Colonial Revolution

A. N. Kuropatkin, the recently appointed governor-general, put the matter in its imperial context when he confided to his diary on 6 March: "Nothing special has happened yet, but we can expect anything, even terrorist acts, which are especially dangerous in Asia where we Russians form a third [sic] among the 10 million strong native population."^[1] His first instinct, therefore, was to suppress the news of the revolution in Petrograd, but his efforts at concealment were unsuccessful, and the news became widely known through unofficial channels in Tashkent early the next morning.^[2] On z March, Russian workers of the Central Asian and Tashkent railways organized a soviet, which in turn elected a Tashkent Soviet of Workers' Deputies on 3 March. Soldiers at the Tashkent garrison followed two days later and organized a Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies

[1] "Iz dnevnika A. N. Kuropatkina," Krasnyi arkhiv , no. 20 (1927): 60.

[2] Istorua Tashkenta s drevneishikh vremen do pobedy fevral'skoi burzhuazno-demokraticheskoi revoliutsu (Tashkent, 1988), 286.

on 5 March. The same day, the Tashkent City Duma called a meeting of all public organizations, which proceeded to elect a nineteen-member Executive Committee of Public Organizations with V. P. Nalivkin, a moderate Menshevik in spite of his long career as a functionary in Turkestan, as chair.^[3] All the trappings of dual power were in place in Tashkent.

The initial assumption among all sectors of Russian society was that the revolution would not question their supremacy in Turkestan and that it would remain a largely Russian affair, as had been the case in 1905. The earliest efforts to organize public life in Tashkent therefore made no attempt to include the native population. The public organizations represented in the Executive Committee were all organizations of Russians in the Russian part of Tashkent, and dual power was at first a purely Russian affair. The token presence of "natives"—Ubaydullah Khojaev and Tashpolad Narbutabekov were coopted into the Tashkent Executive Committee to represent the old city—only served to underscore this assumption. On 6 March, Kuropatkin addressed separate assemblies of Russians and Muslims, assuring the latter (in an abridged version of his speech to the Russian assembly) that "under the new order of life in Russia their lives, too, will be easier than before."^[4]

But this was not to be a repeat of 1905. The rise of the reading and listening public over the previous decade and, more importantly, the war and the uprising of 1916, had politicized local society, and in March 1917 the proclamation of the new order was universally celebrated as the dawn of a new age of liberty, equality, and justice. A long poem, "The New Freedom," by the Tashkent poet Sirajiddin Makhdum Sidqi, published in an enormous edition of 10,000 copies on 12 March, provides a glimpse at how the revolution was received in this distant colony of the Russian empire. "Praise be that the epoch of freedom has arrived. The sun of justice has lit the world.... The time of love and truth has come.... Now, we have to set aside our false thoughts; ... the most important aim must be to give thought to how we will live happily in the arena of freedom."^[5] A few weeks later, Sidqi published another narrative poem giving an account of the revolution in Petrograd with a print run of 25,000. Here again, Sidqi's fundamental theme was liberty: The events in Petrograd, which he recounts in considerable detail, were the

[3] P.A. Kovalev, Revoliutsionnaia situatsua 1915-1917 gg. i ee proiavlenua v Turkestane (Tashkent, 1971), 217.

[4] "Iz dnevnika," 60.

[5] Sirajiddin Makhdum Sidqi ,Taza hurriyat (Tashkent, 1917), 2.

culmination of a long struggle by the people of Russia for liberty that dated back to the Pugachev revolt in the 1770s. The verse format of the pamphlet bridged the gap in intelligibility by translating the episode into a form fully accessible to the local population.^[6]

Sidqi's call for action was echoed by many others in Turkestan. The newly established newspaper Rawnaq ul-Islam declared that "it ... [was now] necessary to pass from the epoch of words to the era of deeds."^[7] Even Behbudi broke his composure and in a moment of excitement criticized the old regime, in which "missionaries, or rather men wishing to destroy us and our sacred shariat," had subordinated the shariat to the Turkestan Statute.^[8] And indeed, in the very first days of the new order, a number of organizations appeared among the Muslim population. The Jadids played a crucial part in this period of organization. As early as 5 March, activists in the old city of Tashkent formed a committee to "explain the meaning of the revolution to the Muslim population and to prepare it to take advantage of the new political situation."^[9] On 9 March, a public meeting in old Tashkent, presided over by Ubaydullah Khojaev and Munawwar Qari ,attracted 20,000 people.^[10] Another, even larger public meeting on 13 March at the main mosque elected by acclamation four deputies to the Tashkent Executive Committee. The meeting also elected a separate commissar for the old city and resolved to elect a forty-eight-member committee to administer it. This committee met the following day and chose the name Tashkand Shura-yi Islamiya (Tashkent Muslim Council) for itself. In due course, the Shura decided to send delegations to other cities in Turkestan to initiate organizations, induct new members, and raise funds.^[11] But similar meetings, perhaps on a less spectacular scale, took place in almost every city of Turkestan.

