3
Revolutionary Russia and Islamic Asia

The Theory and Strategy of Global Revolution

The foreign relations with which Soviet Russia entered world politics in 1920-21 were based on several propositions. One was that the revolutionary potential of the imperialist war had been exhausted and that proletarian revolution would be delayed until Communist parties could mobilize mass movements. Another was that reconstructing the infrastructure of the Russian economy depended on three factors: protection from further foreign intervention, the technology of mature industrial capitalism, and a secure place for the Soviet state alongside the capitalist world order. The third was that, for the immediate future, the anti-imperialist revolution begun in Russia could be continued among the Muslim peoples of Asia. Each proposition gained its appropriate slogans—"united labor front," "peaceful coexistence," and support for "national revolutionary" movements.

Of all the leading Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin had the longest-standing and deepest appreciation for the potential of revolutionary movements in Asia.^[1] From his study of the uneven development of capitalism, Lenin concluded that worldwide social revolutions bringing the proletariat to power would not occur everywhere at once. "World revolution" would happen in phases, differ from region to region, and take the form of both social and national revolutions. In the fully developed industrial economies of Western Europe and North America, where bourgeois democratic revolution was completed, and where capitalism had reached its imperialist stage, the proletariat would struggle for power and fight for the independence of the colonies and dependencies dominated by their country. In the multiethnic countries of Eastern Europe, where the development of capitalism was not complete, the struggle for worker solidarity and national independence would take place simultaneously. In colonial and semicolonial

areas, where capitalism was underdeveloped and supported by native "feudalism," and where the conditions for socialist revolution had not matured, it was the first duty of socialists to support the bourgeoisie in its struggle for democracy and national independence. This notion of a regionalized and phased global revolution, set forth in Lenin's "April Theses" (1916),^[2] strongly influenced the formulation of the Bolshevik revolutionary program and the concept of revolution in Asia in particular.

From Lenin's pre-1917 theoretical considerations, two major implications for postrevolutionary strategy followed. One was that the overthrow of imperialism required the combined efforts of the workers of the developed capitalist countries of Europe, the peoples of the multiethnic Russian Empire led by the victorious proletariat there, and the oppressed populations of colonial and semidependent Asia led by nationalist revolutionaries.^[3] Appeals to all three revolutionary constituencies were featured in Bolshevik rhetoric following the October Revolution. The second implication, one that has not been so widely recognized as the first, was that when Lenin and Stalin thought of the breakup of the international imperialist order, they thought of it in territorial terms as well as in terms of social conflict. The end of imperialism was not a simple matter of proletarian insurrection, just as the overthrow of the autocracy of the Russian tsar was not. Both required the liberation of self-identified national entities, which Bolshevik rhetoric referred to as "peoples." In 1917 the power of national self-determination had disintegrated the Russian Empire; a similar disintegration of the international imperialist system would follow. From these two strategic premises the Bolsheviks deployed a number of policies aimed at promoting the territorial breakup of the imperialist world order during the years 1917-1923. They are the subject matter of this chapter.

At Lenin's insistence, the Sixth Party Congress, held between the 1917 February and October revolutions, recognized the right of all the "peoples" of the Tsarist Empire to secede and to form independent states.^[4] By November 1918, however, the party's position had changed and Bolshevik national-colonial policy in Asia bifurcated and traveled down two separate paths. In the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia—tied directly or indirectly to the British and French empires—support for national independence and social revolution became the centerpiece of an anti-imperialist foreign policy. By contrast, secessionist movements within the lands of the former Tsarist Empire both in the Caucasus and in Central Asia were labeled counterrevolutionary. They would be crushed, Stalin, the commissar for nationalities, announced in Pravda , between the military power of the Red Army advancing from without and the revolutionary agitation rising up from within.^[5]

In rejecting political independence for the Asians of the former Russian Empire—Bukharin suggested that the term "national self-determination" be reserved for colonial regions^[6] —the Bolsheviks stood in direct opposition to the theoreticians of national communism, a movement of Muslim members of the RCP(B). Their theory of revolution originated in the 1919 writings of Sultan Galiev, who argued that the proletariat of Europe would never overthrow the bourgeoisie and that revolution there had died and was showing no signs of revival.^[7] However, because Asia was on the verge of revolt, "world revolution" continued to be both necessary and possible. The strategy by which it should be perpetuated, he maintained, was to transfer revolution beyond the borders of the Tsarist Empire to include the masses of oppressed Muslim peoples of Asia. Thus, Sultan Galiev argued not for an alliance between the proletariat of Europe and the oppressed of Asia but rather for a purely Asian strategy, for an alliance there of the peasantry and the nationalist bourgeoisie, composed mainly of merchants and progressive members of the clergy. He developed the notion of "proletarian nations" to buttress his argument that entire nationalities were oppressed, that all oppressed peoples were proletarian, and that in the oppressed countries of Asia was located the potential for continued and self-sufficient revolution. The leading exporters of that revolution would come, Sultan Galiev added in 1920, not from European Russia, not from those who were "ignorant and afraid of Asia" (a phrase often used by national communists at the time), but from the Islamic regions of the Middle Volga, the Urals, the Caucasus, and Central Asia—from those who shared the languages, the religion, and the culture of their neighbors to the south. Finally—and this was perhaps his ultimate departure from strict Leninist orthodoxy—in order to transport revolution organically to colonial and dependent Asia, the Muslims of the Urals, Turkistan, and Azerbaijan needed to be free from ethnic Russian domination because only fully independent Muslim states, liberated from European control, could unleash revolution in Asia.

From the precepts of Sultan Galiev's national communism emerged a direct challenge to Russian control of the October Revolution and to the ideological hegemony of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. This may well have been what inspired or provoked Lenin into insisting that the problem of revolution among those whom he and the other Bolsheviks called "the peoples of the East" be considered and strategized in an organized, unified, and systematic manner In advance of the Second World Congress of the Communist International held in July-August 1920, Lenin prepared and distributed a set of propositions, or theses, to structure a consideration of what was called "the national and colonial question."^[8] The first full debate

among Communists on the theory and strategy of revolution on a global scale followed.

As had been the case at the First Congress the year before, the Second Comintern Congress was occupied with the problems of revolution in Europe; two of its ten sessions, however, were devoted to discussion of Asia.^[9] The most serious debate revolved around two sets of issues.^[10] One pertained to the place of Asia in the grand strategy of global socialist revolution. Was revolution in Asia more or less crucial than revolution in Europe? Would it precede or follow revolution in the capitalist states? To which area should the major share of the attention and resources of the Communist International be directed? The second set of issues related directly to tactics. What social classes in Asia were ready to engage in revolutionary activity? Should Communist parties support or form alliances with nonproletarian political forces in a joint struggle for liberation in Asia? Could soviets be formed in agrarian societies?

There arose no disagreement among the delegates to the Second Congress regarding the theoretical and strategic importance of Asia. Just how and why Asia was important, however, were issues on which a diversity of opinion was expressed. Manabendra N. Roy, voicing an opinion held by himself and other Marxist-informed Asian revolutionaries, maintained that the liberation of Europe depended on social revolution in Asia, that revolution in the colonies would precede revolution in the metropolitan areas, and that the Comintern should therefore divert the major share of its attention and resources to supporting revolutionary activity there. "It is," he argued, "necessary to channel energy towards developing the revolutionary movement in the East, toward its ascent, and to adopt as our basic thesis that the fate of world communism depends on the triumph of communism in the East."^[11]

Roy was a professional revolutionary from Bengal who had converted to Marxism while in the United States during the World War. He knew Indian conditions, Marxist dialectics, and revolutionary organization. Along with Mikhail Borodin, he served as Comintern representative in Mexico, and at the Second Comintern Congress represented the Mexican Communist Party. His challenge to Lenin's position on the national and colonial question^[12] launched a debate with Lenin and other Europeans at the congress that would make him a major figure in Comintern affairs.^[13] Where Roy argued for the "Asian road" to world revolution, some Europeans, most prominently Giacinto Serrati—a delegate of the Italian Socialist Party, a member of its "maximalist" wing, and subsequently a leading militant in the Italian Communist Party—responded that revolution in Asia was impossible until it was completed in Europe. Therefore, it was irrelevant to Marxists.^[14]

Here as elsewhere, Lenin arbitrated the dispute, and his view, something of an intermediate position, prevailed. Asia was important, he told the congress, because national liberation movements there undermined the imperialist world order and because Asia was of such enormous demographic size. While admitting that the parties of Europe had neglected Asia, Lenin was nevertheless unwilling to divert support from revolution in Europe.^[15] Zinoviev, the entire Russian delegation, and most of the Europeans at the congress supported Lenin. In response, Roy backed off from his assertion that revolution in Asia must precede revolution in Europe and acceded to Lenin's position: Revolution in the colonies was a matter of urgency because it would accelerate the rate of revolutionary change within the imperialist camp.

