Have you ever seen buildings that look like these?
Maybe there are some of these majestic constructions in your town. Maybe you even live in one of these masterpieces. But have you ever stopped to wonder who built them, and why? We can see these buildings in Britain and in Argentina, in the United States and in China, in Russia and in Iran, and in countless other countries. How can we possibly explain so many amazing buildings, built in the same style, built on such a scale and in such widely-separated parts of the world? Is it just a coincidence? I’ve Done My Own Research and discovered the truth: that these buildings were all built by a civilisation called the Manchukuo Empire. This was a vast civilisation which spanned several continents and several centuries, though I have not yet confirmed which continents, or which centuries.
Lies of Big History
But Big History would prefer that you did not know about Manchukuo. If you dare to speak out against their dogma, you will be shouted down and ridiculed. They are very defensive. They will claim that their opinions count for more than yours or mine just because they have read actual books about history. This is a logical fallacy known as the Appeal to Authority. But I am a fearless maverick, I have excellent critical thinking skills, and I am immune to any appeals to authority.
The favourite argument trotted out by the shills of Big History and Big Archaeology is to say that the Manchukuo Civilisation never existed. But you can just Google ‘Manchukuo.’ See? There’s a Wikipedia page with that name. So even Wikipedia acknowledges that Manchukuo existed. How can anyone deny it?
But there is a sneakier version of this argument. They say that while something called Manchukuo did actually exist, it was actually something entirely different, a puppet state of Japan in China, that only lasted for a few years. These hair-splitting bores know no shame. They want you to believe that there are two completely different Manchukuos, one mythical and one real! They hope to bamboozle you with this convoluted nonsense. Compare this to my simple and straightforward answers.
And it’s not just buildings. Here is a surviving Manchukuo poster!
The Manchukuo Code
But how did I discover the truth where so many have been led astray by the history establishment? The answer is simpel: I made an amazing discovery.
Driven by a passion for these magnificent buildings and a desire to uncover the truth behind their construction, I cross-referenced the locations of over 500 of them and tagged each one on a map. The result was staggering:
Wow.
Assuming the Manchukuo had the same alphabet as us, which is not an unreasonable assumption as they probably invented alphabets and numbering systems, then the conclusion from my research is obvious. The Manchukuo Empire left its initials literally written on the face of the planet: M.E.
After I made this remarkable discovery, which was my discovery, made my me, everything else fell into place, because there is no other way to explain this remarkable discovery, which I made.
Features of Manchukuo Civilisation
The Manchukuo were not only more technologically-advanced than us (with access to amazing building techniques and possibly even telepathic powers) – they were also morally superior to us.
I can prove this using my critical thinking and logic: I like this type of architecture personally, which means that, objectively, it is the best type of architecture. If it is the best type of architecture then it must be morally superior to other types of architecture. It follows that the people who built it must have come from the most wise and moral civilisation ever to have existed.
We know, too, that the Manchukuo were a technologically-advanced people. They must have been, to have built such awesome buildings in so many places. In fact, for one civilisation to have built so much in so many places it would have demanded superhuman powers and technology beyond what is considered possible today, which leads us to even more exciting and tantalising questions.
Hidden Agenda
But Big History and Big Archaeology have colluded with Big Architecture to erase Manchukuo from the record. Why? To protect their own professional reputations, and to further their own agenda. I have not yet figured out all the details of their twisted plans, but I think I’m beginning to understand. You see, The Past Was Better Than Now. Right? Everyone knows that. And the Manchukuo Empire was Better Than Now. Therefore, the Manchukuo Empire must have existed in the past.
But Big History, Big Archaeology and Big Architecture (and don’t get me started on Big Urban Geography) are staffed by people with university degrees in the liberal arts. They are soy-eating rootless cosmopolitans who are too narrow-minded to be inspired by the manifest grandeur of The Past. They don’t get it. They don’t get what history and archaeology are for. They have whiny mid-Atlantic voices. They want to cut us off from our past with their timid attitudes, their red tape and their fussy theories. It doesn’t matter who you are, what walk of life, what income you have, these people are out to undermine your identity and your connection with the glorious past. They want to steal the past from you. They want to ruin it for you. They don’t want to let you enjoy it.
When you say that the Spartans were the direct ancestors of the US Marine Corps, when you say that the leading cause of the collapse of empires is limp-wristedness, when you say that aliens built all the pyramids in the world, they are the people who raise a finger and say in their nasal voices, ‘Well, actually…’
Listen not to the nasal voices. Heed not the scolding finger. Just look up at the magnificent buildings that tower over you like monuments. Buildings like these
And these
And these
And these.
The evidence is all around you: the Manchukuo Empire really did exist, and it can never be truly erased.
But how did the Manchukuo fit in with the Tartarian Empire and the Atlanteans? The hidden past is getting pretty crowded, and Big History won’t be able to keep it all a secret for much longer. Only one question remains. Could the Manchukuo people have been giants, or aliens, or perhaps giant aliens? Nobody can say for sure either way.
‘That night must have been a night of terror for the young King and his Court. From a high turret the King looked out over the greatest city of his realm, which was now no longer his. Below him, stretching away far into the darkness of the June night, was the great rebel force, and there rose to his ears the hoarse murmurs of a vast multitude, alert and watchful. Away on the horizon was the glare of the burning mansions of his friends and counsellors, men of the highest authority in the land, whose will and command was now as unheeded as the whimper of a puppy. To the West burned the prison and mansions in Westminster. Closer, in the fields of Clerkenwell, burned the buildings of the Knights Templar, whilst close by, almost near enough for him to stretch out his hand to touch the flames, burned the great palace of his uncle, John of Gaunt, now master of nothing but a few hundred troops on the Scottish borderlands. Yet nothing had changed, the land was still there, the river still flowed and the stars still shone. ‘All that had happened was that his people no longer obeyed his commands.’
Nine Days that Shook England by H. Fagan, P 190
Nine Days that Shook England (Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club, 1938) is ‘An Account of the English People’s Uprising in 1381.’ A vast rebellion of the peasants along with the poorer strata of clergy, knights and merchants came close to the overthrow of the English aristocracy. Pushed to the limit by exploitation, endless war, corrupt and incompetent ruling circles, and yet another poll tax, armed bands rose up to battle tax collectors, then united and marched on London and other towns. They conquered the capital with help from the masses inside the walls. But just as suddenly the ruling class dispersed them with a bold strike at their leadership, and put down the rebellion with over 7,000 executions and at least two stand-up battles.
Fagan is a very good writer, as you can see in the paragraph quoted above. Passages of comparable quality are many. The early chapters explain the socio-economic changes that laid the basis for the revolt, and do so in a way that any reader can easily understand and follow. The account is shot through with vivid and memorable moments and movements: he describes how an underground organisation called the Great Society built for the rebellion for years in advance. Wandering clergymen and outlawed peasants served as organisers for the Great Society.
The above quote marks the high point of the revolt. Fagan then narrates the sudden turn by which the ruling class re-established control – through what must be one of the most shameful state murders in the history of England. Such a sudden and extraordinary turnaround demands a good explanation, and Fagan supplies one.
The state murder of the rebel leader Wat Tyler — from a medieval chronicle
The book is unfortunately weighed down with emotive verbiage. In itself, I have no major problem with the following passage…
‘…the indomitable spirit of the Englishman was roused. They became determined to fight for what had been given them by the King willingly and of his own accord. Soon many of them were dying heroic deaths in action against the forces of terror, for the defence of freedom and for the maintenance of their just rights.’
…but there’s too much of this kind of language. After a while, my mind became apt to spot such passages coming, and to switch into a kind of half-reading mode, not quite skimming but not quite taking it all in either.
