Toward Soviet Power

In some ways, the carnage at Kokand made surprisingly little difference for the Jadids. Most delegates to the November congress remained active in public life in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Mustafa Choqay represented "Autonomous Turkestan" at several all-Russian gatherings of anti-Bolshevik forces in 1918 and 1919, before going into exile through Transcaucasia.^[2] The Kokand Autonomy had never been able to assert its power beyond the old city of Kokand, and therefore its fall did not affect any significant part of the population beyond Kokand. Nor did military conquest result in effective rule by the Soviets. The Soviet government in Tashkent had admitted its own limits in December when it had allowed the demonstration in support of the Kokand Autonomy to take place in the old city but refused it entrance into the Russian quarter. There matters stood for quite some time. The old city, with its laby-

[1] Fitrat, "Maktab kerak," Hurriyat , 22 April 1918.

[2] D.A. Amanzholova, Kazakhsku avtononuzm i Rossua (Moscow, 1994), 100, 105, 122.

rinthine alleys and unfamiliar sights, remained alien to the new Russian power and largely beyond its control. The only manner in which Soviet power could be asserted in the old city was through requisitioning, carried out in brief armed sorties. These had picked up immediately after the Soviet takeover. The newspaper Ulugh Turkistan complained in early January of the numerous requisitions in recent days. "There was a time when people were dying every day of hunger in the old city, but the European inhabitants of the new city did not grieve. Now that the food supply is diminishing in the new city, they turn their gaze to the old city."^[3] Beyond Tashkent the situation was chaotic still. Soviet power, to the extent that we can speak of it as a unitary entity, came to different places at different times, its fortunes varying greatly according to local conditions. In areas of Russian peasant settlement, Russian-dominated food supply committees took requisitioning in their own hands, often acting against the commands of the Tashkent regime. The establishment of Soviet rule in Turkestan ultimately became a matter of reestablishing the rule of the city over the countryside.^[4]

The dislocation caused by the revolution also redefined the geopolitical situation in Central Asia. Although the Russian civil war did not officially begin until May 1918, the military situation in the empire had been uncertain at least since the autumn of 1917, and had seriously undermined the apparatus of colonial power established a half-century earlier. Soviet power was not established in any militarily meaningful way until 1920, when the central government, having emerged victorious in the civil war in European Russia, could send reinforcements to Central Asia. Until then, the Soviet regime in Tashkent remained vulnerable.

This geopolitical uncertainty was accompanied by a profound economic crisis. By 1918, the cotton economy was in utter ruin. Production had declined after a peak in 1916, and inflation, dating back to 1914, had rocketed in the revolutionary era (prices had increased by 466 percent in 1917, 149 percent in 1918, and 1065 percent in 1919, by which time they stood at 588 times the level of 1914).^[5] Most significantly, how-

[3] "Eski shahrda tintuw," UT , 4 January 1918.

[4] The extremely complex politics of famine m Turkestan after 1917 are analyzed by Marco Buttino, "Politics and Social Conflict during a Famine: Turkestan Immediately after the Revolution," in Buttino, ed., In a Collapsing Empire: Underdevelopment, Ethnic Conflicts and Nationalisms in the Soviet Union (Milan, 1993), 257-277.

[5] Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia: opyt Turkestana (Oxford, 1985 [orig. Moscow, 1921]), 164.

ever, the famine of 1917 had assumed disastrous proportions over the winter. Over the next three years, the famine and the accompanying epidemics and armed conflict with the Russians devastated the local population of Central Asia. According to Marco Buttino's careful estimate, the indigenous rural population declined by 23 percent between 1917 and 1920. (The figure was 30.5 percent for 1915-1920, which included the destruction of the 1916 uprising.) The loss was offset only in very small part by a modest 8.3 percent increase in the urban population, and there was doubtless some emigration to other parts of the Russian empire as well as to China, Afghanistan, and Iran. But the majority of the decline in population is attributable to hunger and war.^[6]