On the issue of with what class or classes in Asia revolutionary Marxists should ally, Lenin maintained that the strongest anti-imperialist forces, and the best potential allies for Communists, could be found among the movements of national liberation that had been awakened in Asia in the years before and during the World War. These movements were of necessity bourgeois, he admitted, since the majority of the population of Asia was composed of peasants rather than of proletarians; however, in the absence of a large proletariat, they had a much greater chance for success against imperialist control than did nascent and weak Communist parties acting alone. The task of the Comintern therefore was to enter into temporary alliances with what Lenin called "bourgeois democratic national movements in the colonies and backward nations," as well as with anti-colonial movements within the imperialist states. However, proletarian elements were to remain organizationally and ideologically independent of these nationalist movements so that they could be educated by Communists in their special tasks—fighting for radical solutions to the problems of bourgeois-democratic revolution and struggling against the very movements with which they allied. This strategy for revolution in Asia was designated in the resolutions of the Fourth Comintern Congress (November-December 1922) "the united anti-imperialist front." A. B. Reznikov, the leading Brezhnev-era expert on the history of the Comintern in Asia, called it "a great scientific discovery" and an idea of "immense theoretical and practical significance."^[16]

Roy rejected it. Bourgeois democracy, he stated, was opposed to the interests of workers and poor peasants; it had no popular support; it was not a revolutionary force; sooner or later it would collaborate with imperialism and oppose revolution. The task of Communists, Roy contended, was to form parties from among the emergent proletariat and the poor peasants, create and lead mass movements, and campaign directly for power. Such parties represented the only viable revolutionary force in Asia, he main-

tained, and the only authentic challenge to imperialism. ^[17] In opposition, Serrati rejected both Lenin's position and that of Roy. Unless the proletariat was strong enough to stand alone, he insisted, no socialist revolution was possible; only by means of proletarian revolutions and soviet regimes could nations be liberated. Zinoviev attacked Serrati's position as nothing more than a summary of Marx and Engels, and Lenin supported him, telling the congress that the Communist Manifesto had been written "under completely different circumstances."^[18] Nevertheless, Lenin compromised with Roy. In the text of the theses he submitted to the congress, the term "bourgeois democratic" was changed to "national revolutionary."^[19]

How large was Lenin's compromise? A comparison of the text of the original supplementary theses submitted by Roy with the text of those adopted indicates that Roy's underwent drastic alteration during the course of the proceedings,^[20] whereas only minor changes were introduced into those of Lenin. The concession Lenin did make, the substitution of "national revolutionary" for "bourgeois nationalist," was probably not unwelcome to him either rhetorically or strategically. Both the theses devised by Roy and those written by Lenin were discussed, revised, adopted unanimously by the full congress, and published accordingly—indicating that the delegates did not regard any contradiction between the two of them as serious. The historical outcome of the double adoption was, however, strategic ambiguity. The exact nature of the conditions and terms of cooperation between Communists and nationalists in Asia was not predetermined. Within months, the course of events in Persia and India would clearly show the difficulties involved in relating actual revolutionary situations to preconceived strategy.

Embedded in the study of Comintern Asian policy are interpretative issues of major relevance to the historical study of twentieth-century global politics. How much significance did the first Communists attribute to Asia in their grand strategy of global revolution? What did they consider the place of nationalism in the crisis of imperialism and in the inception of socialist revolution? Did they develop a coherently conceived grand strategy of global revolution once the prospects for continuous revolution in Europe had faded?

Among the Bolsheviks there was a diversity of opinion regarding the relationship between revolution in Europe and revolution in Asia following the October Revolution, and they proposed a variety of revolutionary strategies. Individuals were not consistent in their views—Lenin least of all—and no coherent debate on global revolution took place subsequent to the Second Comintern Congress. By the time the matter was debated again

within the Communist International—in 1927, during the Nationalist Revolution in China—open debate on strategy and free ideological development had been stifled by the struggle for succession within the Russian Communist Party.

Trotsky and Bukharin seem to have been the most convinced that national liberation in Asia depended on successful proletarian revolution in Europe. In the manifesto of the First Congress of the Communist International, authored by Trotsky, freedom for colonies was regarded as something that depended strictly on proletarian revolution in Europe: "The workers and peasants not only of Annam [a region in Indochina with its capital at Hue], Algeria, and Bengal but also of Persia and Armenia will obtain the possibility of independent existence only on the day when the workers of England and France will have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken the state power into their hands."^[21] Zinoviev shared this opinion, although he momentarily became emotionally enthusiastic about the prospects for uprisings in Islamic Asia at the time of the Baku Congress in September 1920. Stalin, who attributed greater importance to revolution in Asia than did any other major Bolshevik, including Lenin, consistently saw the two revolutions as strongly interdependent: Socialist revolution could not triumph in Europe without revolution in the colonies, but colonial revolution could not succeed without the destruction of capitalism at its center.^[22]

Western scholars have insisted that Lenin never gave to the revolutionary potential of Asia the same attention he devoted to Europe—either before or after October 1917.^[23] He considered Asia systematically only around the time of the Second Comintern Congress in the summer of 1920, and his interest at that time was, as it continued to be, almost exclusively theoretical. That is to say, he never adopted an Asian strategy. On the other hand, party historiography in the USSR during the years prior to 1987-1991 attributed to Lenin an almost divine omniscience in revolutionary strategy. His analysis of national liberation movements, the result of "long years of practical experience, painstaking study, and theoretical analysis," yielded "a set of ideas consonant with the major socio-economic and political trends in the changed world." He "constantly anticipated great battles and revolutions in the colonial East. All his works and speeches dealing with the East attest to his full combat-readiness to meet these great battles equipped with a thorough knowledge of the scientific principles and strategy and tactics of the world socialist revolution."^[24]

One cannot agree. Lenin's speeches and writings during the last thirty months of his politically active life do not disclose a highly articulated theory of global revolution for the postwar/postrevolutionary world into

which was integrated the development of both capitalist Europe and agrarian Asia, and in which social, national, and colonial questions were represented as components of a unitary revolutionary process. A definite strategy for advancing the cause of international revolution on a global basis eluded him. In speaking to the Third Comintern Congress (June-July 1921) he was overtly indefinite regarding the particulars of the Asian situation, stating that revolution in Asia "may break out . . . sooner or later, and very suddenly too," and that in the decisive battles of world revolution the populations of Asia "will perhaps, play a much more revolutionary part then we expect."^[25] It seems that as the revolutionary effects of the World War exhausted themselves without yielding a Europe of soviet republics, Lenin became increasingly open to alternative scenarios of world revolution.

