Muslim Communists

One of Lenin's first decrees had been directed "To the Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East," whose grievances the Bolsheviks sought to coopt. The policies of the Tashkent Soviet were, from this point of view, totally reckless and were challenged by the central government (which moved to Moscow in March 1918) early on. Yet, Moscow's influence was highly mediated. The civil war and the tenuousness of the Bolshevik hold on power in central Russia itself ruled out any direct intervention. Still, Turkestan's avowed adherence to Russia, an important pillar of its claim to legitimacy, gave Moscow some scope for moral suasion, which it sought to utilize to the fullest extent possible. The newly formed People's Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (or Narkomnats, in the revolutionary argot then coming into vogue) sent a mission with plenipotentiary powers to Turkestan to assert its will. The mission, composed of A. P. Kobozev and two Tatars, Y. Ibrahimov and Arif Klevleev, arrived in Tashkent in February 1918 and began the task of attracting Muslims into the new regime. Kobozev's tactics were straightforward: to support local Muslims almost indiscriminately against the Russians in control of the Soviet.^[15] In a telegram to the Tashkent Soviet announcing the Kobozev mission, Stalin, then commissar for nationality affairs, informed the Tashkent Soviet that Klevleev was a former nationalist, but suggested that the new regime not be afraid of "the shadows of the past" and "attract to [Soviet] work other supporters of Kerenskii from the natives, to the extent that they are ready to serve Soviet power."^[16] Kobozev's efforts bore fruit, and on the eve of the Fifth Turkestan Congress of Soviets in April, he was able to inform the Council of People's Commissars in Moscow that "white Muslim chalmas [turbans] have grown [in number] in the ranks of the Tashkent parliament." 17 Seven of the thirty-six members of the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan Autonomous Federative Republic that was proclaimed by the congress were Muslims. Kobozev also pushed for the formation of a Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (Turkomnats) in the new autonomous republic, to which the Tashkent government acceded in June after much footdragging. This was the first in a series of institutions that provided Muslims access to the new power structure. The terms of reference of the Turkomnats were fairly

[15] Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia , 159.

[16] Stalin to Kolesov, 7 April 1918, in PORvUz , II: 223.

[17] Radiogram dated 16 April 1918, in ibid., 241.

modest. Its main function was to represent and defend the interests of workers of various nationalities (including non-Russian Europeans living in Turkestan). With the moral support of Moscow, however, it gathered considerable political power around it and became the mouthpiece of Muslim opinion within the party. By the autumn of 1918, all oblastlevel executive committees of the Soviet regime had sections on nationality affairs.

Over the next few months, large numbers of Muslims flocked to the new institutions of power. The Bolsheviks finally formed their own party, the Communist Party of Turkestan (KPT), in June 1918. Archival research on the recruitment of Muslims into the party in its first years is still not possible, but all evidence suggests that large numbers of Jadids joined it as soon as it was possible. Klevleev was especially active in recruiting Muslims into the party and state apparatus. In May, he visited Samarqand, where he addressed a mass meeting in the Sher Dar madrasa organized by the Samarqand Labor Union. Later in the month, the union renamed itself the Muslim Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies of Samarqand uezd, and by August, a Muslim Workers' Communist Society (Musulman Zehmatkash Ishtirakiyun Jamiyati) boasted 1,600 members in Samarqand. The Jadid newspaper Hurriyat had been adopted by the education section of the Samarqand Soviet as its organ.^[18] In Tashkent, the Tatar Union reorganized as the Tatar Socialist Workers' Committee in June. Then, on z August, in a meeting held in the main mosque of Tashkent and chaired by Klevleev, it transformed itself into the Tatar section of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).^[19] A Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies had appeared in old Tashkent, and it provided an important channel for recruitment of Muslims. After Klevleev engineered new elections for its Executive Committee in June, it included the Bolsheviks Abdullah Awlani and Said Akram Said Azimbaev and the Left Social Revolutionary Tawalla. By August, Tawalla had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Tashkent Soviet, as was Bashirullah Khojaev, the brother of Ubaydullah Khojaev and an old Jadid in his own right.^[20]

The Jadids thus rapidly transformed themselves into Muslim Communists and asserted the claim, again, to speak in the name of the Muslims of Turkestan. "Muslim" also functioned as an identity label in the

[18] Ibid., 235, 267, 289, 324-325.

