White Army

25: Polish Invasion

Full-scale war breaks out between the young Polish Republic and the young Soviet Union. This is Episode 25 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War. We are approaching the half-way point in the fourth and final series.

The Bloodless Front

Readers will remember the young Red Cossack Vasily Timofeich Kurdyukov, whose father was a White Guard but who himself joined the Reds along with his brothers. Vasily – I hope Isaac Babel, who recorded this story, changed the names, but let’s call him Vasily – was a witness to the murder of one brother by the father. Is this ringing a bell yet? He was there too when, after the defeat of Denikin, he and his brothers tracked down their father in Maikop and killed him in retaliation despite the protests of the ‘Yids’, by which Kurdyukov meant the Soviet officials.[1]

April 1920 found VasilyKurdyukov on the move. Denikin was, along with Timofei Kurdyukov, vanquished. So Vasily, his older brother Semyon, and 16,000 other members of Budennyi’s First Red Cavalry Army had left South Russia, going from Maikop through Hulyaipole. They were making their way across Ukraine to take part in another campaign, covering 1200 kilometres in 30 days. Compared to the epic struggle against counter-revolution that was behind them, nothing too serious or historic appeared to lie ahead. The war was over, bar the fighting in parts of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The political regime seemed to be opening up, loosening up. The Allies lifted the blockade in January. The death penalty had been abolished. The leaders in the Kremlin were discussing post-war reconstruction, not the starting of new wars. Back east in the Urals, Third Army had laid down their rifles and turned to chopping down wood as the first Labour Army. 7th Army, after routing Iudenich near Petrograd, began digging peat. ‘Communiques from the bloodless front’ announced the rebuilding of this bridge or that railway line, the numbers of locomotives repaired, etc. And throughout the Red Army, literacy classes were a day-to-day reality, with thousands of mobile libraries in operation. As Kurdyukov rode, he would have been able to read educational letter-boards on the backs of the riders in front of him. [2]

For most Red Cossacks and for the large minority of worker-volunteers in the Red Cavalry, we can assume that peace couldn’t come soon enough. The fields of the Don and Kuban had been tended largely by the women and the old men since 1914. But we can easily imagine that for some Cossacks who had been at war for six years, life in the saddle with a sabre was the only life they had known as adults.

The First Red Cavalry Army was going west to join up with the Red South-Western Front under Egorov. They would then grab a few Ukrainian towns from the Polish Army, so that when the Soviets and Poland finally got around to signing their peace treaty, the line on the map would be a little further west and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that bit bigger.

So far, the Poles had been having their own way – defeating the Ukrainian Nationalists in Galicia and seizing from them the city of L’viv (which they called Lwów and the Russians called L’vov, and which is today part of Ukraine); and to the north, beyond the Pripet marshes, the Polish forces had been chipping away at the Soviet border for a year, seizing one Belarussian town after another. But now that Denikin and Kolchak were finished, it was time to hit back. In a few weeks or a month – if peace with Poland hadn’t been signed by then – the Red Army would be ready to launch an offensive, to hammer that border into a more agreeable shape.

But on April 24th 75,000 Polish soldiers invaded Soviet Ukraine. 11,000 fighters lately incorporated into the Red Army mutinied, led by their commanders, and went over to the Poles. The Polish government had signed a treaty with Petliura, the leader of the late Rada, and he and two divisions of Ukrainian soldiers were aiding the invasion. To make matters worse, Makhno chose this moment to strike the Reds: on 25 April his guerrillas massacred a regiment of the Ukrainian Labour Army at Marinka on the Donets. They also blew up bridges around the Kyiv area, crippling transport.

The Polish invasion made swift progress. This was no border skirmish. They were well-armed. Motor trucks infiltrated Red lines on small country roads. 150 planes supported them from the air with devastating attacks on armoured trains and on flotillas on the Dnipro river. There were 82,847 Red Army personnel on the whole South-West Front – but only 28,568 of them had weapons, and they were in disarray. Egorov pulled back his troops rapidly. The Poles gained 240 kilometres in two weeks. On May 7th they took Kyiv, and soon they had bridgeheads east of the Dnipro River. Since April 24th they had suffered only 150 fatalities.