There were nevertheless matters about which Lenin was definite. For instance, he was convinced that colonial revolt and revolutionary nationalism could powerfully undermine imperialist domination of the global political economy. He reassured his party that the enormous population and revolutionary potential of the Asian continent guaranteed that, ultimately, global socialist revolution could not fail. He was not cynical about the principle of national autonomy. To the contrary, he vehemently criticized the centralizing policies followed by Stalin, Grigorii Ordzhonikidze, and Feliks Dzerzhinskii in bringing Soviet rule to Georgia as being "Great-Russian chauvinist," and he warned against the adoption of "imperialist" attitudes toward national minorities in Central Asia.^[26] He did not believe that European-style class struggle could be induced artificially in agrarian Asia or that revolution there could be installed by military force. He was confident that the struggle for national liberation in the colonial and semidependent world both could and should proceed autonomously, and he was very cautious about identifying national particularism and nationalist insurgence too quickly, too easily, and too closely with the proletarian cause. "Don't paint nationalism Red," he admonished in 1920.^[27] To comprehend how and why Lenin came to these conclusions, it is necessary to understand the revolutionary initiative undertaken by the Bolsheviks in Islamic Asia in the years 1919-1921.

A Soviet Republic in Persia

Within weeks of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks issued a revolutionary appeal to the Muslim peoples of Asia, both to those living within the frontiers of the former empire of the tsars and to those residing beyond. It was entitled "To the Muslim Toilers of Russia and the East." The Muslims of Russia, the proclamation stated, would be granted cultural

autonomy under the protection of the Soviets. Those of "the East"—the "Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Indians"—were encouraged to drive out "the European imperialist robbers," "the oppressors of your countries."^[28] Addressing all of Islamic Asia in a single statement was no mere convenience. As was true of other such revolutionary proclamations made during the early months of the new regime, it indicated that the appeal of the October Revolution was intended to be universal. As Ronald G. Suny has reminded us, the Bolsheviks aimed a common rhetoric of self-determination and national liberation at the empires of the Europeans in Asia, at the semi-colonial periphery of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and China, and at the Muslim former subjects of the tsar.^[29] In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine the appeal of the revolution in Russia to the Muslim peoples of the former Tsarist Empire and to those on the southern periphery of the Russian Federation.

The reconquest of Transcaucasia began in April 1920 when Mikhail Tuchachevskii, Grigorii Ordzhonikidze, and the troops of the Eleventh Red Army reoccupied Baku, the major port on the Caspian Sea and the center of the Caucasian petroleum industry. Ordzhonikidze was chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council on the Caucasian front, Tuchachevskii was temporarily military commander in the area, and most of the troops were ethnic Russians. The reason for the operation had been stated by Lenin the previous February: "We are in desperate need of oil."^[30] The conquerors toppled the nationalist Musavatist government of Azerbaijan and replaced it with a commission of Muslim Bolsheviks who formed the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

The large Armenian state created by the Treaty of Sèvres, concluded in August between the Allied powers and the Ottoman government in Constantinople, was disassembled. Turkish nationalist forces invaded formerly Ottoman western Armenia in September, reassuring Chicherin that they would avoid infringing on Soviet interests in eastern Armenia. The Russian government in Moscow attempted to mediate the conflict, hoping to defend its strategic interests in Transcaucasia without becoming involved in hostilities. When their efforts failed and the Armenians accepted Turkish peace terms, Ordzhonikidze organized a regiment of Armenian troops and Communist Party members, most of whom came from the industrial and cultural centers of Baku and Tiflis. They proclaimed themselves the Revolutionary Committee of Armenia, appealed by radio for a national uprising, and asked the Eleventh Red Army for assistance. Soviet troops blocked any further advance by the Turks but made no attempt to expel them. The Turks meanwhile refused to withdraw and massacred some of the Armenian population.^[31]

1.  Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1923

In late January 1921, Stalin asked the Central Committee to authorize Ordzhonikidze to organize an insurrection in Georgia, to be supported by the Red Army if necessary. Lenin hesitated, and while communications with Moscow were mysteriously disrupted, Ordzhonikidze acted on his own and authorized an armed uprising, which was supported by elements of the Eleventh Army. After two weeks of hard fighting, the Bolsheviks entered Tiflis, deposed the Menshevik government, and proclaimed the Georgian Soviet Republic.^[32] The Turks responded by occupying the southwestern districts of the country. The Caucasian "Iron" Cavalry Division commanded by D. E Zholba secured Batum, but under the terms of the Soviet-Turkish treaty of 16 March the Soviet government made consider-

able territorial concessions to Turkey—the Kars region of Armenia and Artvin and Ardahan in Georgia.

In Central Asia the reconquest of the key border territories of formerly tsarist Russia was assured in July 1919 when the Red Army gained control over the entire 1,600-km-length of the Orenburg (Chkalov)-Tashkent railway. Military units arrived at Tashkent (the capital of present-day Uzbekistan) in November, and a five-man Commission for Turkistan Affairs was installed there. It was led by Mikhail Frunze and Valerian Kuiby-shev, both of whom played leading roles in the reconquest of the two former tsarist protectorates, the Emirate of Khiva, on the steppes of what is today northern Turkmenistan, and the Emirate of Bukhara, in present-day southern Uzbekistan and western Tadzhikistan. Both emirates were riddled with conflict between the central authority and nomadic tribes on the periphery, and between reactionary emirs and groups of enlightened-statist "Young Khivans" and "Young Bukharans." The latter were movements of young, radicalized Turkistani intellectuals and merchants influenced by indigenous radicalism and Young Turk ideology, both of which had developed independently of Russian socialism. In December 1919, elements of the Red Army invaded Khiva, which was declared the People's Republic of Khoresm the following April. In August-September 1920 a "popular revolution" in Bukhara led by "Young Bukharans" was supported by, and perhaps staged by, Bolsheviks from the Turkistan Commission. Red Army units commanded by Frunze intervened, captured the city, destroyed the famous minaret and the public mosque, and seized the state treasury for shipment to Moscow. So transparent was the Bukharan operation that even Moscow was embarrassed and scolded the local Bolsheviks for "appearing imperialist" and for their "colonial attitudes."^[33]

With the military and revolutionary reconquest of Caucasia and Central Asia, relations between the Soviets of Russia and the Muslims of Asia became matters for decision and action. Would the October Revolution be continued, internationalized, and directed southward beyond the borders of the former Russian Empire? If so, would it be transmitted by those of similar religion, languages, and culture, or would it be controlled by Europeans from Moscow and Petrograd? Muslim national communists like Sultan Galiev had an answer to this question. Just as Soviet Turkistan was "the revolutionary lighthouse of Chinese Turkistan, Tibet, Afghanistan, India, Bukhara, and Khiva," he wrote, so will Soviet Azerbaijan "become the Red lighthouse for Persia, Arabia, and Turkey."^[34] Muslim national communists wanted the October Revolution activated in Asia, and wanted it led by Muslims and accomplished forthwith—a purely Asian strategy of

continuous revolution. But the leadership of the RCP(B) within the Comintern was not convinced.

Within five months of Azerbaijan's coming under Bolshevik control, and at about the time the Red Army entered Bukhara, the Comintern proclaimed a major revolutionary initiative in Islamic Asia. Ordzhonikidze and RCP(B)-Central Committee member Elena Stasova arranged a "Congress of the Peoples of the East" and convened it in September at Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. To this congress were invited "the enslaved masses of Persia, Armenia, and Turkey" as well as the "more distant peoples" of Islamic Asia and India.^[35] Almost 2,000 delegates from twenty-nine nationalities, one-half of them from the Caucasus and most of these from Azerbaijan, attended the congress, where they heard Zinoviev call for "a holy war above all against British imperialism."^[36] Although the delegates gave vent to much uncomplicated anti-European nationalism, those who attended the congress at Baku did not constitute a cadre of disciplined, dedicated, and devout activists sophisticated in Marxist theory and skilled in revolutionary tactics; nor did the congress transform them into one.^[37] And those who represented the highest levels of the Comintern at the congress did not commit themselves to an Asian strategy. Zinoviev and Béla Kun disparaged the idea of self-sufficient revolutions of national liberation in Asia. They insisted that the class struggle and the alliance between the peoples of Asia and the proletariat of Europe and Russia were the indispensable elements of international socialist revolution.^[38]

Thus, as the Civil War ended in Russia, disparate strategies for continuing the October Revolution and for extending it to Asia were being articulated, and these the Comintern could not fully coordinate and direct. As a result, the beginnings of the NKID's efforts to introduce "peaceful coexistence" into the relations between the new Soviet state and the major powers of Europe and to normalize relations with the countries on the southern periphery of the soviet republics were seriously complicated. Nowhere was this more true than in Persia.