Readers of today, or even readers of 50 years ago, will also have a problem with all the contemporary references. The references to Spain and Russia, while they were of course topical at the time, must have seemed of questionable relevance even then (There is even one approving reference to Stalin). The Great Society was not really anything like the Bolshevik Party – the comparison does a disservice to both. The comparisons are usually more skilful than that, but they are frequent and sometimes take up whole paragraphs.
I’ve never read anything else on the 1381 rebellion, so I can’t comment on accuracy or historiography. I can say that the story is compelling and coherent. My eyes were really opened to how well-organised the insurgents were, and how close they came to tearing down the English ruling class. It is impossible not to be moved by how the King betrayed the misplaced trust of the insurgents. Don’t be misled by the emotive passages: the author is unromantic and clear-eyed about the weaknesses of the insurgents’ political programme, about the unpleasant reality that English society was not yet ripe for a democratic revolution.
Nine Days that Shook England was a take on medieval history that really was something new to me; I haven’t ever before read about a popular revolutionary movement in the Middle Ages. It is a dramatic story and there are plenty of good primary sources on it, and Fagan makes very good use of both the drama and the sources. Its problems we can file under ‘of its time.’ More than that: you will get more out of the book if you approach it both as a fascinating story from medieval history and as an intriguing artefact of the socialist movement in Britain in the 1930s. The didactic parts are not some spectacular artistic misjudgement; they are the flip side of the passion which drives the narrative.
Note:
The author, Hymie Fagan, was an interesting character in his own right. Here are some links: a few facts about his biography suffice to explain his revolutionary enthusiasm. The life story of his second wife, Marian Fagan, throws another very interesting light on things.
It is August 4th 1922, and the scene is a remote hillside in Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. Ismail Enver Pasha, the former war minister of Turkey, draws his sabre and leads a group of riders on a wild charge downhill into machine-gun fire. Somehow, the riders take out one machine-gun, but they are twenty-five against 300 Red Army soldiers.
The Basmachi were guerrilla forces active in Central Asia from 1918 on and off until the early 1930s, a divided and diverse constellation of irregular bands which attacked Red Army outposts and convoys. At times there were multiple armies numbering in the low tens of thousands active in different places.
The name apparently comes from the Uzbek verb basmak, ‘to attack,’ a word with connotations of banditry. But they called themselves kurbashi, fighters.
As far as I can see, this guerrilla movement drew on several sources of support all at once. Here they are, not in order of priority:
First, as noted, it reflected the failures and the atrocities of the Toshkent Soviet in its early phase, when Kokand was sacked and Russian settlers ran riot across the Fergana Valley. This caused the movement to emerge in early 1918.
Second, it was a response by desperate people to the harsh Civil War conditions and the attendant famine; the movement really became a force over the winter of 1919-20, when a 62% drop in the cultivated area of Turkestan had taken place and half the population was at risk of starvation. In this context the Red Army got first call on food, infuriating many local people.
Third, it was a spill-over from the White movement and the enraged old ruling classes, such as the army of Junaid Khan which cooperated with Kolchak, and the Emir of Bokhara, who was kicked out by his own people in 1920. From the start the movement was sponsored by these bastions of feudal reaction, and Khvostov in his book The White Armies treats the armed forces of Khiva and Bokhara unambiguously as a component of the Basmachi.
Fires in the city of Bokhara, September 1920, during the struggle between the Red Army and Young Bokharans on the one side and the Emir of Bokhara on the other. The Emir was a key sponsor of the Basmachi.
As I say, these sources of support are not presented here in order of importance, because to be honest I have no idea what that order was. A definitive history of the Basmachi has not yet been written. A full account of this fascinating movement is beyond my abilities, and their most active and significant phase falls outside the 1918-1920 period which is my focus in Revolution Under Siege and Class War and Holy War.
But they overlap with my narrative and serve as a sequel to it. Also, they throw a different light on the story I have told in Class War and Holy War, sometimes complicating and other times confirming the case I have made. You can read on and make up our own mind.
Phase One
The 1916 rebellion against conscription represents the prologue to the Basmachi. The first phase of the movement is its emergence after the Kokand massacre, mostly under the sponsorship of the Emir of Bokhara. It remains small until the summer of 1919-1920; in Summer 1920 it is strong enough to seize the Ferghana Valley. Meanwhile other bands are operating in other parts, such as one up by the Aral Sea helping Kolchak.
The Basmachi leader Madamin-Bek after his defection to the Reds, 1920
In Hiro’s account (42), the Soviets did not defeat the Basmachi with violence alone. Moscow sent in two renowned and capable generals, Frunze and Kamenev. Their approach was to return mosques and religious properties to Islamic authorities, to allow religious schools and courts to re-open, and to build a militia of poor Muslim farmers called the Red Sticks. Crucially, they confronted the Basmachi not with Russians but with Muslim units, which the Red Army by now had plenty of. (42-3)
Smele’s account (243) supports this: once the Whites were defeated, the Reds were able to wage heavy offensives against the Basmachi, combined with economic, religious and social concessions: NEP; the return of property to the clergy and the toleration of Islamic courts and schools.
Phase Two
Here the scene shifts to Turkey and the spotlight to Enver Pasha. As a young army officer from humble origins, he led the Young Turks revolt of 1908. But as War Minister during Turkey’s disastrous First World War he lost a lot of prestige. In 1920 he fled to the Soviet Union, and made an improbable deal with Lenin. The peoples of Central Asia (at least some of them, anyway) had, during the war, looked to the Turkish Empire as a potential liberator from Russia. Enver Pasha now promised to use his prestige as a Turkish military leader, anti-clerical moderniser and revolutionary to win over the Central Asian nationalities more firmly to the Soviet banner.
So this seems to have been an example of the Soviet Union making a kind of concession to pan-Turkic identity in order to forge a closer bond. If so it was a complete disaster.
Enver Pasha
On November 8th 1921 Enver Pasha arrived at Bokhara. The next day he rode out ‘on a hunting trip’ with 24 followers. Now he showed his true colours – he not only joined the Basmachi, he recruited thousands to their cause. Had he been fooling the Soviets all along, or did he change his mind after Moscow signed treaties with Turkey in 1921?
Into 1922, Enver Pasha and the Basmachi went from strength to strength. His allies included the Emirs of Bokhara and of Afghanistan. He had 2,000 soldiers under his command, and 14,000 more in his broader alliance. He was ‘commander-in-chief of all the Armies of Islam,’ though privately he called his religious followers ’bigots.’ Soon he controlled Dushanbe (which he seized with just 200 guerrillas) and large parts of the old territory of Bokhara.
The Soviet Union sued for peace. Enver Pasha told them: ’Peace is only acceptable after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkestan soil. The freedom fighters, whose leader I am, have sworn to fight for independence and liberty until their last breath.’
But his movement faced serious problems. There were tensions between the various nationalities and between religious and secular tendencies. Many civilians supported the Reds or were neutral. Splits developed and Enver Pasha’s followers went to join other bands or even to join the Reds. In the summer, the Red Army defeated Enver Pasha in a regular battle, after which he was on the run in the direction of Afghanistan with a dwindling band. In early August he celebrated the Islamic festival of Bayram, enclosed mountain flowers in a letter to his wife, and died in that desperate charge into Red machine-guns. His body was only identified some days later.