Less than one month later, the White Guards who had found refuge in Crimea began an assault on Ukraine’s mainland. Wrangel’s 35,000-strong ‘Russian Army,’ which contained many of the same officers and Cossacks who had been fighting Soviet power since 1917, had rejoined the fray. Two new fronts had opened up, and the prospect of peace had receded to the very distant horizon.

Petliura (left) and Pilsudski on April 9th, not long before the invasion

At War Again

We can imagine the dismay and fear now felt by people in the Soviet Union, from the Kurdyukov brothers in Budennyi’s ranks to their mother back in South Russia. Just when the country was escaping, at long last, from the realm of war, here was another massive foreign intervention. It would set off the dreadfully familiar cycles of confusion, fear, revolt, hunger, disease, red and white terror. The death penalty was soon restored. The railways were militarised.

In the words of John Reed:

The cities would have been provisioned and provided with wood for the winter, the transport situation would have been better than ever before, the harvest would have filled the granaries of Russia to bursting – if only the Poles and Wrangel, backed by the Allies, had not suddenly hurled their armies once more against Russia, necessitating the cessation of all rebuilding of economic life – […] the concentration once again of all the forces of the exhausted country upon the front.

In the words of Trotsky: ‘Ahead of us lie months of hard struggle… before we can cease to weigh the bread-ration on a pharmacist’s scales.'[3]

This time there was also a strong element of patriotic indignation. A repeat of the Polish invasion of 1612 was widely feared. The famous tsarist General Brusilov came out of hiding and volunteered his services as an advisor to the Red Army.

Communists, from the Politburo in the Kremlin down to the volunteer in the trenches, found themselves trying to rein in patriotism whenever it threatened to spill over into the familiar Tsarist channels of imperialistic contempt for the Polish people. Trotsky and Lenin were scrupulous about never speaking of ‘The Poles’ or ‘Poland’ but only ‘The White Poles’ or the ‘Polish landlords.’ ‘Do not fall into chauvinism,’ urged Lenin. One Red Army paper, Voyennoye Dyelo, got into big trouble. Officers were sacked from the editorial board and the paper was suspended over the use of the phrase ‘the innate jesuitry of the Polacks.’

Trotsky affirmed that ‘defeat of the Polish White Guards, who have attacked us will not change in the slightest our attitude concerning the independence of Poland.’

Ukrainian communists, too, made appeals for the defense of Ukraine as a nation. A common charge was that Petliura was the chosen caretaker of the Polish landlords, to mind the Ukrainian estate which they had their eyes on. [4]

The rest of this post will explore the background to the invasion from the perspective of the Polish Republic, then describe the initial Soviet response.

A Soviet poster from this time. The caption says, ‘This is how the Polish lords’ invasion will end up.’

Intermarium

With the defeat of Germany in November 1918, a strong Polish military force emerged. Four of the combatant empires had large Polish units in their armies – not least a 35,000-strong Polish unit that had been raised in France and was now sent back into Poland. Also important was the Polish unit in the Austrian military, which was led by a man named Józef Piłsudski. The strength of the Polish military is probably what led to the emergence of a bourgeois capitalist Poland instead of a proletarian socialist Poland (though we will look next week at how close Poland came to a socialist revolution).

Let’s dwell for a minute on Józef Piłsudski. A Pole from Eastern Lithuania, he grew up under the heavy hand of Tsarist oppression, became a socialist but in his own words he dismounted from ‘the socialist tramcar at the stop called independence.’ He was not a leader of masses but a back-room conspirator and bank robber. [5] Service as an officer in the Polish unit in the Austrian military during World War One promoted him to the front rank of national leaders. In 1920 he was head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. His huge moustache belonged to the flamboyant 19th Century, but his glowering eyebrows and cropped hair gave an impression of urgency and severity.