With the revolution in Russia and the withdrawal of tsarist armed forces from northern Persia in 1917, Great Britain occupied a position of almost complete domination in a region close to the new soviet republics and of vital strategic significance to them. British forces occupied Persia and Mesopotamia and Turkish Armenia to the west. British naval units controlled the Caspian Sea. The Anglo-Persian agreement (signed in August 1919 but never ratified) represented the highest achievement of Lord Curzon, British foreign secretary (1919-24) and former viceroy and governor-general of

India, in his efforts to found a post—World War British Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia.^[39] It would have given to British advisers control over the Persian treasury, army, and railroads. The governments of both France and the United States lodged protests against the treaty; Persian nationalists were outraged; and the assembly (majlis ) in Tehran refused to ratify it. The NKID also objected to it, particularly in that the Persian government refused to open even minimal diplomatic relations with the new Soviet state—despite the fact that the Soviet government renounced the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 dividing Persia into spheres of influence, denounced the secret wartime treaties between Russia and the Entente calling for partition of the country, canceled the debt incurred by Persia with the tsarist regime, surrendered tsarist concessions there, and handed over to the government in Tehran the assets of Russian-owned banks.^[40]

A squadron of eighteen ships formed the northernmost tip of British influence in Persia; these were the remnants of the navy the British had organized for counterrevolutionary General Anton Denikin, commander in chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia (1919-20). With Denikin's defeat and the Bolshevik advance into Transcaucasia in March-April 1920, local Persian authorities interned the ships and placed them under the protection of British Indian forces. The ships were based at Enzeli (subsequently Pahlavi and then Bandar Anzali), the best Persian port on the Caspian and the center of the lucrative prewar Russian caviar industry. Since 1918, British and White forces had repeatedly used Enzeli as a base from which to launch attacks on Baku and on Krasnovodsk across the Caspian in Russian Turkistan. In April 1920, Trotsky cabled Lenin and Chicherin: "The Caspian must be cleared of the White fleet at all costs. If a landing in Persian territory is required, it must be carried out." Before forwarding the memorandum, Lenin noted in the margin: "I fully agree."^[41] On 18-19 May 1920, Soviet naval forces in the Caspian under the command of Fedor Raskolnikov captured the ships, landed 2,000 marines, surrounded the British garrison, and took the city of Enzeli. British forces retreated to Qazvin, 90 miles northwest of Tehran. The government in London declined to reinforce them, and Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law (1922-23) made clear in the House of Commons that His Majesty's Government was under no obligation to defend Persia. British prestige in Persia thereupon suffered a blow from which it never recovered.^[42]

Following the attack on Enzeli, Soviet policy in Persia ran on two tracks. Proceeding on one track, Chicherin warned Ordzhonikidze and Raskolnikov not to extend Soviet military force beyond Enzeli, and Russian forces were withdrawn from Persia within three weeks as part of the

Soviet Russian effort to establish relations with the government of Persia in Tehran. On the other track, the Soviets undertook a major revolutionary initiative beginning with the contacts Raskolnikov established with leaders of the revolutionary nationalist movement in northern Persia.^[43]

The densely forested mountains of the Gilan and Mazanderan provinces in northwestern Persia, along the shores of the Caspian Sea, had been beyond the control of the authorities in Tehran for some time. Local chiefs, who headed bands of guerrillas called jengheli (from the Persian, "of the jungle") effectively controlled the countryside. One such chief was a minor landowner, cleric, and military adventurer named Mirza Kuchik Khan, who was allied with radical bourgeois intellectuals from both Resht, the capital of Gilan province, and Tehran. His movement was anti-Western, Pan-Islamic, and socially radical, and it was directed both against the existing regime in Tehran and against British presence in Persia. In May 1920, Kuchik Khan addressed a letter to the Soviet commanders at Enzeli asking for assistance against the troops of the Persian government, which had recently expelled his forces from Resht. And on 4 June, two days before they evacuated their forces from Persia, Raskolnikov and Ordzhonikidze met Kuchik somewhere on the road between Enzeli and Resht and apparently persuaded him on the spot to proclaim himself president of the "Soviet Republic of Gilan." Thereby was created the first Soviet "satellite" beyond the frontiers of the former Russian Empire.^[44] Kuchik Khan then personally directed a message to Lenin requesting the help of all socialists belonging to the Comintern "in liberating us and all weak and oppressed nations from the yoke of English and Persian oppressors."^[45]

In Moscow and Petrograd the news from Persia evoked an outburst of jubilation. As leader of the Red Army, Trotsky immediately sent to Kuchik Khan a message stating that "the news of the formation of the Persian Red Army has filled our hearts with joy."^[46] The head of the Eastern Department of the NKID announced that revolution would spread from Persia to Afghanistan to northern India. A Persian branch of Adalet , a revolutionary Social Democratic party formed in 1916 of workers in the Baku oil fields, moved to Resht and there founded the Persian Communist Party. It was in the midst of these events that the Second Comintern Congress convened in July 1920. When Lenin informed those assembled that "the Soviet movement in the whole East, in all Asia has already started," he was in all probability referring to the Persian situation.^[47]

Behind the scenes, however, party leaders like Trotsky were much more skeptical regarding Soviet power in Asia.^[48] The Gilan adventure was sponsored by Ordzhonikidze, Stalin, and Sergei Kirov, then a leader of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and subsequently its general secretary

(1923-26). It was an embarrassment to Soviet diplomacy. Chicherin angrily opposed the whole operation, never calling it anything other than "Stalin's Gilan Republic,"^[49] and fought with the supporters of the Gilan Soviet for Lenin's backing. Typically, Lenin supported both positions. He agreed not to grant the Gilan Republic formal diplomatic recognition, but he asked the NKID to give an official reception to a Gilan mission that arrived in Moscow in August 1920.^[50] He also sanctioned military assistance to the Gilan Soviet, an action he may have seen as an implementation by military means of the doctrine of alliance between Communist parties and revolutionary nationalist movements that he had propounded at the Second Comintern Congress. Eventually a division of Red Army troops, mainly from Azerbaijan and Georgia, was dispatched to northern Persia to aid the Gilan Soviet Republic, the first and last time that organized combat units of the Red Army were directly involved in operations assisting a nationalist-communist coalition beyond the borders of the soviet republics.^[51] The aid program was undertaken semi-independently by the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic, which thus gave the Russian government in Moscow the capability of "plausible denial" and allowed it to adopt an official policy of noninterference in the conflict between Gilan and Tehran.