(In passing, one well-read blogger has recently described Enver Pasha as follows: ‘the worst human being who happened to be a general [during World War One…] Ottoman Minister of War from 1914 to 1918, a vain, arrogant strutting sort of man who not only utterly botched the only battle in which he commanded directly (Sarikamish, Dec. 1914 – Jan 1915) but who also then blamed his defeat (falsely) on the Armenians and subsequently instigated and played a key role in the Armenian genocide. He then sold his services to the Soviets, before betraying them to side with the Basmachi movement, which didn’t go particularly well either.’ No-one else I’ve read mentions the connection to the Armenian genocide, probably because this was in the past a neglected subject. A friend, a Kurdish-Turkish communist, has described Enver Pasha to me as a quasi-fascist counterpart to the more left-leaning Kemal Ataturk – the two men embodying different facets of Turkish nationalism.)
The banner of Ergash Kurbashi, taken by the Red Army
Phase 3
The Basmachi experienced a final revival in 1925-6. Their supporters stood for election in the Soviets, took over several in the region, and re-launched the insurgency. Only with their defeat in 1926 did the Soviet Union formally close the last front of the Russian Civil War, three years after the destruction of the last White Army.
A little while ago I wrote: ‘The peoples of Central Asia articulated demands for autonomy many times, but as far as I can see, demands for independence were few, inchoate and scattered. When they were put forward, they were complicated by being linked to broader identities: pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic ideas.’ It should be clear from the context that I’m talking about 100 years ago, not today.
But according to one author quoted by Smele, the Basmachi movement was nothing less than a civil war with the goal of national independence. Smele says this is going too far: this was a disunited and inchoate movement. I’d add that the khans and emirs were unambiguous counter-revolutionaries, not freedom fighters; and that European Russia, too, produced revolts of the rural population in anger at the severity of Civil War conditions.
Moscow confronted the Basmachi with concessions alongside military offensives. How effective was this strategy? On the one hand, the Basmachi were not finally defeated until the early 1930s, but they never threatened the ‘centres of Russian power’ and ‘frequently fought among themselves.’ (Mawdsley, 239) The Soviets played a long game, pushing the Basmachi campaign to a lower level, though they remained endemic. The fact that a long game of concessions was effective, and the fact that Moscow chose to pursue it, represent points against the view of the Basmachi as a movement representing a general desire for independence.
Negotiations between Soviet authorities and Basmachi in the Fergana Valley, 1921
Let’s not forget, though, that the Reds were fighting these guys for more than a decade. I don’t think the numbers quoted by Smele are plausible – apparently some say that over half a million Red soldiers died in combat with the Basmachi after the end of the Civil War – but it was a serious struggle. The Basmachi represented something more significant than the rural uprisings which Russia witnessed in 1921. It was not mere feudal reaction, but was in part a ‘scourge of god’ punishing the Toshkent Soviet for its undemocratic policy and the violence which served it. We can see feudal particularism, Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islam all in the mix. While it was something less than, or even other than, a movement for national liberation, it’s not difficult to see tendencies in that direction.
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This post tells the story of how, having defeated the White Armies, the Soviet Union fought against racism and inequality in Central Asia.
Developments in Central Asia in the early years of the revolution were viewed with mounting alarm by Moscow. The Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party warned of the danger of the Soviet regime in Turkestan becoming ‘A Russian Ulster – the colonists’ fronde [revolt] of a national minority counting on support from the centre.’
Readers of the Russian socialist press before the revolution would have been reasonably well-informed on Irish politics (See Lenin’s 1913 article ‘Class War in Dublin’). The ‘Russian Ulster’ remark was made during the Northern Ireland pogroms of 1920-22. In what are known as the ‘First Troubles,’ gangs of loyalists burned a thousand homes and businesses, killed hundreds of people, and expelled Catholics from the Belfast shipyards along with many Protestant trade union activists.
Of course the comparison only goes so far (see the note at the end of this post). But it must have stung the Russian communists in Toshkent because it was true in many ways.
The Turkestan Communist Party was, in 1921, political home to ‘the communist priest, the Russian police officer and the kulak from Semirechie [East Kazakhstan, near China] who still employs dozens of hired labourers, has hundreds of heads of cattle and hunts down Kazakhs like wild beasts.’ In 1920 a veteran Bolshevik, Safarov, wrote: ‘National inequality, in Turkestan, inequality between Europeans and natives, is found at every step.’
And in response to racism in the region’s Communist Party, the minority of Muslim communists became nationalistic. ‘Militant Great Russian chauvinism and the defensive nationalism of the enslaved colonial masses shot through with a mistrust of the Russian – that is the fundamental and characteristic feature of Turkestan reality.’ Thus wrote Broido, another of the few ‘Old Bolsheviks’ of Turkestan, in 1920.
The Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan in September 1920 was a remarkable event in which supporters of the Soviet regime from across Asia gathered, many in their national costume, many having made dangerous journeys. It was remarkable, too, for the spirit of free debate and criticism which prevailed. A Turkestan delegate condemned the ‘inadequacy’ of communism in Central Asia, demanding the removal of ‘your colonists now working under the guise of communism.’
He was met with applause and cries of ‘Bravo’.
‘There are among you, comrades,’ he continued, ‘people who under the mask of communism ruin the whole Soviet power and spoil the whole Soviet policy in the East.’
Safarov repeated the indictment at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. (Carr, 338, 341)
A mosque in the Soviet Union, from a 1923 painting by Amshey Nurenberg
Moscow intervenes
EH Carr notes that though nationalities policy was discussed at the 8th Communist Party congress in March 1919, Turkestan was somehow not mentioned. Toshkent was after all as far away and as difficult to access as Soviet Hungary. But from July 1919 official statements began to recognise and to stress the importance of Turkestan. It was described as ‘the outpost of communism in Asia.’ With the realisation of its importance came recognition of the crimes and mistakes of the Toshkent Soviet. A 12 July telegram from the Party Central Committee, written by Lenin, insisted on ‘drawing the native Turkestan population into governmental work on a broad proportional basis’ and on no more requisitioning of Muslims’ property without the consent of local Muslim organisations.
The Tashkent leaders were resistant, but as soon as the rail link with Moscow was restored in October 1919, Moscow ‘despatched a team of ideological troubleshooters’ to Toshkent to respond to ‘reports of blood-letting and anarchy.’ (Hopkirk, 79) This official commission insisted that the ‘mistrust of the native toiling masses of Turkestan’ can only be overcome by offering them self-determination, a principle which was ‘the foundation of all the policy.’ Lenin’s further communications stressed ‘comradely relations’ between Russian and Muslim and urged communists to ‘eradicate all traces of Great Russian imperialism.’ (Carr, 339, 340)
Turkestan remained, however, just one relatively small front in a war fought on a continental scale, and Lenin and co were practical. This is unmistakeable in a coded telegram from Lenin to three Toshkent communist leaders dated December 11th 1919:
Your demands for personnel are excessive. It is absurd, or worse than absurd, when you imagine that Turkestan is more important than the centre and the Ukraine. You will not get any more. You must manage with what you have, and not set yourselves unlimited plans, but be modest.
You can look up this stuff on Marxists Internet Archive. A May 25 1920 telegram from Lenin to Frunze consists of a staccato and bluntly practical series of questions about the state of the oil wells. In two August 1921 letters settling a dispute between a pair of communist leaders in Turkestan, Lenin agrees that Moscow must buy ‘nine million sheep’ from Central Asian merchants. ‘They must be obtained at all costs!’ – hence ‘a number of concessions and bonuses to the merchants.’ But the consistent through-line is that ‘the Moslem poor should be treated with care and prudence, with a number of concessions’ – ‘systematic and maximum concern for the Moslem poor, for their organisation and education’ which must be ‘a model for the whole East.’