Józef Piłsudski

Piłsudski had a vision of what he called Międzymorze, ‘Between the Seas,’ also known as the Intermarium. Without understanding Międzymorze we can’t understand the Polish-Soviet War. The idea was that Poland should lead a federation of countries stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic – which meant taking over, or at least installing pliable governments in, Ukraine and Lithuania. This idea harked back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of centuries past.

But in Poland as in Russia and Ukraine, grand plans had to be put on hold, as famine gripped the countryside and there were years of misery and want. Poland was not torn apart by war as Russia and Ukraine were, but the new Polish state battled with Germans, Czechs and, as we have seen, Ukrainians. Unlike in the Soviet Union, vast amounts of American aid alleviated the situation – in 1919-1920 the American Relief Administration fed and cared for 4 million Poles. By the end of 1919 a strong Polish state was in existence with a population of around 20 million and armed forces numbering 750,000. [6]

The time was ripe for Międzymorze. And the territories of the new Polish empire would be wrestled from the small Lithuanian republic and from the war-weary and ragged Soviet regime.

The communists, as imagined in a Polish wartime poster

Toward War

The revolutionary tradition, and most especially those trends around Lenin, had long supported Polish independence, and the Soviet government never made any territorial claim over Poland. An independent capitalist Poland, like Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would be accepted by Moscow.

Of course, the Soviet Union was in favour of world revolution. But this amounted to supporting communist revolutions and parties in other countries. Military intervention, even in the form of support for indigenous movements, was controversial. As the Brest-Litovsk episode showed, the Bolsheviks’ confidence in world revolution could in the right circumstances make them more amenable to signing a peace treaty, not less, because future revolutionary events would render an unfavourable treaty void.

The issue was where to draw the Soviet-Polish border – where, in the ‘300-mile band of polyglot territory between indisputably ethnic Poland and indisputably ethnic Russia,’ [7] would one state end and the other begin? This question had not been on the agenda since the 18th Century, and there was no recognised border. While Soviet Russia was busy fighting against the White Armies in 1919, Poland was settling this question at the point of a bayonet, making steady gains in a small-scale but one-sided war. Galicia was theirs by July 1919.

So the Polish and Soviet armies had been skirmishing for a year before the Polish invasion in 1920. Since the first clashes between Polish and Red troops took place as early as February 1919, the historian Norman Davies accuses other historians of ‘ignoring’ the ‘first year’ of the Polish-Soviet War. [8] It is Davies who here ignores the qualitative difference between the low-level conflict of that ‘first year,’ and the all-out war which began in April 1920 (This is a flaw in his generally great book).

The borderlands between Poland and the Soviet Union can be divided roughly into a northern area around Belarus and Lithuania, and a southern area, Galicia and Ukraine. The Pripet marshes lay in between the northern and southern areas. Polish, Russian and Jewish people lived in both, Belarussian and Lithuanian farmers in the north, Ukrainian farmers in the south.

The possibility of a peace settlement was there. The Soviets had no shortage of competent Polish supporters, some of whom they sent to Poland to try to negotiate peace from late 1918 right up to the eve of the invasion. One typical offer was of territory and plebiscites in exchange for peace. These got off to a bad start when a joint delegation of Soviet diplomats and Red Cross officials visited the Polish Republic soon after its foundation. They were immediately arrested and deported. During their deportation, Polish police dragged them out into the woods and shot them, killing three and leaving one who survived by playing dead. Nonetheless the Soviets kept up their peace efforts through 1919 and into 1920.