Conflict within the government of the Gilan Soviet Republic itself strengthened Chicherin's hand in the policy dispute over Persia. The Gilan regime was composed of followers of Kuchik Khan, Kurdish chiefs, "anarchist" followers of the Tehran bourgeois intellectual Eksanullah Khan, and Communists. Some of the latter were important party personalities, both Persian and Russian, one of whom openly declared that it was the intention of Soviet Russia to liberate all Persia. Others were Persian migrant workers from the Baku oil fields who were inept at politics and who more than once stated openly that the Comintern had instructed them gradually to subvert and overthrow the power of the tribal leaders.^[52] A. Sultan-Zade, the founder of the Persian Communist Party and a member of the ECCI (1920-23), was true to the program he had articulated in support of Roy at the Second Comintern Congress, namely, immediate socialist revolution and establishment of Soviet institutions. Not unexpectedly a struggle for control of the movement erupted between Kuchik Khan, on the one hand, and the Communists on the other. In July the government split, and Kuchik withdrew into the forest with his troops. Sultan-Zade formed a new government in Gilan dominated by the Persian Communist Party which attempted to implement a full-scale program of proletarian dictatorship, including nationalization of enterprises, closure of the bazaars, removal of the veil from women, and attacks on the clergy. With the Gilan Soviet involved in open conflict, the government in Tehran sent the Persian

Cossack Brigade under the command of Colonel Petr Storroselskii, a counterrevolutionary Russian officer, to "pacify" the area. Resht fell in August and Storroselskii's forces marched on Enzeli, but Soviet troops held them off and drove them back from the port city.^[53]

At this juncture the correlation of forces within the Bolshevik leadership tipped away from support for insurrectionary initiative in Persia. The Second Comintern Congress defined the strategy for situations such as those at Gilan: Purely Communist regimes could not be immediately introduced in semicolonial Asia; Persia must first go through a stage of bourgeois revolution; national revolutionaries were objectively progressive and were to be supported. In Gilan the Persian Communist Party, with a new Central Committee, resolved to adopt the tactics of the "united anti-imperialist front," to avoid "revolutionary adventurism," to form a class alliance extending from the proletariat to the middle bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, and to support a program of bourgeois democratic reforms.^[54] The following spring the Persian Communist Party and Kuchik Khan reallied in a "united front" government.

After the Persian Cossack Brigade was driven back from Enzeli, it was reorganized by British advisers. They dismissed Storroselskii and the other Russian officers of the brigade, and at its command they placed the energetic, nationalistic, and ambitious Reza Khan, subsequently prime minister (1923-25), and then shah (1925-41) of Persia/Iran. In February 1921, Reza and his force of 3,000 Cossacks marched on Tehran and installed a new government in which Reza was appointed minister of war and commander in chief of the army. The first actions of the new government were to renounce the unratified Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919 and to sign with the Russian Federation a treaty that had been under negotiation since the previous October.^[55]

The Soviet-Persian treaty was a document without strong precedent in international law. It went into effect from the moment it was signed; it had no expiration date; and there was no mechanism for renunciation. The Soviet government agreed to freedom of navigation on the Caspian Sea and to the presence of a Persian fleet there. It renounced all debts incurred by Persia with the tsarist regime, returned offshore islands seized by the tsarist government, and surrendered every concession Russia held or claimed in Persia, with the exception of the Caspian Sea fisheries. What Soviet Russia gained in return was the reaffirmation of the border of 1917, the reduction of British influence in Persia, and special military rights. Regarding the latter the Persian government consented to allow Russia to "advance troops into the Persian interior for the purpose of carrying out

military operations necessary for its defense" in the event that a third country (Britain) used Persian territory as a military base or threatened the Soviet frontier.^[56] Over these provisions, contained in the notorious Articles V and VI of the treaty, there was vigorous debate in the Persian parliament. And only the strength of anti-British feeling in the country prevented the Tehran government from demanding of Moscow that the text of the treaty be revised to delete the two clauses. In 1941 they served as the basis for Soviet occupation of northern Iran. The Khomeini regime repudiated Articles V and VI in 1979; otherwise the treaty remained in effect.

Throughout the treaty negotiations, the objective of the NKID was to protect Transcaucasia, Baku in particular, from British military power. The oil center was vulnerable to attack from northern Persia; twice in 1918 British forces had occupied Baku from their base there. The RCP(B) Central Committee authorized Chicherin to agree with Tehran that if British troops were completely withdrawn from Persia, Azerbaijani troops would be evacuated from Enzeli. In this regard, the treaty was a triumph for Russian diplomacy. Tehran formally renounced the one-sided Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919, and British troops were withdrawn in May 1921.

Soviet forces remained, however, and in conjunction with the forces of Kuchik Khan they marched on Tehran in June. They were held off by Reza Khan's Persian Cossack Brigade while the Tehran government protested strongly. Moscow was persuaded thereby to abandon all support for the Gilan Republic and stated that it would recall and punish those officials responsible for terrorizing the Gilan people. Chicherin was even able to get the Central Committee of the RCP(B) officially to admonish the "undisciplined" Bolsheviks of Transcaucasia.^[57] Red Army troops were withdrawn in September. Thereafter Kuchik Khan disputed the direction of the movement with his Communist allies which he settled by inviting them to a lavish feast at which he slaughtered the entire Central Committee of the Persian Communist Party. The Persian army "restored order" in Gilan, and the Gilan Soviet Republic expired in October. Kuchik Khan fled to the mountains of the Talysh district along the Persian-Azerbaijan frontier, where he froze to death.^[58] The Persian Communist Party lost three-quarters of its membership, and by 1924 it had but 600 adherents.^[59]

The Gilan Soviet Republic had been launched as the Red Army was achieving its final victories over the forces of counterrevolution. The incursion into Persia was an extension of the Civil War at a time when the international boundaries of southwest and Central Asia were being redrawn amidst the turmoil of the collapse of the Turkish and Russian empires, and when conflicting territorial claims abounded. The means by which the October Revolution was to be internationalized in Asia were still

being defined, and coordination of "the world revolutionary process" by the Communist International was just beginning. The Communist parties in the territories of the former Tsarist Empire had not yet been worked into the disciplined unitary organization; decentralized initiative remained possible. For those who had fought and won the Civil War, revolution, reconquest, and security went hand in hand.

War and Diplomacy in Afghanistan

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the territory of Afghanistan was occupied by a loose confederation of disparate Tajik, Hazara, and Pushtun tribes and principalities. The emir in Kabul was little more than the chief of one of them, and many tribal leaders, rather than paying tribute to him, received payments from him, allegedly for guarding the frontiers. Since the 1860s, control of Afghanistan had been the main prize in "the Great Game" played between the British and Russian empires as the Russians extended the security of their region by subduing one central Asian tribe after another, and as the British moved north from India seeking ground on which to anchor the defenses of the North-West Frontier Province of India (in present-day Pakistan). In 1907, confronted with a common German threat, Russia and Britain suspended the struggle, concluded the Anglo-Russian Entente, and settled their rivalry in Central Asia as well as in Persia. Afghanistan was placed within the British sphere of influence, and Afghan foreign relations, including those with Russia, were conducted by the government of British India in Delhi.

Ten years later, two events changed the terms of Russian and British relations with Afghanistan.^[60] The October Revolution brought to power a government which, unlike the Tsarist Empire, proclaimed its respect for Afghan independence, and the faithfully pro-British emir of Afghanistan (since 1901), Habibullah Khan, was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in February 1919. The new emir Amanullah Khan (1919-29) was associated with an enlightened and reformist-minded group of intellectuals in the Young Afghan movement. He was the son-in-law of Mahmud Tarzi, a man who had spent years in exile, who had strong Young Turk associations, who was well known outside the country as a leading Young Afghan anticolonialist, and who served as his foreign minister. Within months of coming to power, Amanullah adopted a program of radical reforms (which eventually resulted in a traditionalist revolt that drove him from power in 1929), declared Afghanistan an independent country, denounced existing treaties with Britain, opened negotiations with Soviet Russia, and declared a "holy war," calling on Indian Muslims to rise against British rule. In general, he displayed what Lord Curzon termed, with classic British understatement, "a truculent attitude."^[61]

2.  Soviet Turkistan and Afghanistan in 1922

Following a brief, three-week conflict, called the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Amanullah sued for peace. The Indian Army had confronted him within a few miles of the border, and the ability of British forces to bombard Kabul and Jalalabad from the air impressed him. Under the terms of the treaty of Rawalpindi (August 1919), Amanullah recognized British authority over the Pathan tribal belt of the North-West Frontier Province. The government of India recognized the independence of Afghanistan and surrendered control of Afghan foreign relations while at the same time

cutting off the subsidy the emir received. The Indian government had little choice but to surrender its strategically significant position. Although the Indian Army had repulsed the Afghan invasion, its military campaign had collapsed completely when the long-established practice of defending the Peshawar district of the North-West Frontier Province with local tribal troops failed disastrously. So many men deserted from the Khyber Rifles that the commanders found it necessary to ask each man individually whether he wished to remain in British service or to be discharged. Six hundred of seven hundred men opted for discharge, and the unit had to be disbanded.^[62] In the aftermath of the war, the government of India reevaluated its whole frontier policy, and the British Indian Army was permanently redeployed in the area.^[63]