Some Bolsheviks (notably Stalin) held the idea that only the working class of a given nation should decide the fate of that nation (Jones). The problem with this position is illustrated starkly in Central Asia, where a few thousand foreign railway workers tried to exercise ‘self-determination’ over the heads of ten million Muslim farmers. But Lenin recognised that vast areas of the territory that fell within Moscow’s gravity well were underdeveloped (that is, even more so than the semi-feudal Russian metropole), and that a more sensitive and democratic policy was necessary.
Through 1919, according to Mawdsley (328), Muslims were given ‘more of a role in the state and party, thanks to Moscow’s influence. The centre kept overall control, but more than a semblance of power was given to progressive natives.’ For example, Turar Ryskulov was a Kazakh who joined the Bolsheviks in September 1917 and went on to hold numerous prominent and powerful government posts. (Smele, 333n42)
You might say, ‘Well, Moscow remained in real control,’ but that misses an important point. The peoples of Central Asia articulated demands for autonomy many times, but as far as I can see, demands for independence were few, inchoate and scattered. When they were put forward, they were complicated by being linked to broader identities: pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic ideas.
In January 1920 there arrived the first ‘Red Train’ of party activists fluent in native languages and there was a ‘rapid improvement during 1920’ in the Soviet authorities’ treatment of Muslims.
‘In the winter of 1920-21,’ writes Carr (340), ‘Friday was substituted for Sunday as the weekly rest day, and the postal authorities for the first time accepted telegrams in local languages.’ It’s really shocking that such basic measures were not in place before that time. But at least the ‘Russian Ulster’ was now steadily being dismantled.
Military conquests
Meanwhile the Red Army was consolidating its hold on Central Asia.
The Khanate of Khiva, south of the Aral Sea, had held out against the Reds. In January 1920 the Young Khivans, an indigenous progressive movement, began a revolt and invited the Red Army into the city. The result was the establishment of the Khorezm People’s Socialist Republic.
The new Russian Socialist Federation recognized the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic as an independent state –publicly renouncing all claims to territory and offering a voluntary economic and military union with the new state. All property and land that once belonged to the Russian state, as well as administrative structures were handed over to the new government with no demands for compensation. Financial assistance was provided to build schools, to campaign to end illiteracy and to build canals, roads and a telegraph system.
The other major feudal power was Bukhara, which in 1920 suffered under famine conditions and under its regressive and violent Emir. In August 1920 the Young Bukhara movement called in the Red Army just like their counterparts in Khiva. There were four days of fighting in Bukhara. By October the Emir was running for the hills to join the Basmachi, while the First Congress of Bukhara workers met in his palace. (Hiro, 41; Carr, 340) There is even a story (Hopkirk, quoting M.N. Roy) that the women of the Emir’s numerous harem each chose to marry a Red Guard after a bizarre kind of speed-dating session.
Detail from Pictorial Wall Map 08: ‘Liquidation of Kolchak and his followers.’ From the accompanying notes: ‘Former Tsarist Turkestan, essentially most of Central Asia, is represented as a giant fireball erupting out of Tashkent. Red spearheads advance throughout as though they were spreading flames. Various centers of authority had arisen in Central Asia following the revolution, but the Red Army managed to turn the region into a series of soviet republics by the end of 1920. Spread across the region is the name Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Turkestani Red Army, who defeated fierce guerilla opposition to set up a Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in September 1920.’
In 1920 revolution in Europe was receding as an immediate possibility. Communist leaders turned their attention to the east: there were major independence struggles in India, and in Turkey a guerrilla movement was resisting Allied occupation. In Toshkent there was even a brief attempt to build a revolutionary army of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent.
Social Conquests
The October Revolution did not, as things turned out, attempt to overthrow the British Raj in India, but in the longer term it overthrew illiteracy in Central Asia. For example, in 1926 literacy was only 2.2% in Tajikstan; by 1939 it was 71.7%. 1,600 public libraries were opened across Turkestan. Along with this there was a dramatic rise in the availability of media; newspapers, periodicals, books and radio. Other socio-economic achievements included major road and rail projects and works such as the Fergana Canal.
Red victory in Central Asia brought massive changes to family life, with bans on child marriage and encouragement to women to learn to write. The proportion of women in the workforce in Uzbekistan was 9% in 1925, and 39% by 1939 as women entered into the civil service, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and labs.
In a 1990 interview with the BBC’s Central Asian Service, a secondary-school teacher reflected on what the October Revolution and its extension to Central Asia meant for her:
I felt I was the luckiest girl in the whole world. My great-grandmother was like a slave, shut up her house. My mother was illiterate. She had thirteen children and looked old all her life. For me the past was dark and horrible, and whatever anyone says about the Soviet Union, that is how it was for me.
She could access free infant healthcare. She could also avail of measures which, in my country in 2023, are not even on the table for discussion: two years’ maternity leave with full salary, and a guaranteed childcare place for her children. (Dilip Hiro, 56)
The revolution in Central Asia was in large part a gender and family revolution, but it was above all a land revolution. From 1920, the major Muslim political parties saw an exodus of members to the Communist Party. Even in rural areas, communism gained popularity. ‘Contrary to the Muslim clerics’ dire warnings […] they [the communists] had concentrated on confiscating the lands of the feudal lords and distributing them to landless and poor peasants.’ (Hiro, 41)
A March 1920 decree returned Central Asian land that had been seized by Russian settlers – 280,000 hectares were given back to local people in a single year. The most notorious racists among the Russian population were deported back to Russia.
From March 1921, the New Economic Policy (NEP) was brought in across the Soviet Union. In Central Asia there was a danger it might cut across land redistribution (hence Lenin’s letters of August 1921 quoted above), but through skilful implementation it was a success. From 1925-1929 there was further redistribution of land at the expense of landlords and clerics. The beks, emirs and khans were simply finished as a ruling class.
The former ruling classes rage at the economic development being achieved by the proletariat. An Uzbek-language poster, published in Tashkent, 1920s. (Source)
Cultural Conquests
Under Soviet rule, the various languages of Central Asia were standardised with Arabic script on a Turkic base of vocabulary and grammar, with the exception of the Persian-influenced Tajik language. Lenin explicitly rejected forcing these languages into Cyrillic script, though as we will see this was later done under Stalin.
For Central Asian languages, this was a historic moment. For example the Kyrgyz language was set down in script for the first time in 1922. (Hiro, 46)
By 1923 there were 67 schools teaching in Mari, 57 in Kabardi, 159 in Komi, 51 in Kalmyk, 100 in Kirghiz, 303 in Buriat and over 2500 for the Tatar language. In Central Asia, the number of national schools, which numbered just 300 before the revolution, reached 2100 by the end of 1920.
This article by David Trilling from Eurasianet.org points out that the surge in artistic achievement which followed 1917 continued for longer in Central Asia:
The 1920s saw an unfettered flowering of creativity in these regions, especially among Russian-trained artists based in Tashkent and Baku. While central publishing houses in Moscow and Leningrad were shifting to Socialist Realism, artists in the periphery continued the avant-garde movement, combining it with local traditions, according to the exhibit’s curator, Maria Filatova. She sees the colorful posters from the 1920s and early 1930s, with their longer texts and multiple figurines, as direct decendents of local calligraphy and miniature traditions.
Filatova feels the relative freedom of the 1920s makes the work from that decade artistically more interesting compared to what followed. The work is also revealing about that period in early Soviet history, when “socialist ideas coexisted with Islamic ideology.”
For example – the cover image for this post, part of the exhibition in question, an Azeri-language Red Army recruitment poster
Political Conquests
These socio-economic gains were the basis for the emergence of new states in Central Asia.