Frustration and alarm gripped Soviet diplomats and politicians in early 1920. They were still at the ‘talks about talks’ stage, and the Polish negotiators were stubborn and demanding. They would only agree to meet for peace talks in Barysaw (Borisov), a town recently captured by the Poles. It was not acceptable to the Reds as it was in a zone of active military operations. The Soviets proposed Warsaw, Estonia, Moscow, or Petrograd, all of which the Polish side rejected. Meanwhile Soviet leaders had accepted six out of seven conditions presented by the Poles as a basis for talks, but balked at the seventh – it demanded that they never attack the Ukrainian Nationalist leader Petliura. [9] When Moscow pushed back, Piłsudski broke off talks.

Beevor characterises all this as Piłsudski ‘playing for time.’ The time, from the first Soviet peace mission, was nearly 18 months. Piłsudski ‘s stubbornness is explained by the fact that he did not seek to make peace, but sought a pretext to invade.

‘When diplomatic moves failed,’ writes Robert Jackson, ‘the Reds launched a series of small attacks along their western front; the Poles beat them off and held their positions.’ [10]

The Soviet leaders were not naive, so they understood that a Polish attack was likely. They developed their own plans for a strategic offensive as far as Brest – hence Kurdyukov and 16,000 other riders hurrying over from South Russia. The limit of the Red Army’s ambition was to seize a few more towns before the signing of a peace treaty, and to foil any plans the Poles might have of doing the same.  

Unfortunately, some writers highlight a few facts out of context – a troop build-up here, a local offensive there – and paint a picture of a savage communist horde massing to trample and enslave Poland. Piłsudski’s grandiose imperial ambitions, his deliberate wrecking of peace talks, and his very ambitious and large-scale invasion of Ukraine feature only as minor details, if at all. [11]

The Allies

The Soviet leaders were convinced that the Polish invasion was the work of the Allies. It was characterised as ‘The Third Campaign of the Entente’ in an article written by Stalin in Pravda on May 25, 1920. We can say with hindsight that this impression was wrong.

The Allies did not egg on the Poles to attack the Soviet Union. In fact they were shocked and dismayed by the attack. The Allied leaders had learned that the Soviets were not to be trifled with, and they were getting cold feet on the question of intervention. On the more liberal end, Lloyd George thought the Poles had ‘gone rather mad’ and were behaving as ‘a menace to the peace of Europe.’ [12]

The Allies had rejected schemes proposed by Polish leaders which involved the Allies bankrolling a Polish march on Moscow. In addition to their growing wariness toward the Red Army, the Allies still held out hope that the Soviet regime would collapse, and they didn’t want to big up the Poles too much in case it offended a future conservative regime in Russia. Ideally, they wanted Poland to act as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ protecting Germany from the influence of revolutionary Russia – much as Stalin would use it later as a defensive glacis against the west. To that end the Allies began arming Poland in earnest from January 1920: rifles captured from the Austrians, planes and pilots, 5,000 French officers to train them. It was not much compared to the total resources of the Allies. But for a Polish army severely overstretched by its recent conquests, it was a game-changer [13].

In that very important sense, the Soviets were right. The Allies had backed (and still backed) the Reds’ opponents up to this point, and although they did not push Poland into war, in the months and years leading up to the war they backed Poland, armed its soldiers, gave equipment, lent advisors – in short, made the war possible. People on the Soviet side could not have known the ins and outs of Allied policy, and would have been innocent to believe any verbal reassurances along the lines of, Yes, we are bankrolling the army that’s invading you, and we got some other people to invade you a few months ago, but we didn’t actually want this army to invade you right now.

So the Soviets treated it as a seamless continuation of the Civil War. But the fact remains that their strategic understanding of the situation was wrong on a fundamental point. The initiative had come from Piłsudski, not from the Allies.

Moscow: volunteers for the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War

The Soviets Rally

This was one of several mistaken ideas with which the Soviets were burdened as this war began. But it would take time for these mistakes to have their fatal effects.