Such were the political realities faced by the Jadids in the spring of 1918. Many entertained hopes of foreign intervention against the Soviet regime. One émigré account, written a quarter of a century later, suggests that many Jadids were in contact with Ottoman authorities in Transcaucasia as well as Istanbul, hoping to attract military intervention.^[7] Rumors of such action had reached P.T. Etherton, the British consul in Kashgar, who also reported in December 1918 that "a deputation of the leading merchants of Ferghana and Kashgaria, men of great wealth and influence, came to see me and expressed the hope that British intervention would eventuate, whilst at the same time they voiced the confidence of the people in any action the British might take."^[8] The Ottoman foray into Transcaucasia ended quickly, and the British, for all their concern about the security of India, were wary of active involvement in an unstable situation while the war still continued in Europe. Armed resistance did not appear as an option to the Jadids.

The Jadids had little connection with the Basmachi revolt in Ferghana, which began in 1918 and continued for several years, by which time it had also spread to eastern Bukhara. Conventional wisdom connects the Basmachi to the destruction of the Kokand Autonomy. Soviet historiography saw in them the force of counterrevolution, acting in unison with every reactionary force in the region to nip Soviet power in the bud. Non-Soviet scholarship has generally accepted the romanticized émigré view of the Basmachi as a guerrilla movement of national libera-

[6] Buttino, "Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation m Turkestan, 1917-1920," Central Asian Survey 9 , no. 4 (1990): 64-69.

[7] Abdullah Recep Baysun, Turkistan Milli Hareketleri (Istanbul, 1943), 31-34.

[8] Etherton to Government of India, 9 December 1918, in IOLR, L/P&S/10/741, 211v-212.

tion.^[9] Both views place a greater burden on the Basmachi than historical evidence can sustain. Instead, the revolt was a response to the economic and social crisis produced by the famine and the resulting "bacchanalia of robbery, requisitions and confiscations on the part of 'Soviet authorities.'"^[10] Ferghana had been a turbulent area in the last decades of imperial rule, when the term basmachi was commonplace in TWG , whose pages were replete with accounts of banditry and murder in the region. The Basmachi represented one strategy of the rural population to cope with this dislocation.^[11] The potential military threat that the Basmachi represented to Soviet power was recognized by many contemporaries, but always greatly overestimated. Both in terms of its organization and its goals (or rather the absence thereof), the movement was embedded in local solidarities, which remained alien to the more abstract visions of national struggle espoused by those who sought to coopt it to their goals.^[12] We might do well to remember that Choqay on more than one occasion disowned any connection between the struggle he had led and that of the Basmachi, who were little better than bandits in his opinion.^[13]

The main political strategy of the Jadids came to focus instead on a struggle for participation in the new regime and its fledgling institutions. "Knowing that struggle in Turkestan was useless and could lead only to the ruin of the land," Choqay wrote in 1923, "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." 14 For reasons beyond their control, the Jadids were remarkably successful in this bid; in the process they outflanked the ulama in their quest for leadership of urban Muslim society.

[9] Most recently by Baymirza Hayit, Basmatschi: Nationaler Kampf Turkestans in den Jahren 1917 bis 1934 (Cologne, 1992).

[10] S. Ginzburg, "Basmachestvo v Fergane," in Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizhenua v Srednei Azu: sbornik statei (Moscow, 1926), 134.

[11] Richard Lorenz, "Economic Bases of the Basmachi Movement m the Farghana Valley," in Andreas Kappeler et al., eds., Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Durham, N.C., 1994), 277-303.

[12] The most quixotic of these attempts was that of Enver Pasha, who in 1921 briefly placed himself at the helm of the Basmachi in a bid to oust the Soviet regime from Central Asia. On this episode, see now Masayuki Yamauchi, The Green Crescent under the Red Star: Enver Pasha in Soviet Russia , 1919-1922 (Tokyo, 1991).

[13] Bor'ba (Tiflis), 12 February 1921; Chokaev, "Korni vozstanii v Bukhare," Poslednie novosti (Paris), 29 September 1923.

[14] Chokaev, "Korni vozstanii."