Early in the Civil War Ataman Dutov, a key White leader in the Urals, recognized the autonomy of the Kazakhs. But when Kolchak took over in late 1918, true to form, he suppressed it. So there was a split between the White Guards and the Kazakh people. In Autumn 1919 the Red General Frunze issued an amnesty for all the fighters of the Alash-Orda who had sided with the Whites; this proved a master-stroke politically and militarily. The Kazakhs came over to the Reds in great numbers and within 4 or 5 months the Reds had advanced all the way across the vast expanse of Kazakhstan.
Moscow quickly recognised a Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). Confusingly, it was at first known as the Kyrgyz ASSR, because Russians ignorantly called the Kazakhs Kyrgyz.
This Kazakh ASSR, population 6.5 million, was the first of the Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The others emerged in the next few years:
The Turkmens got the autonomous state for which they had been fighting, in the form of the Turkmenia SSR, population one million;
There emerged the Kyrgyz ASSR, population one million;
And in December 1926 the Tajik ASSR, population one million, separated from…
The Uzbek SSR, population 5 million.
The drawing of the boundaries between these new states was not dictated by Moscow, which confined itself to laying down general principles and settling intractable disputes. The actual borders were worked out by local parties and specially designated commissions. Look at a map of the world and at the vortex of convoluted borders between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan: this was a result of bargaining between indigenous communists. What a contrast to the suspiciously straight lines we see in parts of the Middle East and Africa, drawn up by imperial officials rather than by people with on-the-ground interests and knowledge. (Hiro, 44)
Yes, I know it’s in Hungarian. But in any language you can see the convoluted tangle of borders
Muslim communists began to come to the fore. But the particular history of Soviet Central Asia also led to particular problems. As outlined above, chauvinism among Russian communists led to a ‘defensive nationalism’ among Muslim communists. This bred further conflict; many of the Muslim leaders who came to prominence in Soviet Central Asia entertained Pan-Turkic ideas as part of that ‘defensive nationalism,’ leading to disagreement between them and Moscow, a struggle which the former lost. (Mawdsley, 332) The Volga Tatar communist Soltangaliev was arrested in 1923, accused of complicity in a Pan-Turkist conspiracy with the Basmachi – an accusation that strikes me as improbable. He was expelled from the party and even jailed, but later released. (Smele, 333n43)
The history of the Soviet Union is sometimes presented as a monolithic story of dictatorship. Certainly the draconian security measures of the Civil War era and the 1921 ban on opposition should not be downplayed, and under Stalin from the late 1920s totalitarian rule was imposed. But as we have seen, even during the Civil War Soviet congresses made important decisions. The Civil War years in fact saw centrifugal tendencies – from Tsaritsyn to Toshkent, local officials turned their noses up at signed credentials from Lenin, and declared that they would do as they pleased. In the 1920s we see some of the potential of Soviet democracy shine through despite extraordinary difficulties such as post-war reconstruction. This is obvious in the case of Central Asia. Hiro writes: ‘the landless, poor and middle-income peasants forming the bulk of the population benefitted economically and politically’ from the extension of the October Revolution to their lands. ‘For instance, in the 1927 to 1928 elections to the Soviets in Tajikistan, the landless, poor and middle-income peasants accounted for 87% of the deputies.’
Conclusion
This post concludes my four-part miniseries Class War and Holy War, a spin-off from Revolution Under Siege. But I’m going to add two short posts to this series, one dealing with the fascinating guerrilla movement known as the Basmachi and another on the impact of Stalinist forced collectivisation and terror in Central Asia.
This series started out bleak and violent. Urban Russia, linked by rail and wire, transplanted the revolution from the Baltic Sea to the Silk Road with remarkable speed. But in Toshkent the Russian population was surrounded by a majority that was of a different religion and of many different nationalities. The workers’ leaders, almost none of whom were developed Bolshevik cadres, filtered the October Revolution through an approach that was at best crude, at worst brutally racist. Instead of combining the anti-colonial revolution with the workers’ revolution, they set the one against the other and risked creating what the Party’s Central Committee termed ‘a Russian Ulster.’
But the Toshkent Soviet did manage to survive a bitter military struggle against many diverse enemies, and from late 1919 the racist element was in retreat. What has been covered in this concluding post really is remarkable: the peoples of Central Asia tore down their ancient lords and shared their land out among the poor; they booted out the worst of the Russian settlers and shared out their land, too; women seized the day; minority languages were revived; the number of healthcare facilities, schools and libraries increased massively; for some years, the people enjoyed free creative expression, democratic rights and real representation; people of different nationalities settled their borders by debate and compromise. Such things really are possible, and in a revolutionary time they can happen quickly.
I’m not describing heaven on earth, and I’m sure the legacy of the Soviet period is disputed and complicated in the diverse countries of Central Asia today, and I understand why the events I have written about might be coloured more negatively in the eyes of people from the region because of later developments. This is a topic I have only begun to look at over the last six months or so, and I feel exactly how I imagine an Uzbek blogger writing about Irish history would feel. While I don’t want to get stuck into comment-section trench warfare, I welcome constructive criticism from people mpre familiar with the region. But it’s difficult for me not to be impressed and even moved, comparing the Central Asian revolution with today’s bitter and violent world with all its bigotry and its apparently intractable national and religious conflicts. Violence and horror are part of history – you didn’t need me to tell you that. But such things as we have described in this post are possible too, even against a background of hate and bloodshed, and they really did happen.
Note on ‘A Russian Ulster’
Speaking of which, here’s a final note about the phrase ‘a Russian Ulster.’ The phrase is inappropriate in important ways.
The first problem is that Central Asia is way bigger, more diverse and more globally significant than Ulster, but because of Anglo cultural hegemony nobody has ever uttered the phrase ‘Ulster is in danger of becoming a British Turkestan.’
Second, the Protestant population in Ireland are not ‘settlers’ but the descendants of settlers from centuries ago, and they have as much of an established place here as anyone. By contrast, the main mass of Russians in Central Asia dated only from the 1890s.
A scene from the Belfast shipyards in 1911
Third, while the sectarian division in Ireland has been and remains bitter and violent, the situation in Central Asia in the early 20th Century appears to have been much worse. I’m sure Northern Irish Catholics and Central Asian Muslims have no interest in competing in the oppression Olympics, but it’s necessary to clarify the limits of the comparison.
Fourth, before the 1920-22 ‘Troubles’ came the 1919 Belfast engineering strike – in which Catholics and Protestants stood together in a strike committee that virtually ran the city. One of several prominent socialist leaders, incidentally, was Simon Greenspon, a man of Russian Jewish background. Here was a glimpse of ‘a Russian Ulster’ in a very different sense.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins, Penguin, 2022
Legacy of Violence covers 200-plus years of the history of the British Empire, from the late 18th to the late 20th century, spending most of its word count in the early-to-mid 20th Century. Elkins refers positively to the anti-imperialist writings of Walter Rodney and Vladimir Lenin, but only to tell us that she will be coming at the subject from a different, though not contradictory, angle. This is primarily a book about repression and counter-insurgency in the British Empire. Economics, politics and sociology are part of the narrative but rarely to the fore.
Elkins focuses on key episodes, states of emergency and of exception, in which laws and human rights were suspended. There are far too many examples to list, but they include the revolt in Jamaica in the 1830s, the Boer War, the ‘Malaya Emergency,’ and the Troubles in Ireland. Questions of philosophy and law are traced through this diverse globe-spanning range of episodes. One thing that really impressed me was how she follows the careers of various British officials – for example, the Black and Tans who went from one brutal counter-insurgency in Ireland to an even worse one in Palestine.
The same themes and phrases keep coming up. For example, you could point to so many examples where the British military terrorised rebellious people into submission with killings, torture and bombing. From one continent and decade to the next, British officials and officers had the same pleasant phrase for this: ‘the salutary moral effect.’