[19] Ibid., 303, 420-421.

[20] Ibid., 333-334, 461-462.

early Soviet period. For the new regime in Moscow, "Muslims" represented a nationality alongside Ukrainians, Jews, and Georgians in the vocabulary of the Narkomnats. (In Turkestan, "Muslim" had the added benefit of being usable as a synonym for "native.") The ulama, who had contested the Jadid claim to leadership the previous year, proved far less adept at operating in the new political language and quickly lost the initiative they had gained in Muslim politics in 1917. The Jadids went on the offensive quickly. In early 1918, they organized a Fuqaha Jamiyati (Society of Jurists) comprising ulama sympathetic to reform, which was clearly meant to counter the influence of the ulama. Then in April the Tashkent Soviet of Muslim Workers' and Peasants' Deputies, essentially a Jadid organization, asked the City Soviet to arrest the "counterrevolutionary" ulama belonging to the Ulama Jamiyati and to requisition the property belonging to the organization. The request was duly carried out, and the Jamiyat was abolished on 5 May for "not corresponding to the interests of the working people" and its organ, al-Izah , was banned.^[21] The Fuqaha Jamiyati did not last very long, but it had done its work. When it was dissolved in its turn for being "irrelevant to current problems," its property was turned over to Madaniyat (Civilization), a new educational society formed by Jadids.^[22]

For their part, the new Muslim Communists assimilated the language of class that legitimated the new regime. The Tashkent Soviet, in using the language of class to assert the national rights of the region's European settler population, had highlighted the importance of the new language. The Kokand Autonomy had also sought "proletarian" legitimacy for itself by organizing a Muslim Workers' and Peasants' Congress. From then on, class and revolution entered Jadjd vocabulary and over the next several years were repeatedly used to assert the rights of the local population. To be sure, most of the Muslims who entered the party in 1918 and subsequent years had not been active Jadids before 1917. The revolution had seen a major influx of new people into public life, and their numbers continued to increase, thus broadening the base of the politically active elite in Turkestan. The politics of these Muslim Communists, however, represented in many ways a direct connection with the main thrust of Jadidism. Education and enlightenment continued to hold a central place in their strategies. The burst of activity that took place in 1917,

[21] Ibid., 203-204, 265.

[22] "Maqsad-u maslak," Bayan ul-baq , 16 August 1918 (n.s.).

when the Jadids organized teachers' courses and published new textbooks, continued and by the middle of 1918 found a more receptive official environment. Kobozev and Klevleev ensured that the new Commissariat for Education became involved in Muslim education as well. This provided a significant channel for the influx of Jadids into the new apparatus. Russo-native schools had been abolished in the summer of 1917, and now a new network of "Soviet" schools began to emerge around existing new-method schools. In the summer of 1918, twenty new schools were opened, and in 1919, in Tashkent alone, there were forty-eight Muslim schools with 158 teachers and 9,200 students, a significant increase over the figures of the tsarist period.^[23] (This was in addition to the maktabs, which continued to exist.) Although details of the curricula of these schools remain elusive, there is no doubt that these schools were a direct continuation of the Jadids' new-method schools. The increase in the number of schools was made possible by the presence in Turkestan of Ottoman prisoners of war, many of whom were pressed into service as teachers.^[24] They brought with them curricular and political attitudes that had little in common with those of the new regime. Ottoman Turkish was widely used in instruction, and the "national poetry" of the Jadids gave way to Ottoman martial songs and military drill.^[25] Old textbooks were reprinted and new ones continued to appear in a very similar mold. Textbooks such as Wasli's Ortaq (Friend) or Shakirjan Rahimi's Sawgha (Present) scarcely differed, in tone or content, from any new-method textbook of the past, even though they were published by Soviet authorities.^[26] In addition, several textbooks were translated from Russian or Tatar.^[27]

The lithography-based publishing trade did not survive the revolution. The year 1917 had been the most prolific in Central Asian publishing, and the same activity continued into the first half of 1918, when several new periodicals appeared. By the summer, however, the Soviet regime had managed to nationalize all printing presses (the majority of

[23] Rakimi "Prosveshchenie uzbekov," Nauka i prosveshchenie , 1922, no. 2, 41-42; Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia , 149.

