russian forces when they fought head-to-head. The Basmachi relied on hit and run tactics instead, exploiting their knowledge of the terrain and local peoples, their superior mobility, and smaller numbers to undermine Russian control.

For their part the Russians found the Basmachi tactics unsettling, one Russian military observer writing:

“Without anything distinguishing them [the Basmachis] on the outside, clothed in the same way as the peasant population, they were all around our units, not hesitating to infiltrate, and unrecognizable and elusive, they devoted themselves to espionage that has no equal, whose network extends from the Afghan frontier to Tashkent”

Robert F. Baumann, Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, pg. 142

Reflecting on what this required from the Russians forces, one Russian officer wrote:

“The roadless mountains and deserts of the Central Asian theaters, and the backwards and disorganized enemy in Turkestan, [prove that] the old principle-the training of a steadfast and calm individual soldier-has not outlived its usefulness”

Robert F. Baumann, Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, pg. 152

and war analyst V. Lavrenev wrote that any commander would:

“Be entirely unprepared here [the mountainous zones of Central Asia] and in most instances will begin with a series of blunders”

Robert F. Baumann, Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, pg. 152

Given the lack of a strong military presence in Turkestan, the Basmachi were at the peak of their power in 1920. They had free range in the Ferghana and around the fields of Khiva and Bukhara, the Bolsheviks and the Musburo could barely handle the famine and their own rebellious Russian and indigenous subjects let alone a large guerilla movement. Frunze, trying to solve Bukharan shaped problem, actually helped the Basmachi cause by overthrowing the Bukharan Emir.

When the Bukharan Emir retreated to Afghanistan, he created a cause the indigenous peoples could rally around. The Basmachi also served as a safe haven for those who didn’t want to be conscripted or wanted to escape the reach of the Bolsheviks. By the summer of 1920, the Basmachi’s ranks are said to have swelled to 30,000 men and was attracting supporters such as Zeki Validov, a Bashkir nationalist who was the former president of the short-lived Bashkir Autonomous Republic and Enver Pasha in 1921.

The Red Army in 1920

When Frunze wasn’t attacking Khiva in February and Bukhara in August, he forced on building an army that could not only defeat the Basmachi but establish Communist power in the region.

Frunze wrote to Lenin in March 1920, complaining about the condition of the soldiers who were to make up the units of the newly created Turkestan Front. He wrote that the Red units were numerically weak, had no uniforms or, in some cases, shoes, with one quarter using Berdan rifles and the other quarter using English weapons sent to Russia during the world war. He had one unit consisting of 4,500 infantrymen and 700 cavalry men holding the front from Termez on the Afghan border to Krasnovodsky. He had a mixture of international regiments comprising of foreign prisoners taken during the world war, territorial Red guards, and Muslim volunteers he either brought with him from the Steppe or had organized in Tashkent.

Frunze eventually created a Turkestan Front that consisted of two entire armies, the Fourth and First, and elements of a third. The Fourth army consisted of 3 rifle divisions (equipped with 203 machine guns) and a reserve of 21,650 men total. The First army consisted of 3 rifle divisions and a Tatar Brigade for a total of 31,129 soldiers, 515 machine guns, and 99 field guns. Frunze borrowed elements of the Eleventh army in Astrakhan which gave him an additional 17,000 men on paper, and he also relied on members of the Cheka.

Indigenous Volunteers in the Red Army

A note on the Muslim volunteers. If we think about to our episodes on the Alash Orda and the White Army, we’ll remember that the Alash Orda organized several different cavalry and infantry units. They first fought with the Whites and then were subsumed by the Red Army. By the end of 1919 there were at least five Kazakh units including the 1^st Siberian Kazakh Volunteer Cavalry Regiment which served in the Altai province until 1922.

Risqulov in 1919 managed to convince Madamin Bey to temporarily side with the Bolsheviks, securing a major propaganda victory for the Red Army. The Bolsheviks worked hard to encourage the indigenous peoples to join their fellow Muslims in protecting their lands from all enemies non-Communists (i.e., Russian settlers who resisted the Bolsheviks and the Basmachi who preyed on the population as much as they “protected” them.)

In 1919 a Muslim section was established within the Political Department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Turkestan Republic (really need shorter names here, guys) and they organized a series of lectures highlighting Muslim soldiers in the Red army, organized agitation trains known as “Red East” and “Rosa Luxemburg”, and pushed the benefits of Communist and joining the Red Army via theater and literary publishing clubs.

The Bolsheviks organized the indigenous volunteers based on ethnicity, foreshadowing their approach towards the creation of the future Central Asian states we know today. It also seemed to be an attempt to kill any idea of a “Turkic” republic or connection to a greater “Turkestan” which Risqulov had been a big proponent of. The Russians feared that anything “Turkic” could be used to support a Pan-Turkic movement favored by the Turks in the former Ottoman Empire and by some members of the Basmachi. Basically, kill any sense of a greater unity with non-communist entities by focusing on a local, ethnic identity that could then be crushed later to be replaced by a class identity.