The Poles had made their own strategic mistakes in counting on Petliura and the Rada. After a month in Kyiv, things were not going well. Their ally (or ‘caretaker’) Petliura could not rally the Ukrainian people to his cause. It did not help that the price of the alliance was for the Rada to sign away Lviv and West Ukraine to Poland, which demoralised many Ukrainian Nationalists. This was on top of the basic point that Petliura was acting as an ally to the Polish landlords and business owners who had oppressed and exploited Ukrainians.

On May 25th the Reds began their general counter-offensive. At first, the Red Cavalry tried advancing directly on Polish trenches. They rapidly discovered that wild Cossack charges would not work as well as they had against Denikin, and the first few days of the offensive saw little progress. The Poles were experienced at trench warfare, and it was futile to attack them head-on. The Red Cavalry commanders refined their tactics. They would dismount close to the enemy, use artillery, use small striking forces to take strong points; or find gaps in the enemy line, turn enemy flanks, wreak havoc in the rear.

This Budennyi did personally on June 5th. He spent a sleepless night worrying about the following day’s attack, and rose to bad news about one of his divisions being forced to retreat during the night. He personally joined 1st Brigade of 14th Division and led the unit into marshy ground shrouded in early morning mist. They ran into some Polish cavalry, known as uhlans, and gave chase. One uhlan fired at Budennyi and missed. Budennyi caught up to him, knocked him from his horse. The dismounted uhlan fired again, and the bullet whined past Budennyi. The Red Cavalry commander used the flat of his sabre to disarm the uhlan, and brought him in for questioning. This encounter bore fruit: Budennyi learned of an ideal place to cross the Polish trench lines, and even found good places to fire directly down the trenches. The brigade passed through into the Polish rear.

This cavalry infiltration tactic saw widespread success. The area was too large for Great War-style trenches to cover it fully. Zhitomir, far behind Polish lines, was recaptured by the Reds on June 8th. On June 10th the Poles, threatened with being surrounded, evacuated Kyiv. Two or three days later the Reds marched in – this was, Mawdsley points out (p 348) the sixteenth time that the city had changed hands during the Civil War. Fortunately for the residents of the city it was also the last time.

Egorov’s South-West Front had been evacuated quickly enough that they did not suffer major losses during the Polish advance. It showed lessons learned from 1919: let the enemy advance run out of steam, then hit back hard. A Polish veteran summed it up bluntly: ‘We ran all the way to Kiev, and we ran all the way back.’ [14]

As the South-West Front covered the distance between Kyiv and Lviv, the Reds felt the wind at their backs. The insolent invaders were on the run. They might run all the way back to Warsaw. The Polish army appeared to be weak.

Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Soviets, predicted that the defeat of the Polish Army by the Red would deal the first blow to the Polish bourgeoisie, but that the Polish people themselves would deal the second and fatal blow. Likewise Trotsky ‘assumed that Poland would be liberated by her own people… His only recognisable war aim was to survive.'[15]

The Polish defeat, like the Tsar’s, might lead to revolution at home. A fraternal Soviet Poland might help alleviate the horrible suffering in the Soviet Union, might push Germany into revolution, might ignite Europe. The Reds had entered into the conflict with a notion of a struggle over the borderlands. Now they were being tempted by the idea, to use a modern phrase, of regime change.