The Tashkent Shura, which in contemporary Russian sources was commonly translated as the "Soviet of Muslim Deputies," was clearly intended to be the counterpart of the soviet in the Russian city. In the long run, this audacious bid to secure self-administration did not suc-

[6] Sidqi, Buyuk Rusiya inqilabi (Tashkent, 1917). Sidqi's poems are only one example of a minor literary explosion unleashed by the February revolution in Turkestan. For obvious reasons, this corpus has received no scholarly attention.

[7] Rawnaq ul-Islam (Kokand), no date (April 1917), no. 5.

[8] Mahmud Khoja Behbudi, "Bizga islahat kerak," Najat , 17 April 1917.

[9] D.I. Manzhara, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Srednei Azii 1905-1929 gg. (Vospominanua ) (Tashkent, 1934), 36.

[10] Najat , 23 March 1917. The figure of 20,000 was most likely exaggerated, bur it nevertheless indicates a completely unprecedented scale of mobilization.

[11] Najat , 26 March 1917 UT , 25 April 1917; Tirik soz (Kokand), 2 April 1917.

ceed, and the Shura came to be a coordinating committee of Muslim organizations in Tashkent. By the summer, when other organizations had emerged beyond its ambit and, eventually, in direct opposition to it, it had become one Muslim organization among many in Tashkent. But in March, it served to assert a Muslim presence in the politics of the most important city in Turkestan, and it tapped the widespread enthusiasm aroused by the revolution.

This enthusiasm was also reflected in the rebirth of the vernacular press. The first month of the new order saw a number of newspapers launched in Tashkent, Samarqand, and Kokand. However, the biggest coup was the takeover of the TWG by a group of Jadids in mid-March. In pursuance of demands by social organizations that both TWG and its parent publication, Turkestanskie vedomosti , be given over to the public (obshchestvo ),^[12] the Tashkent Executive Committee of the Provisional Government organized a public meeting on 12 March to discuss the fate of TWG . The meeting, with Nalivkin in chair, convened in the Teachers' Seminary, which since its inception in 1879 had been headed by N.P. Ostroumov, who was present as editor of TWG . In attendance were Munawwar Qari ,Ubaydullah Khojaev, and a host of other Tashkent Jadids. Ostroumov resigned as editor before the meeting began, and his permission to leave was granted. Nalivkin, speaking in Turkic, decried "the extremely constrained position" of the vernacular press that had existed until then but expressed hope for a better future "now that there are no secrets between the government and the Muslims." The evening ended with Munawwar Qari being elected the new editor of the newspaper, which was renamed Najat (Salvation).^[13]

Ostroumov might have thought the world had turned upside down. The same bewilderment is clear in a letter sent to a Tashkent newspaper by N. S. Lykoshin, the orientalist and longtime Turkestan hand who until recently had been governor of Samarqand oblast. Lykoshin drew his readers' attention to "the transformation in the worldview of our natives," who never had even as many popular rights as those expressed in the Novgorod veche . The difference between Russian and native had to be established, even if only through an appeal to the hoary myths of eleventh-century Novgorod. "These people lived for centuries under

[12] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 8, d. 528, ll. 16-160b.

[13] Gr. Andreev, "Soveshchanie po reorganizatsii 'Turkestanskoi Tuzemnoi Gazety,'" Turkestanskie vedomosti , 16 March 1917; "Tarikhi majlis, yakhud Astraumof ornida Munawwar Qari ,"Najat , 19 March 1917.