            Frunze had no problem working with former Basmachi who wanted to join the Red army. In fact, the Kyrgyz Red Cavalry Brigade consisted of 400 people, many of whom served with Madamin Bey before his death. Dzhanybek, a former Basmachi field commander would eventually command the Kirghiz Cavalry Red Regiment for the Bolsheviks.

            Frunze was able to recruit enough Muslim volunteers by May 1920, that he felt comfortable issuing an announcement stating that “the workers of the local national population aged between 19 and 35 were subject to conscription to the Red Army”. It called upon non-Russian citizens from Siberia, Turkestan, and other outskirts for military service. In Tashkent, the first conscription took place in June while the recruitment efforts in Semirech’e and the Bukharan republic were postponed.

            One of the biggest challenges facing the indigenous volunteers was the language barrier. The indigenous peoples didn’t know Russian and requested that the Russians learn their various languages to ease communication. Even when the Russians could send translators to recruitment stations they faced a lack of qualified people and money to train anyone from either language. Frunze complained that he had to refuse many Kyrgyz willing to volunteer because of lack of weapons and uniforms. He wrote

“The formed military units on their horses, in Kyrgyz common clothes and providing for themselves, were armed with what they got mainly from the whites, and with various weapons, including the Berdan rifles”

Yu A. Lysenko, National Units of the Red Army in the Steppe Region and Turkestan During the Civil War, pg. 1129

Frunze also faced a lack of skilled commanders. Through enormous effort, the Bolsheviks were able to create several military courses that covered subjects such as infantry, artillery, cavalry, military topography, and other courses.  Despite all odds, Frunze was able to recruit several units of indigenous peoples and integrate them into the forming Turkestan Front.

Frunze’s Tactics Against the Basmachi

First, he had to come to terms with the fact that mountain warfare is the worst and that he needed to have soldiers and officers who knew how to secure their flanks and rears, deploy patrols effectively, and give the officers enough initiative to effectively deploy their superior firepower. Frunze translated this into a strategy that aimed at isolated and destroying Basmachi groups or, failing that, cut them off from their sanctuaries all over the mountains, including Afghanistan. Frunze did this, three different ways:

First, he created flexible and mobile units of light irregular cavalry known as the “flying detachments”

These detachments were the main weapons used against the Basmachi. They could maintain communications amongst the different garrisons and could chase the Basmachi back to their bases and destroy them. They never stayed in one place for long on principle and could range from platoon size to a division, so roughly 200-2000 men. The detachments could fight their own skirmishes but were also used to support other, larger operations. Frunze believed that only concentrated forces would be able to pursue and destroy Basmachi units, and forbade his commanders from spreading themselves too thin.

A spinoff of the flying detachment was the raiding detachment. The raiding detachment was more partisan in nature and focused on reconnaissance and harassing the Basmachi whenever they could.

Second, Frunze had to solve the problem of supplies. At first, soldiers feared traveling too from the railroads and their sources of supply, giving the advantage to the Basmachi. A combined effort of clearing the territory of Basmachi by the flying detachment and meticulous care and planning when it came to resupplying the soldiers allowed the Red Army to push ever more and more into Basmachi territory. When the army reported issues moving heavy artillery pieces up the mountains, Frunze made them rely on portable mountain guns. These guns were used mostly to provide covering fire to support the advancing infantry and cavalry as they chased after the fleeing Basmachi.

Third, Frunze relied on modern technology to transport soldiers, supply them, and support them. Steam locomotives were the pack mules of Frunze’s efforts, providing the soldiers with everything they needed to survive the mountains. To protect the precious railroads, Frunze armed the trains with their own units of soldiers and firing platforms. Like the RAF in Iraq, Frunze would use airplanes in his war against the Basmachi. These planes performed reconnaissance and occasionally bomb Basmachi positions. These bombings had a far more psychological effect than material. Finally, he used naval ships to protect the Aral Sea and the Amu River. His naval forces consisted of nine steamers, two vessels powered by internal combustion, and a cutter.

Political Campaign Against the Basmachi: How to Solve a Problem Like Turkestan

While Frunze was creating an effective military apparatus, Frunze knew he couldn’t defeat the Basmachi through militant means alone. He had to also had to undermine their support amongst the people. To do that, he had to resolve the many issues facing Turkestan.

When Frunze arrived in February 1920, he identified three political and military threats to Bolshevik power: the Musburo, the Emirs, and the Basmachi, but he was also inheriting a region wracked by ethnic violence, famine, and complete disintegration of any central authority. As we discussed in our last episode a combination of pragmaticism, faith in the Communist order, and racism/xenophobia led Frunze to overthrow the existing “government” represented by the Musburo and the Turkestan Communist Party (KPT) and elect his own trusted members to the government.

As we’ve noted, many of these people were indigenous peoples who either belonged to the nascent Communist party or hadn’t annoyed Frunze yet. And while Risqulov was initially sent away, he would return to Turkestan and serve on its governing body before being executed by Stalin for being a traitor and a nationalist. But it would be going too far to say this was a progressive policy or somehow the Bolsheviks weren’t racist. This was a combination of pragmatism and necessity.

Once Frunze established his version of a Communist government in the region, how did he plan to solve the many problems facing Turkestan?