Home Page/ Archives

Revolution Under Siege

References

  • [1] Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Pushkin Press 1926, trans Boris Dralyuk (2014), p 25-26
  • [2] Davies,p 118. John Reed, ‘Soviet Russia Now,’ published January 1921 in The Liberator, accessed at Marxists Internet Archive on 10 Jan 2024 at 21:49. https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1921/01/russianow.htm
  • [3] On the numbers on South-West Front, Makhno, and mutiny of East Galicians, see Davies, p 108. Quote from Reed, ‘Soviet Russia Now.’ Quote from Trotsky, ‘Speech at a meeting in the Murom railway workshops,’ June 21st 1920. In How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
  • [4] Davies, p 115, Smele, p 357, Trotsky quote from ‘The Polish Front and Our Tasks’ in How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
  • [5] Davies, p 63
  • [6] Davies, p 93; Smele, p 153-154
  • [7] Smele, p 153
  • [8] Davies, p 22
  • [9] Davies, p 71-73
  • [10] Jackson, Robert. At War with the Bolsheviks, Tom Stacey, 1972, p 229.p 230
  • [11] See Beevor, The Russian Civil War, Chapter 36; and Read, The World on Fire, p 110-111. Trotsky in May 1920 said: ‘[T]the most double-dyed demagogues and charlatans of the international yellow press will be quite unable to present to the working masses the irruption of the Polish White Guards into the Ukraine as an attack by the Bolshevik ‘oppressors’ on peaceful Poland’ How wrong he turned out to be. ‘The Polish Front: Talk with a representative of the Soviet press.’ How the Revolution Armed, Volume 3
  • [12] Davies, p 89; Smele, p 320 n46
  • [13] Jackson, p 229.
  • [14] Davies, p 105
  • [15] Davies, p 114

24: Escape to Crimea

This post tells how the White Guards fled South Russia in a state of complete chaos, but survived and established a new base in Crimea. This is Series 4, part 3 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War.

A Red soldier named Eduard Dune was captured during Denikin’s advance on Moscow. Among other terrible ordeals in captivity, he succumbed to typhus. Thirst and headaches gave way to two long comas; the second time, he woke up in the war-scarred city of Tsaritsyn, far away from where he’d passed out, and was soon loaded on a train bound for Novorossiysk. There he slowly recovered in an infirmary near the Black Sea port city, and as his faculties returned, he got active in underground work.

There were partisans in the hills near town, and he stole medical supplies from the infirmary and passed them to these ‘Green’ guerrillas. This close to the port of Novorossiysk, the supplies sent by the British government were piled up.

There was so much in storage that food supplies were lying under the open sky, and still the English continued to send more in ship after ship. Now that the White Army had their backs to the sea, the English had begun to supply all that had been promised when the army had stood near Moscow. The prisoners’ infirmary now enjoyed bed linens and other English hospital linen. In our storeroom lay trunks packed with English food products, including cocoa and dried vegetables. There was more than our cook could cope with.

There was a sand spit within sight of the infirmary where the Whites regularly took people for executions. The patients kept watch on this spot, collected intel and helped escapees. Dune and his fellow captive invalids stole papers from comatose typhus-inflicted Whites and supplied them to Red and Green agents in the city. They had a workshop on hospital grounds where they turned out false documents.

Novorossisyk had already been the site of things so strange and terrible they are difficult to visualise; way back in the fourth episode of this series, we followed the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov on his mission to scuttle the Black Sea Fleet. Very soon after that, the port fell to the Whites. Now, less than two years later, it was to witness one of the most surreal and pitiful scenes of the war.

Russian Civil War pictorial map number 7, ‘Liquidation of Iudenich and Denikin.’ The White Guards (coloured green) are pursued southward. Trace the Red arrows across the Don River, over the Kuban steppe, and down the Black Sea coast. Note also in the map two things we’re not going to deal with in much detail here: the final victory in North Russia and the rise of Soviet power around Baku, Azerbaijan.

Rostov

Meanwhile the war was raging on, the Whites falling back, the Reds surging southward: in January Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) saw its last battle of the Civil War when it fell to the Reds. But when the Whites reached their old base area of the Don and Kuban Countries, they rallied. The river Don, as if it was in sympathy, froze to let the Whites retreat across it, then thawed before the Reds could. Alongside this military recovery, the White civilian government, such as it was, promised reforms and tried to juice up some popular support. The Red Army hit the moat of the Don in disarray from its long advance, overstretched and agitated with internal disputes.

The Whites recaptured Rostov-on-Don on February 20th. But the Reds were by this time over the worst of their confusion, and it was the Whites’ turn to have some internal disputes. Denikin had made concessions to the Kuban Cossacks – not enough to stop them deserting, but enough to enrage the White officers. ‘What are we?’ they demanded. ‘Cannon fodder for the defence of the hated separatists?’