[24] This episode remains little known; the only substantial piece of documentation is the reminiscences of Râci (Çakiroz, one of the prisoners of war, in R. (Çakiroz and Timur Kocaoglu, "Turkistan'da Turk Subaylari," serialized m Turk Dunyasi Tarih Dergisi in 1987-1988.

[25] Sh. Rahim, Ozbek maarifning otkandaki wa hazirgi hali (Tashkent, 1923), 18-19.

[26] Wasli, Ortaq (Samarqand, 1918); Shakirjan Rahimi, Sawgha (Tashkent, 1919).

[27] N.P. Arkhangel'skii, "Uchebnaia literatura na uzbekskom iazyke," Nauka i prosveshchenie , 1922, no. 2, 2nd pagination, 36.

which had existed in Russian parts of towns and for whom the printing of Arabic-script texts was a side operation), thus sounding the death knell of the book trade. The official monopoly on printing and publishing was in place, but again the only qualified personnel available were Jadids, and the new official press bore an uncanny resemblance to the Jadid press of old. The unofficial vernacular press had ceased to exist by mid-1918, to be replaced by Ishtirakiyun (Communists), the official organ of Turkomnats, which, as its Arabianate title indicates, retained a distinctly Muslim flavor. Jadid authors retained a commanding presence in the many such quasi-official newspapers that appeared throughout Turkestan over the next three years, as the officially sanctioned press became in those years a conduit for a Jadid voice.

But that voice had changed dramatically in the aftermath of the collapse of the old order. An ethnically charged patriotism rapidly came to characterize the Jadid rhetoric of the nation. In the first days of the revolution, the nation was universally defined as comprising the Muslims of Turkestan. Over the course of the year, the Jadid emphasis shifted gradually to Turkestan, which was now insistently seen as the homeland of the Turkic peoples. The ulama's appropriation of Islam was partially responsible for this, for it pushed the Jadids to cast their appeal increasingly in terms of ethnic nationalism. For Turkestani Jadids, the new conditions pushed to the fore the romantic notions of Turkicness that had been present in their rhetoric before the revolution. All through the year Jadid writers evoked Chinggis, Temur, and Ulugh-bek. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of Fitrat, who wrote a regular column in Hurriyat after becoming its editor in August 1917. In July, he wrote: "O great Turan, the land of lions! What happened to you? What bad days have you fallen into? What happened to the brave Turks who once ruled the world? Why did they pass? Why did they go away?"^[28] This newfound Turkism was also reflected in Fitrat's language. Up until the revolution, Fitrat had published almost exclusively in Persian; in that year he switched to a highly purist form of Turkic. In September 1917, he published a reader for the fourth year of new-method schools (ostensibly for use in Bukhara) with a vocabulary so rigorously Turkist that Fitrat felt compelled to translate several words in footnotes. All the characters in the reading passages bear Turkic names.^[29] In the spring of 1918, a news-

[28] Fitrat, "Yurt qayghusi," Hurriyat , 28 July 1917.

[29] Fitrat, Oqu (Bukhara, 1917).

paper, Turk sozi (Turkic Word), was being published in Tashkent by an organization called Turk Ortaqlighi (Turkic Friendship). Over the next two years, the same mood was to lead to the elaboration of a Chaghatay nationalism by a number of Jadid writers under Fitrat's leadership, grouped in the Chaghatay Gurungi (Chaghatay Conversation).^[30]

There were several sources of this new emphasis on Turkism. The abolition of censorship made possible the expression of hitherto unmentionable visions of identity. The most extreme expressions of Turkism still came from the Tatars, whose newspaper in Tashkent was called Ulugh Turkistan (Great Turkestan). In its first issue, Nushirvan Yavushev had claimed that the "30 million Turko-Tatars in Russia" were, "from the point of view of race, nationality, and language, tied to one another like the children of the same father and the branches of the same tree. Turkestan is the original homeland of the Turks. Therefore, no Turkic nation of Russia will stand back from helping our Turkestani brothers in their quest for autonomy. No Turkic son can forget that Turkestan is his own homeland."^[31] This tenor was kept up throughout the year by Ulugh Turkistan and the Tatar press in European Russia.