the despotic administration of their khans and amirs, under the severe statutes of their strict religion.... Our natives were never citizens; they were always only members of the general Muslim religious community, regardless of which state they happened to live in." Their incapacity to become citizens was clearly demonstrated in 1916, when, "presented with the demand to raise troops, our natives responded not as citizens, but simply as people in whom the instinct for self-preservation was much stronger than [the sense of] duty.... Disorders erupted in the region, Russian blood flowed, and punitive expeditions were called up." Once "pacified" (and Lykoshin knew all about the "pacification," for he had been responsible for the suppression of the uprising in Jizzakh, one of the bloodier episodes in the uprising), the natives had turned to other unsavory practices, such as the campaign of petitions against functionaries launched by "the secret society 'Taraqqiparwar.'" It was in these conditions that the natives entered Russian political life. "The administration explained to the natives the recent events, but of course it was not possible to explain everything completely. The native mass heard nothing sensibly, and understood nothing sensibly. Only it became clear that with the change in the government, our native population was also given the same rights as the other citizens of our fatherland.... This our practical natives understood very well and, not thinking apparently of the obligations of Russian citizenship, turned all their attention to the most rapid realization of their new rights." Lykoshin's ire was raised by events in Samarqand, where the organizers of the first executive committee, formed on 5 March, had coopted two Muslims (one of whom was Behbudi) as its members. At its first meeting, however, the committee had decided that the Muslim population should elect its own deputies. A mass meeting held two days later had resurrected the petition campaign and, in addition to calumniating various members of the administration, had been impertinent enough to ask that taxes raised in old Samarqand not be spent on the Russian part of town and that Muslims be granted not two, but fifty-eight of the ninety seats in the executive committee.^[14]

Lykoshin's views were not necessarily typical of the Russian population, but the unease at the prospect of the transformation of natives into citizens was widely shared. Once the bewilderment had worn off and it became clear that the Provisional Government intended to extend full citizenship to Turkestan and to grant its Muslim inhabitants the fran-

[14] N.S. Lykoshin, "Grazhdane tuzemtsy!" Turkestanskii kur'er , 19 March 1917.

chise on the same basis as other citizens, Russian organizations acted to protect their privileged status in the region.^[15] This took the form of a demand at the Regional Congress of Executive Committees in April to create separate dumas for the Russian and "native" parts of cities in Turkestan, each controlling separate budgets. This attempt to protect the privileges that had been assured under the old regime (the Tashkent Duma was assured a two-thirds Russian composition) and to protect the interests of the Russian population from the impact of democracy clearly pitted the Russian community against the local population. In mid-summer, this issue took a different form, as local Russians demanded the creation of a special electoral unit for the Russian population of Turkestan in the elections to the Constituent Assembly to ensure that the local Russian population was not drowned in the sea of local voters. Both these demands directly contradicted the principle of universal and equal franchise and were contested by Muslim representatives.

The Russian left, which had a considerable presence in Turkestan (the region had returned several socialist deputies to the Second Duma), did not differ markedly in this respect from the rest of Russian society. A Soviet of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies had emerged in Tashkent at the very beginning of the revolution. Given the situation in Turkestan, it was by definition a Russian institution. The labor movement in Turkestan had always been a Russian affair, with little effort to propagandize the "natives." In the conditions of empire, even Russian workers were a prosperous elite in Turkestan, since "belonging to the industrial proletariat in [this] tsarist colony was the national privilege of the Russians."^[16] For the labor movement, native society with its dark Asiatic masses signified little more than the panorama of backwardness that socialism was to conquer. It had failed to protest against the atrocities committed against the local population in 1916. For its part, the Muslim artisans were organized along very different principles. The struggles of the Russian labor movement would scarcely have been intelligible to them even if the Russians had made any effort to be inclusive.^[17] The case of the soldiers

[15] In April, the Provisional Government ordered new elections for all existing municipal dumas (including that of Tashkent) on the basis of universal suffrage (Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents , 3 vols. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961], I: 261-262). It also introduced dumas into other cities m Turkestan.

[16] G. Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia —opyt Turkestana (Oxford, 1985 [orig. Moscow, 1921]), 110.

[17] Ibid., 83 et passim. For a similarly harsh appraisal of the Russian labor movement and the early Soviet regime in Turkestan, see the opening pages of S. Ginzburg, "Basmachestvo v Fergane," in Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizhenua v Srednei Azii: sbornik statei (Moscow, 1926)

was even more obvious: Even the most humble Russian soldier in Turkestan was a member of an occupying force and derived his identity on the colonial fringe from that fact. Moreover, many of the soldiers stationed in Turkestan in February 1917 were recent arrivals, having been sent just the previous autumn to quell the uprising against recruitment. Russian peasants, mostly armed settlers competing with the local population for land and water, were also quick to organize soviets. The majority of them lived in Semirech'e, where the bloodshed from the previous year continued well past the revolution.^[18] The soviets' claim to power thus violated the principle of autonomy of Turkestan on both "national" and territorial grounds, but their monopoly over armed force in the region at a time when all constituted authority was disintegrating ensured that they emerged as very significant political actors.