The First Red Cavalry Army (which by this time boasted 16,000 riders, 238 machine-guns, nineteen artillery pieces and eight armoured trains) crossed the Don and threatened the rear of Rostov; there was nothing for it but to abandon the town and fall back to Ekaterinodar (the city outside which a shell had killed the Whites’ chief inspirer Kornilov two years earlier) and then, after a short hopeless struggle, on to Novorossiysk.[1]

One of many grim chapters in Beevor’s recent book deals with the entry of the Reds into Ekaterinodar. He describes the summary murder of men falsely identified as officers, Kalmyks being massacred for no apparent reason, and dead White Guards being mounted on a locomotive as trophies. Beevor appears to be repeating contemporary rumours which his source’s author heard second-hand, which is consistent with some of my criticisms of the book. [2] But even allowing for exaggeration and rumour-mongering, such excesses probably did form a part of the picture of the Red Army’s advance in some areas.

1st Red Cavalry Army
The cover image is a detail from this 1921 Soviet poster. Of the text, all I can tell you is that the heading means a frontline soldier. Thankfully the images are self-explanatory.

Novorossisk

The resumption of Red advance translated into rumours heard by Dune in the Novorossiysk infirmary: ‘The Whites had won victories with the aid of their cavalry, but ever since Trotsky had said, “Proletarians, to horse!” we too fielded a cavalry, and ours beat the Cossacks all hollow. The Red cavalry had captured all the English tanks.’

This was confirmed by what Dune could see with his own eyes; White Guard Russia was visibly shrinking and contracting around him. First, discipline grew lax, and he could get out into the city on errands. Once there he saw the streets fill up with a strange juxtaposition of affluence and squalor: cartloads of expensive household goods, and huge numbers of typhus-stricken refugees. White officers began taking entire battalions to join the Greens. Back at the infirmary, White Army supplies were stolen wholesale now instead of retail.

Moving away and up the chain of command from the humble soldier Dune, the British General Bridges was disgusted: ‘the whole affair was a degrading spectacle of unnecessary panic and disorder, and I urged the government by cable to dissociate themselves from the White Russians who had no prospects and little fight left in them.’ But Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, overruled him. So the British remained and took responsibility for the evacuation of White officers and their wives and children. [3]

Suddenly the British project of pumping in great quantities of supplies and war materiel had to go into reverse: now the British were evacuating White officers and their families, and anyone else who could be crammed on board. At the quays, crowds pressed against the British Army cordon and the ships heaved with people. A tank drove slowly over a row of thirteen British aeroplanes, turning them to matchwood so that the Reds couldn’t use them. Then, of course, the tank itself was abandoned. Other engines of war littered the sea floor where they had been dumped. Tearful Cossacks shot their horses.

The other White naval evacuations were disasters, but Novorossiysk was the worst. [4] It was so bad, Denikin resolved to resign as soon as it was all over. The misery, destruction and desperation were extraordinary:

…the waterfront was black with people, begging to be allowed on board the ships… Conditions were appalling. The refugees were still starving and the sick and the dead lay where they had collapsed. Masses of them even tried to rush the evacuation office and British troops had to disperse them at bayonet point. Women were offering jewels, everything they possessed – even themselves – for the chance of a passage. But they hadn’t the ghost of a chance. The rule was only the White troops, their dependants and the families of men who had worked with the British were allowed on board. [5]

Above: the chaos at Novorossiysk.

The 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers acted as a rear guard, supported by a naval bombardment (one of the ships firing was the Waldeck-Rousseau, which had mutinied the year before). On March 27th the Red Army arrived, lobbing shells after the fleeing ships. By then, 34,000 had been evacuated (A disproportionate number were Volunteers, which suggests the Don Cossacks got shafted).