The Red Army meanwhile had given support to the Afghan war effort, turning back a British Indian attack in Turkistan and forcing the enemy to give up the idea of opening up a second front against Afghanistan in the north.^[64] The basis for continuing Soviet-Afghan collaboration was then laid in April 1919. As tensions mounted between Kabul and London, Amanullah addressed two letters to Moscow, which did not arrive until six weeks later, having been passed with enormous difficulty through the military fronts of the Civil War.^[65] One letter, addressed to the NKID, requested formal diplomatic relations. The second was a personal greeting from Amanullah to Lenin calling him "the greatest hope of the Afghan people." Lenin responded promptly by praising the Afghans for their heroic defense of their freedom, calling Afghanistan "the world's only independent Muslim state," agreeing to an immediate exchange of diplomatic representation—making Afghanistan the first country in the world to recognize the Soviet government—and suggesting the possibility of "mutual assistance against every encroachment on the part of foreign plunderers."^[66] Soon thereafter, a second dispatch announced the impending delivery of "a completely outfitted radio-telegraphic station which represents the latest achievement of technology."^[67] Indications of Soviet-Afghan collaboration had a decisive effect on the terms of the Anglo-Afghan peace negotiations taking place at the same time.

Yakov Surits, who subsequently had a long career of ambassadorial posts in Turkey, Germany, and France, was appointed "extraordinary and plenipotentiary representative of the RSFSR in Central Asia with residence in Kabul"—suggesting to one scholar that his duties included directing subversive activities from northwest India to Chinese Turkistan.^[68] He was succeeded in March 1921 by Fedor Raskolnikov, the mastermind of the Gilan Soviet Republic, and the man who made Kuchik Khan a world revolutionary figure.

A dynamic and charismatic personality,^[69] Raskolnikov took his name from the protagonist of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment , and while a student he had worn his hair long, wrapped himself in a long, dark coat, and affected a typical "nihilist" stance. His Bolshevik credentials went back nearly to the foundation of the party—he had been editorial secretary of Pravda when it first appeared in 1912. Drafted for the World War, he attended the naval academy, and by the time of the October Revolution he was a junior officer and an important revolutionary organizer among the sailors of Petrograd. His bravery and achievements during the Civil War were legendary. Raskolnikov was married to Larissa Reisner, who was well known before the revolution as a decadent-leaning poet and subsequently as a prominent "aesthetic revolutionary." A man of letters himself, he organized literary magazines and authored books following his service in Kabul. His presence in Kabul contributed significantly to the romanticization of diplomatic representation in Afghanistan that characterized numerous "diplomatic novels" published in the USSR and, eventually, the film Mission to Kabul . During his posting in Kabul, Raskolnikov and Reisner separated and then divorced. She returned to Moscow in early 1923, and the following autumn accompanied Karl Radek to Germany, where she acted as liaison between the KPD leadership in Berlin and the Comintern delegation in Dresden during the abortive "German October" revolution. After Raskolnikov's appointment to Kabul ended in 1924, he held important positions in the NKID and in the Communist International, including the directorship of the Eastern Division of the Comintern Secretariat. While abroad at a diplomatic post during the purges of the 1930s, and knowing the fate of ambassadors who returned to Moscow when recalled, he declined to go back and instead published a bombshell "open letter" to Stalin in the French press, accusing him of betraying the revolution and becoming a despot. For this he was rehabilitated during the Khrushchev thaw, and during glasnost he became the object of admiration among reformers.

In Kabul, Soviet diplomacy could operate without the embarrassment of the Comintern. No socialist or Communist party existed in Afghanistan, and the CI displayed little interest in inspiring and supporting one. With Afghanistan, the Comintern employed the rhetoric of bourgeois nationalism rather than of proletarian revolution, and aimed it directly at the Pan-Islamic proclivities of the Young Afghan nationalists. As Afghanistan was the only independent state in the Muslim world, so Lenin told the new Afghan ambassador, the "great historical task befell it of unifying around itself all the enslaved Muslim nations, and of leading them on the path of freedom and independence."^[70] Moreover, Afghanistan was of great strate-

gic significance both to the military security of the soviet republics and to the cause of global anti-imperialist revolution. An independent and neutral Afghanistan, like an independent and neutral Persia, diminished British predominance on the southern rim of the socialist republics and formed the basis for a possible anti-British nationalist movement on the frontiers of India. These prospects, rather than the hope of creating a socialist revolution there, attracted the Bolsheviks to Kabul.

It was primarily the need for assistance from Soviet Russia in the event of a renewed Anglo-Afghan war that brought Amanullah into treaty negotiations with Moscow. He seems to have aimed at a comprehensive offensive-defensive alliance, a step the NKID was not prepared to take. However, the Soviet government was willing to grant financial and military assistance, and a formal Soviet-Afghan treaty of recognition and friendship was initialed by Surits and Mahmud Tarzi in September 1920 and signed the following February.^[71] Both governments promised to refrain from entering into agreements with third parties against the interests of the other—a provision of much greater potential benefit to Russia than to Afghanistan. In exchange, Moscow promised Kabul, in addition to the radio station promised in the summer of 1920, a telegraph line from Kabul to Kushka via Kandahar, a yearly subsidy of one million rubles in gold or silver, and technical specialists. No mention was made of the military aid Surits had promised the previous spring—airplanes with crews, an air force training school, antiaircraft guns, and 5,000 rifles with ammunition.^[72] The agreement strengthened Amanullah's hand in maintaining Afghan independence from Britain, and after 1921, Afghanistan was no longer the extension of the British Empire it had been in 1914. Lenin and Chicherin believed moreover that the treaty would accelerate the liberation of the oppressed peoples of Asia,^[73] and the Foreign Office in London feared that Kabul would become the instrument of a Bolshevik campaign to overthrow British rule in India. Neither happened.

Instead, major tensions developed in the new Soviet-Afghan friendship, largely as a result of Russian efforts to sovietize the former Tsarist Empire in Central Asia and of Amanullah's ambition to incorporate part of it into a confederation of Islamic states in Central Asia. The confederation he imagined included the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva and entailed direct Afghan sovereignty in the Turkmen districts of Kushka, Panjdeh, and Merv. Persia, regarded as too weak to oppose or rival Afghan aggrandizement, was expected to accept Kabul's domination. In the event that the former Russian Empire disintegrated further, all of Turkistan would be included. If British power in India receded, Amanullah would lay claim to the lands of the Pushtun tribes to the south and to the maritime province of

Sindh Sind with its port at Karachi. As might be expected, Moscow looked with favor upon Afghan claims made at the expense of British India and Persia, but not upon Amanullah's claims to Soviet Turkistan.^[74]

The Afghan-Soviet rivalry in Turkistan was intensified by the basmachi rebellion, which Amanullah sought to win over to his Pan-Islamic movement, and which the Soviets were intent on suppressing. The basmachi (from the Uzbek term for bandit) were armed bands organized around local chiefs, called kurbashi , who exercised both military and political authority over their followers. They had begun as improvised self-defense organizations during the period of semianarchy that existed in the region from early 1918 to late 1920. The sovietization of Turkistan, the nationalization of cotton and vine growing, famine, and unemployment swelled their ranks and transformed them into a loosely organized, counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet resistance in the defense of their independence and their traditional way of life. The rebellion of the basmachi began in, and was centered in, the Fergana Valley of what became Soviet Tadzhikistan, where it had strong support from the local population. With the Soviet takeover in Bukhara and Khiva, it spread to those areas too. By December 1921, basmachi forces numbered 20,000, and the movement was growing into something approaching an Islamic revolt against Soviet power The basmachi were Muslim and Turkistani and identified themselves as mujahedeen . The forces opposing them—mainly ethnic Russians—closed Muslim religious schools and curtailed the activities of the clergy. Muslim units of the Red Army proved to be unreliable and deserted to the basmachi ; important Muslim figures in the Bukharan government defected; and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party had to take over coordination of the Communist parties of Turkistan, Bukhara, and Khoresm. The basmachi rebellion became the most formidable mass anti-Soviet revolt prior to the Afghan resistance of 1978.^[75]