The other source of this new Turkism was the Ottoman empire, where pan-Turkism had reached an apogee of influence during the war, the fetvâ depicting it as a holy war notwithstanding. Strict censorship imposed at the beginning of the war had excluded much of this rhetoric from Russia, but with the weakening of the Russian war effort by the autumn of 1917, such censorship waned. Ottoman victories in Transcaucasia in the spring of 1918 further heightened enthusiasm for Turkism among the Jadids. Yet, this was not the Ottoman-directed spread of pan-Turkism that Russian official had long feared (and that contemporary British intelligence services suspected). No evidence of direct Ottoman government support for Turkist or pan-Turkist groups in Central Asia has come to light. Rather, this enthusiasm for Turkism sprung from the radical mood of the Jadids. The most tangible connection between the Ottoman empire and Turkestan was the presence of several thousand Ottoman prisoners of war in Turkestan, who, in the chaotic circumstances of 1918, found themselves having to fend for a living. Yet their participation in

[30] On the Chaghatay Gurungi, see Hisao Komatsu, "The Evolution of Group Identity among Bukharan Intellectuals m 1911-1928: An Overview," Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko , no. 47 (1989): 122ff.; William Fierman, Language Plan-rang and National Development: The Uzbek Experience (Berlin, 1991), 232-239.

[31] N. Yavushev, "Turkistan aftanomiya aluw haqinda," UT, 5 May 1917.

local cultural life, although important, was hardly part of a centrally directed plot to disseminate pan-Turkist ideas.^[32]

It is also important to note that this rigorous Turkism did not come at the expense of Islam, which continued to figure prominently in Jadid rhetoric. Consider the following appeal for unity among Muslims published in October 1917 by the Shura's Central Council: "Muslims! All hopes, all goals of us Turks are the same: to defend our religion [din ] and our nation [millat ], to gain autonomy over our land [topraq ] and our country [watan ], to live freely without oppressing others and without letting others oppress us. Turkestan belongs to the Turks."^[33] "Muslim" and "Turk" were still used interchangeably, but all the Muslims of Turkestan were now assumed to be Turks.

This shift toward Turkism was accompanied by a sudden turn to anticolonialism in Jadid rhetoric. This turn, first noticeable in the autumn of 1917, is largely to be explained by contemporary events. The Jadids had supported the Russian war effort in the hope of securing a voice in imperial politics after the war. The February revolution had changed little in this regard; however, by autumn Russia's commitment to the war, and the geopolitical calculations that underlay it, had unraveled. Upon taking power in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks immediately cast their appeal in antiwar and anti-imperialist terms. Their appeal to toiling Muslims, meant to rattle the governments of the Entente powers,^[34] was followed by the publication of secret treaties signed during the war, many of which were at the expense of the Ottoman empire. The publi-

[32] The main sources for our understanding of pan-Turkism have been contemporary British intelligence reports. Written in the heat of the moment, during a war that had a taken a turn that their authors often did not understand, these reports can easily exaggerate Ottoman influence in Central Asian affairs. They also assumed political manipulation behind every change of opinion among the "natives," who were usually assumed to not be able to think for themselves.
It is true that in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, both Enver and Cemal pashas found themselves in the Russian empire. But it is simplistic to assume that they were still chasing a pan-Turkist dream. Based on unprecedented access to Enver Pasha's private correspondence, Masayuki Yamauchi (The Green Crescent under the Red Star ) has argued persuasively that Enver was motivated ultimately by a desire to recapture his political position in Anatolia. For much of his time in Soviet Russia, Enver sought ways m which he could upstage Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) as the leader of the anti-Entente struggle in Anatolia by appealing to a mixture of anticolonial, anti-Entente, Muslim, and Turkic sentiments. It was only when he realized that the Soviet regime had little interest in backing him that he went to Bukhara and sought to rally the Basmachi against Soviet rule.

[33] "Musulmanlar!" Turk eli , 15 October 1917.

[34] The move achieved its goals, for the British were truly concerned and sought to ensure that news of the proclamation did not reach India or Egypt. The correspondence m this regard is in IOLR, L/P&S/11/130, file P4/1918.

cation of the treaties had a significant impact on Jadid thinking. For Fitrat, "it had now become clear who the real enemies of the Muslim, and especially the Turkic, world are."^[35] The defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1918 further fueled anti-Entente sentiment, and anticolonialism (with an acutely anti-British ring) became a constant feature of Jadid rhetoric.