What unfolds as you read through this book is a fascinating and globe-spanning story. Here are some of the things I did not know about, in vaguely chronological order:
The perpetrator of the infamous Amritsar Massacre in India in 1919, Brigadier-General Dyer, faced a controversy but ultimately got off the hook. But the politician who tried to make Dyer face some consequences was himself punished with the loss of his reputation and career – along with anti-Semitic abuse. Also, that Amritsar Massacre was not just a singular event – it was preceded and followed by a long reign of terror over the whole area where it took place.
The British prepared the ground for the Naqba, the ‘catastrophe’ in which Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their country in 1948. Death squads of British commandos, supported by Jewish paramilitaries, suppressed Arab revolts with raids, bombings, assassinations and torture. One of the main British officers, the famous and eccentric Orde-Wingate, was motivated by vicious anti-Arab racism.
When these paramilitaries began an insurgency against the British Empire in the late 1940s, a wave of anti-Semitism swept Britain. Yeah, right after the Holocaust, Mosely and the British Union of Fascists made a comeback. (Though I had heard about this one in a fascinating book called The 43 Group).
Long before the Blitz of 1940, the British military pioneered the bombing of defenceless villages, for example in Iraq.
During and after World War Two, there were prisons in England and in Germany where torture of German detainees was widespread. This was the case tenfold in India, where Britain had to come up with elaborate means to re-establish control after the war.
After the war there were campaigns to get governments to recognise human rights laws. Britain saw that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights would be incompatible with the brutality required to maintain its empire, so it resisted for decades.
As Britain cleared out of India, clouds of smoke hung over the major cities; British officials were burning heaps of documents.
The rebellions in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s were the most striking and educational parts of the book for me. These were popular rebellions with democratic demands and grievances, and they were put down with a variety of evil means. In Malaya we see the mass transfer of entire ethnic groups and populations. There and in Kenya we see huge torture camps. The reality is that torture was a completely normal practise in the British Empire, though the folks back home didn’t know about it and instead were fed rubbish about ‘hearts and minds.’
There is so much more I could say – if I’d taken notes, I could write in greater length and detail about all the above bullet points and as many again. That goes to show how much I learned from this rich volume. It’s really well-written, it’s obvious that a vast mass of research has gone into it, and there is a deep coherence and structure underlying the whole globe-spanning narrative. I’m grateful to have read this fascinating, disturbing and enlightening work.
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This short book is a memoir of adventures in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. There are various categories of people to be found in the poisoned and abandoned area of the 1986 nuclear disaster: legal visitors on guided tours, looters, and elderly people who never left the Zone. The author, Markiyan Kamysh, is part of another category entirely: a community of people who make illegal trips into the heart of the Exclusion Zone, dodging the police and scaling fences. He made over thirty trips in ten years, sometimes as a paid guide but usually with no eye to profit.
Illegal Chornobyl tourists like Kamysh are known as Stalkers, after the 1979 film Stalker which anticipated the Chornobyl disaster. Based on the 1971 novel Roadside Picnic, the film is about a ‘Stalker,’ an underworld figure who guides paying customers into the heart of a forbidden place called The Zone, where the laws of reality do not apply. In the heart of the terrible dangers of The Zone lies a place where wishes can be made to come true.
The novel is more straightforward than the film. I recommend both.
Real life is stranger than fiction. In contemporary Ukraine (before the war, that is), the real Stalkers would enter the Zone even though there was nothing valuable there, except copper wire and stuff like that, which anyway the Stalkers were not interested in.
Rather than explaining his own motivation directly, Kamysh draws us into his memories and experiences and lets them speak for themselves: hiking for days through wilderness, bathing in water that may give him cancer, getting high and drunk in abandoned tower blocks, burning fence-posts by the score to survive a winter night. It is like travelling into an alternate dimension. To go into the Zone is to escape from society and the state – without leaving behind human structures and artefacts. That means discomfort, danger.
The Zone is, in Irish terms, an area roughly the size of County Roscommon. 120,000 people lived in two industrial cities and hundreds of villages, until the area was suddenly evacuated thirty-seven years ago. It would be fascinating to visit such a place in any country in the world; in Ukraine this makes it a massive time capsule of the vanished Soviet Union. The author’s strange affection for the rusting industrial landmarks is partly that (his father was a liquidator) but it is mostly something else.
Kamysh shows an unpleasant contempt toward the legal tourists, and even toward the groups of foreigners for whom he serves as a paid guide from time to time. He does not fear the police, though they have arrested him multiple times and, on occasion, stolen his belongings. He is wary of the looters.
Kamysh barely touches on politics, but he mentions his experiences with street fighting in Kyiv during the upheavals of 2013-14. This book was published in 1019. He joined the Ukrainian military in July 2022 to resist the Russian invasion. That sheds an unexpected light on the question of motivation because obviously it is more dangerous and painful to go to war than to go into the Zone. I wonder how Pripyat and its strange communities are faring these days.
In July 1918 the ground was shaking under the feet of Soviet power. We have already looked at the situation in ‘Central’ and South Russia, and in the Urals and Siberia: atamans invading, Czechs in revolt, officers, Cossacks and Right SRs forming rival governments, foreign powers invading, insurrections in Moscow, Kazan and Iaroslavl.
Central Asia was one section of this panorama of general catastrophe. The customary apology which I make on the podcast for mispronouncing Slavic names must now be accompanied by another customary apology: that a disproportionate part of my material comes via British military officers with a gift for languages, a high tolerance for deserts, a racist attitude to ‘the natives’ and a loathing for the anti-war and egalitarian programme of the Soviets. These guys bring their biases to the table, and the simple truth is that I wasn’t able to find much material from the other side or even from a balanced standpoint.
A Turkmen, photographed some time between 1905 and 1915. These guys are going to be important in this post.
Turkmens and Punjabis
Civil War proper came to Central Asia with the formation of the region’s first major White government. Here is how that happened.
We have seen how the main support base of the Toshkent Soviet consisted of oilers and drivers on the railways. As we saw, these workers refused to support the Menshevik-led railway strike. But in the Trans-Caspian region (modern-day Turkmenistan), the Mensheviks had the ear of the railway workers. Toshkent sent out an agent, a Latvian named Fralov, to coerce these railway workers into cooperating. According to his enemies (What follows is drawn from Teague-Jones, 83-85), Fralov arrived with a hundred ‘armed Austrians and Magyars,’ and soon developed a reputation for brutality and drunkenness. Apparently local railway workers were furious, but not all that surprised, when Fralov shot three of their representatives at Kizil Arvat.
Around July 11th, news of these killings arrived at the main city, Ashgabat.
Other news would no doubt have been arriving in Ashgabat around the same time: that there was street fighting in Moscow; a mutiny on the Volga led by one of the top commanders of the Red Army; that Britain, Japan and France had taken Murmansk and Vladivostok under their ‘temporary protection;’ and that the United States had just agreed to intervene in Russia. And that’s just the factual news. No doubt other wild rumours would have been in the mix too.
It must have seemed to local people in Ashgabat that the Soviet regime was about to collapse. Why should they tolerate the likes of Fralov any longer?
Local railway workers cut the telegraph wires and proclaimed a revolution against Soviet power. The town militia sided with the railway workers. Turkmen groups joined in, including officers like the Tsarist-era general Oraz Sardar. They killed nine commissars, some of them simply lynched on the spot. The rebels seized the town armoury and distributed 6,000 rifles on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, to whoever showed up asking for one. They also seized 17 million roubles.
200 of the rebels got together on a train and set off for Kizil Arvat. They found Fralov and his followers on the station platform. Fralov was (this is, again, according to his enemies) sitting in an armchair, passed out from drink, with his wife and his companions around him. The train full of insurgents pulled up, the doors opened, and the insurgents immediately opened fire, gunning down Fralov and everyone else on the platform.