The conflict reached its most intense level with the arrival in Bukhara of Enver Pasha, former war minister of the Young Turk ruling triumvirate of the Ottoman Empire. Ultra-ambitious and opportunistic, Enver had dreams of a Pan-Turanian Islamic federation in Central Asia. He signed his documents as "Commander-in-Chief of all Forces of Islam, son-in-law of the Caliph [he was married to the daughter of the last Turkish sultan], and Representative of the Prophet." Along with other Young Turks, he stood accused of organizing the 1915 genocide of the Armenian people, and at the end of the World War he was sought by the Kemalist nationalists of Turkey as a traitor and by the Allies as a war criminal. In the summer of 1920, Enver and another leading Young Turk, Djemal Pasha (subsequently shot on the steps of the Tiflis Cheka by Armenian fidai nationalist guerrillas),

arrived in Moscow, after having earlier contacted Karl Radek in Berlin, and offered their services to the revolution. Although Lenin distrusted Enver, he was prepared to use him in the cause of Islamic anti-imperialism.

Together Enver and Djemal participated in the Baku Congress, and Enver was sent to Turkistan in November 1921. There he was expected to act as a pro-Bolshevik leader of well-known nationalist and Pan-Turkic reputation, consolidate Soviet control over the Turkmen of Central Asia, and promote anticolonial rebellion against British influence throughout the region. However, instead of winning the Muslims of Central Asia to the cause of world revolution, Enver assumed a Pan-Islamic program, defected to the anti-Soviet basmachi rebels, and joined with Ahmed Zeki Velidi (Torgan) in an effort to bring unity to the movement. The deposed emir of Bukhara named him commander in chief of Bukharan resistance forces, and by the spring of 1922 he had gathered together some independent tribal chiefs, acquired about 7,000 supporters, and captured Dyushambe (subsequently the capital of Tadzhikistan). Enver rejected the efforts of the NKID to negotiate a truce with him, stating: "Peace is only acceptable after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkistan soil. The freedom fighters, whose commander I am, have sworn to fight for independence and freedom until their last breath." In return he dispatched an ultimatum to Moscow in May demanding national independence for the "peoples of Bukhara, Turkistan, and Khiva."^[76]

Moscow responded angrily, temporarily suspended the Soviet-Afghan treaty, and sent Ordzhonikidze and the Third Red Army to Turkistan, where they took ruthless punitive measures. Crops and wells were destroyed and hostages were taken and executed. Aerial bombardment and, allegedly, poison gas were used. Entire villages were wiped out in what became known during the glasnost era as "the most unknown Soviet war." The Russians deployed a relatively small force (estimates of troop strength vary) but one far superior to the basmachi in size, training, and especially in firepower. When Enver insisted in fighting open battles against superior forces, he suffered major defeats at the hands of the Red Army. His supporters drifted away, and he was killed in a skirmish with Russian troops near the Afghan frontier in August 1922.

Enver had never succeeded in fully uniting the basmachi chiefs and the British had rejected his pleas for military assistance. Amanullah gave up the struggle in November in order to turn his attention to the south, where British Indian forces were gaining control of the relatively independent tribal areas along the Indo-Afghan frontier. He abandoned his project for an Afghan-led Central Asian Islamic Confederation. Enver's successor kept the struggle alive among the basmachi in the hope of massive British

and/or Afghan military assistance that never came. In the end a combination of military operations and the economic and social concessions that accompanied the New Economic Policy extinguished the revolt. The basmachi rebellion in the Fergana Valley was defeated by a Red Army offensive in 1923 that employed cavalry, artillery, armored cars, and airplanes. A hard-core but incoherent anti-Soviet resistance persisted in the mountains of southern Bukhara until 1928 and on the steppes of Turkmenistan until 1935. Thus the basmachi resistance was tenacious, but the most remarkable story of the conflict may be the ability of the young Soviet state to win a significant guerrilla war in one of the most inaccessible regions of the world.

The basmachi war clearly demonstrated the limits of Amanullah's rapprochement with Soviet Russia. Following the September 1920 Soviet revolution-invasion in Bukhara, the emir and his entourage had escaped into the mountains to the east, and from there the advance of the Red Army drove him to take refuge in Kabul. Amanullah considered himself the protector of the emir. He granted diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of Bukhara only under intense pressure from Moscow, and as the anti-Soviet resistance in Central Asia intensified after the arrival of Enver, Amanullah gave to the exiled emir of Bukhara and to the basmachi direct and covert military assistance and also allowed them to use northern Afghanistan as a base of operations. Nadir Khan, the war minister and Amanullah's successor as emir of Afghanistan (1929-33), personally coordinated military operations from northern Afghanistan. At one point (July 1922), he took up a position with a considerable force on the Afghan-Soviet frontier and addressed a message to Chicherin making his intentions clear: "I have the honor to warn Your Excellency that unless the Bolsheviks stop their unfriendly activities against Bukhara, the government of Afghanistan will be forced to annex it. This is the only way to help the Islamic state of Central Asia against treacherous Bolshevik plotting."^[77]

These tensions did not, however, disturb the essential geopolitical basis of Soviet-Afghan affinity—their mutual desire to turn back the efforts of the government of British India to gain control of the independent Pushtun tribes of the Peshawar district of the North-West Frontier Province. When this "forward policy" resumed, Amanullah visited Peshawar in 1923 and met with tribal leaders. Together they concluded that the situation was dangerous for the security of Afghanistan as well as for the Pushtun tribes, and Kabul distributed sizable amounts of money. With the connivance and encouragement of Amanullah, some tribes conducted raids against British forces and then took refuge in Afghanistan. This constituted an opportunity for the Soviet government, in the words of Larissa Reisner, to

"remind the British, particularly after Lausanne, of their weak spot in the East."^[78] It was also a chance to renew collaboration with Amanullah following the basmachi war.

To support Amanullah and the Pushtun against the "forward policy," Raskolnikov in February 1923 recommended to the Commission for Turkistani Affairs in Tashkent that arms and money be distributed to tribal leaders. Both were forthcoming; the radio transmitter promised in 1920 was constructed; preparations were made to deploy eleven military aircraft; and the NKID authorized Kabul to import arms from Italy across Soviet territory.^[79] Anglo-Afghan tensions mounted in this latest continuation of "the Great Game," and by the end of the year a "Fourth Anglo-Afghan War" seemed imminent. The British openly threatened to bomb Kabul from bases in India, but were deterred by the presence of Soviet aircraft. Only Amanullah's surrender to demands that tribesmen who resisted British Indian authority be arrested prevented war.