This marked a significant break from the Jadid admiration for the "developed" and "civilized" nations of Europe, which had withstood all evidence to the contrary. Fitrat, who had chosen Europeans as his mouthpiece in his exhortatory tracts earlier in the decade, wrote Sharq siyasati (Politics of the East), a bitter denunciation of Europe's imperial record in 1919. "To this day, European imperialists have given the East nothing except immorality and destruction. Even though they came to the East saying, 'We will open schools of civilization and colleges of humanity,' they have opened nothing but brothels and winehouses." The European policy of "enslavement and destruction" was current everywhere in the East and the Muslim world and had reached new heights after the recent war. The British now occupied all Arab lands with the exception of Hijaz, which, Fitrat wrote, they were about to swallow. "They will make an Englishman who has falsely converted to Islam the caliph and thus turn 350 million Muslims into their eternal slaves." The only solution for Muslims, and for the people of "the East," was to seek the support of Soviet Russia, which had already fought the imperialist powers and which needed help from "the East" for its own survival. Most significantly, "Today it is necessary to drop everything else and take on the English. In order to do that, it is our responsibility to befriend every enemy of the English."^[36]

The plight of their counterparts in Bukhara further drew the Jadids to the Soviet regime. Bukharan Jadids has sought to force the amir's hand in April 1917, but the move had backfired. The amir turned the matter into one of Bukharan sovereignty and Islamic purity and persecuted the Jadids, most of whom fled to Kagan and Turkestan, where they continued to plot and publish.^[37] Their writings from this period are

[35] Fitrat, "Yashurun muahidalari," Hurriyat , 28 November 1917.

[36] Fitrat, Sharq siyasati (N.p., 1919), 13, 37-47.

[37] Accounts of the revolution m Bukhara are to be found m S. Ayni, Bukhara inqilabi tarikhi uchun materiallar (Moscow, 1922); Faizulla Khodzhaev, K istorn revoliutsii v Bukhare (Tashkent, 1926); Khodzhaev [Fayzulla Khojaev], Bukhara inqilabinin tarikhiga materiallar (Tashkent, 1930); Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Réforme et révolution chez les musulmans de l'empire russe , 2nd ed. (Paris, 1981), 190ff.; Seymour Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva , 1865-1924 (Cambridge, 1968), chs. 14-17; Reinhard Eisener, "Bukhara v 1917 godu," Vostok , 1994, no. 4, 131-144; no. 5, 75-92.

also marked by a conflation of revolution and national struggle. Abdullah Badri, who had written several plays before 1917, published two pamphlets in 1919 presenting the Young Bukharans (as the Bukharan Jadids had come to be known after 1917) to the peasant population of Bukhara. The amir appears not as the last surviving Muslim monarch in Central Asia, as Bukharan Jadids had seen him before 1917, but as a corrupt, bloodthirsty despot living off the toil of the peasants in his realm; other high-ranking dignitaries fare no better.^[38] Fayzullah Khojaev, the leader of the Young Bukharans, writing in the first issue of the party's newspaper, Uchqun (Spark), connected the amir to imperialism, especially that of the British (who had forced the government of Turkey, the center of the Muslim world, to move to Anatolia and who had bombed Mecca and Medina). "Therefore, it is necessary for us," he concluded, "to destroy the cruel, bloodthirsty, and despotic amir [and his functionaries], and to form in their place a just and equitable government, so that poor peasants, artisans, and soldiers may live together in liberty and peace, like the children of the same parents. Thus, hand in hand with our coreligionists throughout the world, Afghans, Iranians, Indians, Arabs, and Turks, we will counter the English, accursed throughout the East, and their lackeys." Khojaev also concluded the need for assistance from Soviet Russia, "the tribune of justice and liberty in the whole world."^[39]

But the conflation of class and nation allowed by anticolonialism could be used against Russian Communists in Turkestan just as easily as against the British. As the First Regional Conference of Muslim Communists, held in May 1919, noted, "The spirit and direction of the old privileged classes has not been removed decisively and... members of the former privileged classes as well as some self-styled Communists treat Muslims as subjects."^[40] Another conference of Muslim Communists of Tashkent "consider[ed] it necessary to note that the primary hurdle to the Soviet construction of Turkestan is the mistrust shown by the

[38] Abdullah Badri, Yash Bukharalilar kimlar? (Moscow, 1919); Badri, Yash Bukharalilar, bechara khalq wa dehqanlar uchun yakhshimi, yamanmi? (Moscow, 1919).