From this revolt the Trans-Caspian Government emerged.
65% of the inhabitants of Trans-Caspia were nomadic Turkmens, living in auls or villages near cultivated oases. They dressed in soft leather moccasins and leg wrappings, cotton shirts and pantaloons, long kaftans and big papakha hats of sheepskin. The working-class revolution was at first incomprehensible to the nomads, on top of which Red forces seized their horses and crops. They were also motivated to join the revolt by a desire for self-government. They calculated that the British or the Whites might grant it in return for help against the Reds.
Russians made up only 8% of the population. ‘The Russians, both Red and White, were dependent on the railway, or confined to it. They could not operate and could not even exist save in the immediate vicinity of those two shining steel rails… The Turkmans had the whole of the vast interior in which to roam about.’ (Teague-Jones, p 186)
Like Toshkent, it was a Russian-dominated regime. The leaders were Menshevik railway workers, schoolteachers, counts, Right SR activists, Russian generals and Turkmen patriarchs.
British agents had crossed from Persia, a short distance as the crow flies but withkut roads or raios, over mountains. A British force, large, but not as large as its officers wanted the world to believe, was centered on Masshad (Yes, the British in this period could simply drop a whole army into Iran). Contacts between the new White regime and British agents preceded the anti-Soviet revolt (through General Junkovsky) and developed afterwards, mainly through Lieutenant Reginald Teague-Jones. This meant advice and advisors, diplomatic recognition, money and armed forces. The money was a grudging trickle, and the soldiers numbered only a few hundred. But to the ‘democratic counter-revolutionaries’ of Ashgabat, who felt completely out of their depth, it was comforting to have the British Empire at their back. It enhanced their prestige to the point that, getting ahead of ourselves and taking the long view, it at least doubled the lifespan of the regime.
The new White government sat astride one of the two railways which connected Central Asia with the old Russian Empire; in other words it cut Toshkent off from Moscow. So the Toshkent Soviet sent a thousand fighters across the river Amu Darya. This army, like the formations of early 1918, was run by committees. Theirs was the highest proportion of internationals, recruited from the prison camps of the Great War. The British officer Teague-Jones saw women fighters among their dead. (Mawdsley, 328, Teague-Jones, 194. The credulous British officer also repeats some grotesque and improbable second-hand rumours about ‘their women.’)
Battle at Kaahka
An early battle outside the town and railway station of Kaahka on August 28th was characteristic of this strange linear ‘railway war.’ Teague-Jones (104-110) describes it from firsthand experience.
On the Trans-Caspian side were a few hundred untrained Turkmen, fewer Russians – including some officers and artillery – and a handful of British officers with 500 Punjabi sepoys. Their camp was a collection of carriages on the sidings, fifteen fighters to a car. The Russians would sing at night. Some of the trains were armoured – the Trans-Caspians even discovered that machine-compressed bales of cotton had excellent stopping power against bullets, and covered their trains with them.
Meanwhile there were numerous Russian officers who could have been at this battle, but chose instead to hang around the capital, Ashgabat, with nothing to do because they were too racist to serve in an army whose officers included Turkmen. (Teague-Jones, 125)
The Trans-Caspian forces set up a defensive line in a dry riverbed just outside of Kaaahka to the west, crossing the railway line at right angles. Their eyes followed the railway uphill to a bare ridge. That way, out of sight, were the Reds, who had already been repulsed by Indian machine-guns on August 25th. Soviet aviators flew overhead, scouting the ground.
When the Reds struck, the blow was sudden and fell on the left flank. In the morning they seized an old ruined fortress then advanced into the gardens on the outskirts of town. The Trans-Caspians had to climb out of their ditch and pelt across to the railway station and the gardens in complete disorder. Until midday confused firing raged in the gardens, where nobody could see very far. The British considered the Russians incompetent. Friendly-fire incidents on the Trans-Caspian side led to frenzied suspicions of the Turkmen. The Punjabis could not tell White from Red – you probably couldn’t either, if you were there – and didn’t know who to shoot at. The artillery on both sides was pretty much useless (because the personnel and equipment alike were poor), but its noise and debris no doubt added to the terror and confusion of the fighters.
Painting by Mitrophan Grekov (Probably depicting South Russia rather than Central Asia)
It was one of those clumsy battles so typical of the early Civil War. If the Reds had pressed the attack they probably would have taken the town. But the commanders didn’t know, and if they had somehow known they could not have communicated it to the fighters.
This was also a typical battle of the Civil War in Central Asia- fewer than a thousand combatants per side, drawn from a dizzying array of nationalities. At its most simple, it was a war between Russians, over the heads of the local Muslim population. The latter might feature as allies or auxiliaries but there was not even a pretence – at any point on the White side, and at this early stage on the Red side – that the war was being fought on their behalf. From Mensheviks to British officers, the aspiration of the Turkmens to rule in their own land was regarded as a sinister plot.
At a stretch, you might even boil it down to a war between different factions of social-democratic railway workers – but that would efface the clear class difference between the two Russian factions, the preponderance of the upper class and intelligentsia on the White side. It was a war of accidental alignments and improbable allies: Turkmen nationalists and reactionary Russian officers; Punjabi machine-gunners and Menshevik train drivers; Hungarians fighting for the Toshkent Soviet; slave-trading bandits in the service of a government whose link with the most powerful empire in the world was a junior officer whose friends called him Reggie.
Soviet Toshkent
By late 1918 Toshkent was fighting a war on three fronts: this Trans-Caspian railway war, a struggle with Kolchak’s forces for the Orenburg-Toshkent Railway, and a war against a Cossack host based in modern-day Almaty, Kazakhstan. They had a treaty with Bokhara, but they had heard rumours that a whole regiment of Britain’s Indian Army was stationed in the city. This turned out to be false, but over a dozen Red spies sent to find out were caught strangled by the Emir of Bokhara. (Hopkirk, 85) Like Moscow on a smaller scale, Toshkent was under attack from several angles.
Next we will examine how things stood behind Red lines, in Soviet Toshkent.
Thousands of Germans and tens of thousands from Austria-Hungary lived in 25 camps near Toshkent. Since the Revolution, they were free men. But there was no way home, unless they fancied a stroll across a continent and through a Civil War and a World War, so most still lived in the camps, where they had no protection from the cold, few medicines and little food. 70 died every month in the winter of 1917-18. By the summer hundreds were dying every month due to the heat and the worsening supply situation. Outside one camp sprawled a graveyard in which lay 8,000 dead.
(Antony Beevor, quoting British Consul-General Harris several thousand miles away in Irkutsk, implicitly blames this on the Reds who ‘turned them loose,’ not on the Tsar who locked them up here in massive numbers without providing for their nutritional and medical needs – page 197).
Many had settled in villages or in Toshkent itself, enough that their field-grey uniforms became part of the scenery under the mud walls and domes of the city, and in the chaikhana, tea houses. Some lived as beggars, others married local Muslim or Russian women and settled down. A hundred of them set up a shoe factory. For some reason – and this happened in the Trans-Baikal region as well – many of the captives from Austria-Hungary were accomplished musicians, and every restaurant in Toshkent soon employed an orchestra made up of former prisoners.