Soviet support for Amanullah's regime continued in the face of a conservative rebellion against the emir that erupted in March 1924. Centered in the mountainous eastern province of Khost, the revolt prefigured the opposition to Amanullah that would force him to abdicate in 1929. The rebels opposed the landslide of progressive reforms Amanullah had introduced beginning in April 1923—centralized administration, constitutional government, development of education, encouragement of trade and industry, legal recognition of private property in land, direct taxation, suppression of slavery, and a formal penal code.^[80] The rebels came within 80 km of Kabul, where they were stopped when Soviet (and German) planes and pilots, in a remarkable feat of contemporary aviation, crossed the Gindikush mountains and bombed, strafed, and dispersed them.^[81]

The direct military assistance rendered to Afghanistan from 1919 to 1924 indicated the extent to which Soviet Russia was willing to go to protect an independent and intentionally progressive regime against its enemies, both those within and those without. By establishing and maintaining normal and friendly relations with internally and externally stabilized regimes in Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey, the Soviet government largely restored the prewar borders of the Russian Empire along the southern perimeter of what would become the Soviet Union and reinforced "anti-imperialist" regimes against British control and influence. In Afghanistan the objectives of Soviet policy were consistent with the principles of conventional international relations. The ECCI made no effort to promote social revolution among the tribes of Afghanistan, and no attempt was made to create an Afghan Soviet Republic or even to inspire a Communist party.^[82] No dual policy was conducted in Kabul. The purposes of global

revolution were not absent from Soviet-Afghan relations, however, for Afghanistan occupied a place of importance in the Comintern's project for revolution in India.

The Comintern and the Indian Revolution

India was at the center of the struggle between revolutionary Russia and the British Empire. In the Bolshevik geopolitics of revolution, a blow struck at British India would inflict a decisive defeat to British power in Asia, inspire anti-imperialist revolts from Syria to China, and so "set the East ablaze."^[83] Calculations such as these formed the basis of an audacious scheme to ignite a revolution among the Muslims of India launched under Comintern auspices in late 1920.^[84]

The project was planned in the Small Bureau of the Comintern Executive Committee and approved by the ECCI, the Politburo, and Sovnarkom in the early fall of 1920 during the period following the Second Comintern Congress and about the time of the Congress of Asian Muslims at Baku. The central element of the plan, which was premised on the active support of Emir Amanullah, was to train and equip an army of Indian liberation in Afghanistan. Troops, recruited from among the Muslim population of India, would join with the forces of the anti-British resistance among the Pathan tribes of the North-West Frontier Province. This "Army of God" would occupy territory in northern India, set up a government there, and extend the Indian liberation movement from this base. The central figure in the scheme was M. N. Roy, then a leading member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Comintern. In late 1920 he was dispatched to Tashkent to organize the Indian revolutionary army. With him he took two trains with twenty-seven wagons loaded with weapons, ammunition, and military supplies, ten wagons of dismantled airplanes, a supply of gold coins, bullion, and pound and rupee notes, and the staff of a military training school.<Popup-03-85>

Those recruited by Roy in Tashkent were young Muslim zealots, mujahedeen , members of the Pan-Islamic Khilafat movement in India who regarded the preservation of the Ottoman Empire and the temporal authority and spiritual leadership of the sultan to be essential to the unity and welfare of all Muslims.^[86] They were incensed at the partition of the Ottoman Empire, at the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) in which it was codified, at the treatment nationalist Turkey received at the hands of the Allied powers, and at infidel rule in India. In the summer of 1920, 18,000 of them left India for Afghanistan, some of whom intended to travel to Turkey to join the army of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, organizer of the Turkish Nationalist Party. On their way some fifty of them were captured

by Turkmen tribesmen in Afghanistan and then liberated by the Red Army. Taken to Tashkent, some became enthusiastic Communists. Of these, the most important was Shaukat Usmani, who was to become a leading figure in the Indian Communist Party. Others, amused at being designated "representatives of the Indian revolution," resisted political education.^[87] Only a few eventually became Marxists.

The Indian Military Training School at Tashkent lasted only a few months before it was disbanded in May 1921 along with the Central Asian Bureau of the Comintern. The task of directing revolutionary activities in Central Asia was transferred to the newly formed Eastern Commission of the ECCI in Moscow. Roy returned to Moscow, where he was placed in charge of coordinating Communist activities in India. With him went twenty-two graduates of the Indian Military School who received further training at the Communist University of the Working People of the East established in April. A year later, Roy and his activities were transferred to Berlin, where he published a journal and wrote books that were then smuggled into India, probably via the Soviet diplomatic mission in Kabul.

Just as Roy withdrew from Tashkent, Raskolnikov arrived in Kabul as polpred , or diplomatic representative. Chicherin formally instructed him to "categorically avoid the fatal mistake of undertaking artificial attempts to plant communism" in Afghanistan.^[88] Instead Raskolnikov's considerable talents and efforts were expended on persuading Amanullah to permit the organization in Afghanistan of revolutionary activities directed at India. His immediate task was to induce the Kabul government to allow Moscow to open the consulates provided for in the Soviet-Afghan treaty concluded the previous February. Three of them were located in the north of the country (at Herat, Meimen, and Mazar-i-Sharif), but two were located in the south near the frontier with India (at Kandahar and Ghazni), where Moscow had no commercial interests and in which no Soviet citizens resided. (The joke making the rounds of the Kabul bazaar at the time was that Afghanistan would claim the right to open consulates in Siberia.)^[89] The only conceivable purpose of the consulates in southern Afghanistan was to maintain points of observation, propaganda, and infiltration on the borders of the North-West Frontier Province of British India.

British intelligence correctly recognized the intended purpose of the consulates. In the terms of London's note of protest to Moscow, it was "to secure facilities for attacks through Afghanistan against the peace of India."^[90] The Foreign Office warned both Kabul and Moscow against establishing the consulates. For months, Surits and then Raskolnikov avoided making an explicit and binding declaration that the consulates would not be opened, and the Afghan foreign ministry delayed assuring London pend-

ing official notification from the Soviet government. The notice from Moscow arrived on 21 November 1921; the next day the governments of Afghanistan and Great Britain signed a treaty normalizing relations and exchanging diplomatic representation.^[91] Thereafter, Amanullah refused to allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for revolutionary operations against British India, requiring that all arms sent through Afghanistan be placed under the control of the Afghan government, that all Indian revolutionaries entering Afghanistan be disarmed, and that the Soviet-supported "Provisional Government of Free India," which was headquartered at Kabul, leave the country.

The Muslim Indian revolutionaries trained in Tashkent and Moscow began filtering back into India in late 1922. Some of them traveled on foot across the mountainous Afghan-Indian frontier in apparent contradiction of Afghan restrictions. Many were promptly arrested by British authorities on passport violations and immediately forswore Communism. Others augmented the several small groups of party members in India supported by Comintern funds. The government of India responded by tightening censorship and increasing surveillance. Roy's newspapers were confiscated; his confidential dispatches were intercepted by British intelligence; and the chief courier between Roy in Europe and India was apprehended. Shaukat Usmani was tracked down and arrested, and the government in Delhi notified its provincial governments that "prompt and definite steps must be taken to counter M. N. Roy's organization and propaganda and to terminate the activities of his principal followers."^[92] Nine of the latter were tried in the Peshawar conspiracy case in 1923. The next year in the Cawnpore Bolshevik conspiracy case, additional members of the Indian Communist Party, including Usmani, were convicted of conspiracy to organize a revolution to overthrow British rule in India. A court of appeal upheld the convictions but found the notion of a conspiracy "absurd and unbelievable."^[93]

With the trial and conviction of the cadres of the Indian Communist Party, the authorities of British India effectively suppressed what there was of the small, irresolute, and undisciplined invasion force mobilized by Roy. The leadership structure of the Communist Party of India was destroyed at least temporarily, and potential followers were discouraged. Within two years, the Indian Communist Party had but fifteen to twenty members, and the Bolshevik revolutionary offensive among the Muslims of southwest Asia and India ended for all practical purposes. In the months between Roy's withdrawal from Tashkent and the Cawnpore Bolshevik conspiracy trial, Soviet foreign relations developed in other directions. In October 1921 the NKID undertook a major initiative aimed at concluding a comprehensive postwar settlement of outstanding problems affecting Soviet

relations with the victors of the World War. In April 1922 the Rapallo agreement was signed, sealing the Soviet-German "special relationship" that would be the lodestar of Soviet diplomacy in the years to follow. And, at the end of 1923, the first Soviet political and military advisers arrived in Canton to assist in a revolution of national liberation and unity in China. These developments are considered in the next two chapters.