[39] Fayzullah Khoja, "Bukharaning yagana azadliq wa istiqlal charalari," Uchqun , 15 April 1920. The masthead of the newspaper proclaimed: "The liberation of the East is a matter of the People of the East themselves."

[40] Quoted by Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoluisiia , 151.

European proletariat toward the toiling Muslim masses, as a result of which the Muslim proletariat is sidelined in the construction of the new life."^[41] Food supply committees, subordinated to the soviets by early 1918, became the most significant arena of political conflict, but the conflict soon spread to the highest organs of the party itself.

The process was set in motion by the highest authorities of the (newly renamed) Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), or RKP(b), themselves, who by the spring of 1919 were stressing the need for "particular care and attention" toward "the remnants of national feelings of the toiling masses of the oppressed or dependent nations." This concern led to the formation in April 1919 of the Muslim Bureau (Musbiuro) of the Regional Committee of the KPT as the party analog of the Turkomnats.^[42] Quite rapidly, the Musbiuro became autonomous of the Regional Committee of the KPT and began to assert its will quite openly. A Central Committee decree demanding that the indigenous population of Turkestan enjoy proportional representation in all state organs provided an opportunity for the Musbiuro to act. New party and Soviet congresses were hurriedly convened to act upon the new directive, and both elected new executive committees, both of which were dominated by Muslims. Turar Rïsqulov, a Qazaq from Awliya Ata, was elected president of both committees.

Muslim Communists made their most ambitious bid in January 1920, at the Fifth Regional Conference of the KPT, where they succeeded in passing a resolution changing the name of the KPT to the "Communist Party of the Turkic Peoples" and that of the Turkestan Republic to the "Turkic Republic."^[43] This was accompanied by another resolution demanding wide-ranging autonomy for Turkestan. Rïsqulov had explicitly drawn a parallel with the Kokand Autonomy in describing to the congress the kind of autonomy the resolution hoped to institutionalize,^[44] but the resolution, "On the Autonomy and Constitution of Turkestan," went much further. "In the interests of the international unity of toiling and oppressed peoples, to oppose by means of Communist agitation the

[41] Quoted by U. Kasymov, "Iz istoru musul'manskikh kommunisticheskikh organizatsii v Turkestane v 1919-1920 godakh," Trudy Tashkentskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta , n.s., no. 207 (1962): 10.

[42] T. Ryskulov, Revoliutsiia i korennoe naselenie Turkestana (Tashkent, 1925), 121-127.

[43] Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia , 171.

[44] V.P. Nikolaeva, "Turkkomissiia kak polnomochnyi organ TsK RKP(b)," Voprosy istorii KPSS , 1958, no. 2, 83.

strivings of the Turkic nationalities to divide themselves into different groups ... and [their desire] to establish separate small republics; instead, with a view to forging the unity of all Turkic nationalities who have so far not been included in the RSFSR, it is proposed to unify them with the Turkic Soviet Republic, and wherever it is not possible to achieve this, it is proposed to unite different Turkic nationalities in accordance with their territorial proximity."^[45] The juxtaposition of nationalist and Communist language was used again when Rïsqulov traveled to Moscow in May 1920 to present the Muslim Communist case to the highest party authorities after the resolution had been overridden, after some vacillation, by the recently appointed Turkestan Commission (Turkkomissiia) of the Moscow Central Committee. In a presentation to the Central Committee, Rïsqulov argued that there were only two basic groups in Turkestan, "the oppressed and exploited colonial natives and European capital."^[46] He went on to demand, in the name of the KPT and the government of Turkestan, the transfer of all authority in Turkestan to the Central Executive Committee of Turkestan, the abolition of the Turkkomissiia, and the establishment of a Muslim army subordinate to the autonomous government of Turkestan.^[47] In their substance, these demands harked back to the hopes of 1917, but they were now couched in the language of revolution. But class had been replaced, in the colonial situation of Turkestan, by nation; national liberation of the Muslim community could be achieved through Communist means and in the Soviet context.