A Chaikhana in 1930, depicted in 1947 by Boris Romanovsky
The regime was based on the local working class – transport workers obviously, but there were also, for example, Chekists who used to be shop assistants and circus clowns. Like Stalin in Tsaritsyn, the local leaders were inclined to dismiss signed credentials issued in Russia’s capital cities as ‘merely a scrap of paper,’ and to view the authority of the central government with ambivalence: ‘we do what seems right to us.’ (Hopkirk, 26)
Across the former Russian Empire, civil war had cut across food supplies that were already stretched to breaking point by the years of the Great War. This was worse in Central Asia, which relied on imports. The Toshkent Soviet forced nomads and farmers to hand over food and cotton. The conflict over food was no doubt exacerbated by the colonial arrogance of Toshkent and its agents: according to the official Civil War history published years later, ‘many of the local Bolsheviks,’ to say nothing of the SRs, ‘distorted the policy of the Party on the national question and committed gross mistakes in their dealings with the native population.’ (Hopkirk, 29)
As time went by the Bolsheviks gained more of the balance of power in the coalition. But the vast majority of the local Bolsheviks had not been party members for even a year. Cut off from Moscow, there was no way to integrate them into the party. They hared off in their own direction politically. In relation to the Muslim majority, they were as sensitive as bulls in a china shop. But they also rejected the idea of an alliance with the peasantry. These were some of the ‘infantile disorders’ of newly-minted, ultra-left communists against whom Lenin would soon write a book.
The thing about history is that daily life doesn’t stop in respectful silence when memorable events pass by; twenty minutes’ walk from barricades that will be written about 100 years later you can generally find somewhere to sit out on the terrace and order a cuppa. In Toshkent when British agents arrived there in August The Prisoner of Zenda was showing in the cinema and an Englishman with a troupe of performing elephants was passing through. The British imperialists were worried that the Austro-Hungarian prisoners were getting ready to invade India. But when the Britons walked into a tea-house frequented by the ex-POWs, they would be greeted with a good-natured rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’
Western visitors such as these witnessed, and heard rumours about, the Toshkent Cheka carrying out arrests, beatings and executions. But judging by the same testimonies, the local security regime was clumsy. There was a serious White underground in the city known as the Toshkent Military Organisation (which included the brother of General Kornilov, himself also a general). Its agents were continually escaping just before arrest or having messages passed to them after arrest. Such messages were regularly baked into the bread rolls served up in the town’s prison, which was still staffed by the old Tsarist prison guards. It appears (from Hopkirk, 77) that a foreign agent looking for false papers could afford to be picky, such was the supply from Toshkent’s underground.
The British agents had many meetings with the Toshkent commissars, mainly the Left SR Minister for Foreign Affairs, Damagatsky. One of these meetings turned awkward when Damagatsky brought up the recent battles in the Trans-Caspian region, and showed the British agents shell-fragments with English writing to back up the reports he had received of terrible clashes with British-Indian troops along the railway line. The British agents knew that ‘the Bolsheviks [sic], they had to admit, would have been perfectly justified in interning them’ (Hopkirk, 31) since their two countries were now at war. But they bluffed their way out, claiming that the shells were among those donated by Britain to the Tsar, and that the Indians were just bandits. Even after the British landing at Archangel’sk and the beginning of Red Terror after August 30th, the British agents were left at liberty in Toshkent.
It seems obvious to me, and various authors I’ve read agree, that the British Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey was up to his neck in the White underground, preparing a revolt. Certainly he gave funds to White agents (Hopkirk, 63). But Kolesov, the Soviet President, did not see it this way at the time. ‘My government have grave suspicions of you,’ he warned Bailey, but ‘He added that personally he had none.’
FM Bailey. I can easily find pictures of these British interventionists, and memoirs written by them, and books written about them. Alas it’s not so easy to find material from the other side.
Bailey took the hint and, when he had found false papers that were perfectly to his liking, he disguised himself as an Austro-Hungarian soldier and disappeared. The heat was on: one of his co-conspirators, Pavel Nazarov, was soon arrested.
Hopkirk remarks ‘It is surprising perhaps that they did not attempt to torture’ Nazarov. Surprising – only if, like Hopkirk, we take the second-hand rumours of Chinese and Latvian torture specialists at face value. (43)
In spite or Bailey’s flight and Nazarov’s arrest, the White underground continued to organise its rising. So sloppy was the Soviet apparatus of repression that this White agent Nazarov, who was on the Toshkent equivalent of Death Row, was notified in advance that the White uprising he had been organising would take place on January 6th at 10AM.
And, give or take twenty minutes, so it did.
Pavel Nazarov, underground White Guard organiser in Toshkent
The Osipov Revolt
Toshkent’s Commissar for War was a Bolshevik – like all Toshkent Bolsheviks, one of very recent vintage – named Osipov. He had been a junior officer before the Revolution. He was all of twenty-three years old on the morning of January 6th 1919 when he picked up the phone in the barracks of the Second Turkestan Regiment and summoned his fellow government ministers to meet him there at once. The regiment, he told them, was about to mutiny and must be talked out of it.
Eight commissars arrived, one by one. Osipov had each one shot dead. While this trap was being sprung, Osipov’s co-conspirators were blowing open the gates of the prison and seizing parts of the city. 2,000 of the garrison’s 5,000 soldiers joined the revolt.
Osipov got drunk (According to legend he was drunk when he killed his fellow commissars). Those of White sympathies celebrated in the streets. The former head of the Cheka, who had joined the revolt, paraded through town on a horse with an escort of Cossacks, declaring that the new government would end bloodshed and bring stability. In the meantime, anyone who resisted would be shot. Six more commissars were killed, bringing the total to fourteen. The insurgents controlled most of the city, but had failed to take the railway stations or arsenals.
Red commanders of the Toshkent Citadel, 1918
Those celebrating and lynching in rebel-held parts of the city could not ignore the sounds of artillery, rifles and machine-guns. The battle was still raging. The railway workers again proved to be the key force in the situation: they vacillated, but seeing open White Guards and counter-revolutionaries on the side of the rebels, they stuck with the Soviet. Here is yet another sense in which this was a ‘Railway War.’
The decision of the railway workers tipped the scales. After a couple of days the rebels were clearing out of town and running for the mountains. Osipov and his supporters grabbed a load of gold from the state bank and fled to a fate that remains a mystery to this day.
For days afterwards, Red forces pursued the rebels into the mountains. For weeks, severe retaliation came down on the heads of anyone who had supported the rebels. Brun, the Danish officer sent to look after the prisoners-of-war, was imprisoned because he broke curfew. He avoided execution himself, but witnessed enough, surely, to traumatise him for life. He saw a crowd of condemned men trying to storm out of a prison and being beaten back. Some nights he heard people begging for their lives outside his window. He saw teams of gravediggers at work and saw the bloodstains on the ground. He estimated that 2,800 were killed in all. One chance detail: there was one Red executioner who required an extra alcohol ration in order to kill in cold blood. Is that why Osipov, too, was drunk when he ambushed and summarily executed his comrades?
My sources leave me with important questions unanswered. Here Kolesov disappears from the record – was he one of the unlucky Fourteen Commissars? On which side of the Toshkent barricades were to be found those demoralised fighters who had participated in the slaughter and looting in Kokand? It appears that some Muslims participated on both sides – but were there more on one side or the other? What role did the SRs and Mensheviks play in these events?
One thing is clear: this was another battle between Russians, fought over the heads of the native population.
A Russian Orthodox congregation in Kokand, 1889
The British agent Bailey had, before the uprising, fled Toshkent disguised as an Austrian soldier. By mid-February he felt things were safe enough to return. A few weeks later he celebrated Easter at a crowded mass in the city’s Orthodox cathedral. At midnight the congregants – who must have been disproportionately White sympathisers – stood up, exchanged kisses and declared ‘Christ is Risen.’ Maybe they were hoping that the tide would turn for their cause in 1919. But it was to the other side, to the Toshkent Soviet, that redemption would come in that year.
The 1919 Review 