Famine is Bad Everyone

His first solution was to invade Khiva. You can learn more about that invasion in the last episode, but invading a neighboring emirate wasn’t going to solve any of Turkestan’s real problems such as famine and infrastructural collapse.

According to scholar, Marco Buttino, the Russians settlers had lost 28 percent of their cultivated land by 1920 with the indigenous population losing 39 percent and the nomadic peoples losing 45 percent. The Russians lost a significant percent of their livestock, but it was absolutely catastrophic for the indigenous peoples. The settled indigenous peoples lost 48% and the nomadic peoples lost 63% of their livestock by 1920.

As we discussed in our episode of Turar Risqulov, famine was a common specter amongst the indigenous peoples of Central Asian, especially the nomadic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz being driven south because of the Russian Civil War. These peoples were reliant on either a government that could not provide for them (or worse requisitioning desperately need food from them and then failing to share the food) or were forced to find support elsewhere i.e., by finding common cause with the marauding Basmachi or trying to cross into the neighboring countries such as Afghanistan and Xinjiang and China.

According to Buttino, Turkestan had a population of roughly 7 million in 1916. By 1920, that population dropped to 5 million, mean two million people were lost in four years due to famine, forced migration, and war. Interestingly, the Russian population saw the biggest drop in its urban population. By 1920s, half of the Russians who lived in cities were gone, but their rural presence increased by 14%. Buttino suggests that the drop could be explained via forced conscription and migration as well as death.

The indigenous population, no surprise, suffered the most. While Buttino admits that the census he used to gather this information needs to be taken with a grain of salt, he estimates that in total the indigenous population lost more than a million and a half people between 1917 and 1920, with a third of those missing belonging to the nomadic population.

While all of this is horrifying, we also have to consider the infrastructural damage. Entire irrigation networks (which many cities, such as Bukhara, relied on for water) were in ruin, whole districts were abandoned, and the amount of migration is hard to imagine. The borders with Afghanistan, Persia, and China were porous, straining those country’s systems as mass refugees fled the Basmachi, the Russian Settlers, and the Russian Civil War.

Russian Response

The Turkkomissiia responded first by creating provision brigades. These brigades were to gather food from the country, convince farmers that things were safe, and they can resume planting, ensure loyalty of local leaders, and agitate as needed. We’ve talked a lot about how this was a horrible idea in our episode on Risqulov and they were disbanded by 1922.

Instead, a collection of locally organized soviets and unions cropped up and worked together to survive, creating black markets. “Speculation”, and trade occurred quite frequently, despite the Communist efforts to establish a state-controlled process of food collection and redistribution.

These self-organized sources of administration cropped up because the central administration in Tashkent couldn’t reach beyond the borders of Tashkent. It started with landless and low-income peoples coming together to keep villages afloat. These unions grew into a parallel administrative structure that supported local soviets and helped reach out to the people. The administrative center in Tashkent would use these unions to establish their hold over the rural regions and spread the principles of Communism until their forced dissolution in 1927.

The Bolsheviks also tried to build support within the women of Turkestan. They created a party specifically for women called Zhenotdel and attracted women escaping abusive relationships, low-income, and displacement. These women were employed through labor cooperatives and gained political rights they had never experienced before. The Bolsheviks would later create the Komsomol, an organized for the youth of the region, which would produce many future rulers of Communist Central Asia.

To combat the influence of the market on food stuffs and everyday needs, the Bolsheviks created labor and consumer cooperatives, offering cooperative credit to struggling peoples to help them make ends meet. While they offered aid to those in need they also laid the foundation for ostracizing and later eliminating the bais and kulaks of Turkestan.

But Frunze knew this wasn’t enough, so he created party schools in every oblast to bring the benefits of Communism to the people. He cracked down on abuses the army perpetuated against the indigenous people, even disarming and disbanding the Soviet 4^th Regiment for crimes against the Muslim population. He also pressed for land and water reform.

Frunze had the awkward job of maintaining Communism’s anti-religious stance while neutralizing Islam as a source of organization and resistance. He knew being completely anti-Islam would only drive people into the arms of the Basmachi, so he allowed the ulama to maintain their courts and schools, but also provided secular schools and economic opportunities.

He provided tax assistance for peasants in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, delivery of seed to farmers, extension of offers of amnesty, and the restoration of Muslim schools and property. The New Economic Policy of 1921 would expand upon these economic incentives, helping people desperately in need. While these measures alone weren’t enough to completely stop the Basmachi, they went a long way to stemming the stream of people joining their ranks.

Frunze would leave Turkestan late in 1920, but he left behind a political and military structure that would transform Turkestan from a collection of collapsing, failing political entities to a not anti-Communist region. The Basmachi despite being pushed back by the Russian forces, but were not yet defeated. In fact, they were about to receive help from an unlikely ally traveling all the way from the former Ottoman Empire.

References

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

Central Asia: A History by Adeeb Khalid

Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan by Robert F. Baumann

Study of the economic crisis and depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920 by Marco Buttino

National Units of the Red Army in the Steppe Region and Turkestan During the Civil War by Yu. A. Lysenko