The Reds found on the quays an indescribable landscape of dead horses and destroyed equipment – but also heaps of intact supplies, such as one million pairs of socks. General Bridges had not been permitted to abandon the Whites, but he had left food and clothing to try to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people in war-torn South Russia. The Reds captured 22,000 White Guards in the town, and 60,000 later surrendered further down the coast at Sochi.

Other Whites fled into the Kuban steppe, where they waged a guerrilla war. As for the Green armies, at the moment of victory they suffered a split between the pro-Communist elements and the various other forces who were in the mix, and soon dissolved. [6]

London

Meanwhile in London, time of death was called on the White cause. Field Marshal Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: ‘so ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s attempts. Antwerp, Dardannelles, Denikin. His judgement is always at fault.’

Several days later he wrote: ‘cabinet at 6pm. We decided, Curzon leading, finally to tell Denikin to wind up affairs and come to terms with the Soviet government. Great joy. Winston fortunately absent.’ [7]

It was neither the first nor the last time the British had decided to withdraw from the Russian Civil War. They were sick of being on the sidelines of the bloody mess, acting as referee and sponsor, and occasionally stepping onto the pitch to play midfield, only to be frustrated again and again by the unexpected strength of the opposition and the shocking failures of their own side. In spite of all this, British intervention continued while the Whites made another throw of the dice. The fact that some tens of thousands of White Guards had escaped in one piece, plus an accident of geography and miitary fortune, gave the Whites an opportunity.  

During the chaotic White retreat across Ukraine, one White officer had fought his way through Makhno’s anarchists to reach Crimea. There he held the Perekop Isthmus, the narrow strip of land connecting Crimea to the mainland. This officer, who had entered Ukraine as one of Shkuro’s notorious ‘White Wolves,’ bore the evocative name Slashchev.

Because of Slashchev’s feat the Whites held onto Crimea, an area 27,000 square kilometres in size, or one-third the size of Ireland. The Reds had no fleet on the Black Sea and the Allies had, so Crimea was a natural fortress as well as a base area of manageable size and with a population of over a million. That’s where the British fleet obligingly left those 35,000 evacuated White Guards. We have the strange picture of masses of hardened veterans disembarking at seaside resort towns.

Crimea

The first item on the agenda was leadership. At a Council of War in April, power passed from Denikin to his rival and critic, the ‘Black Baron’ Wrangel. The military chieftains objected on principle to electing Wrangel. To be clear, they did not object to Wrangel himself, only to the idea of electing a leader. So they insisted Denikin appoint him. After the galling experience of handing power to his rival, Denikin had nothing left to do but depart for Constantinople on a British destroyer, never to return. [8]

Above: photographs and a poster depicting Wrangel

Wrangel was not a graduate of Bykhov prison-monastery or a survivor of the Kuban Ice March, not at all one of the original Kornilov club. But with his height and striking features, he looked the part more than any other major White leader; Soviet cartoons and posters got great mileage out of him.

But there was still a line of continuity going all the way back to those origins as ‘the saga of the Volunteer Army continued in the Crimea.’ The elite ‘colourful units’ that were named after Markov, Alexeev, Kornilov and the others still existed as I Corps. [9] Like his predecessors, Wrangel called himself ‘Ruler’ and his army the ‘Russian Army.’

One of the themes that keeps popping up in this series is the role of the individual in history. Wrangel is a striking case study, because under him a new and distinct White Guard regime emerged in Crimea. Whereas Denikin’s regime was overstretched, ragged and undisciplined, Wrangel’s was every bit as lean and severe as he was.

In contrast to the previous White regimes, there was a functioning government and strict discipline. Reds who deserted were given a fair hearing. Looters were shot. Wrangel’s government would even pass a law redistributing landlords’ holdings to peasants – yes, the Whites were finally ready to cut their losses on that one, and the irony is that Wrangel, unlike Denikin, was actually of the land-owning nobility. His regime also made overtures to Tatars and Ukrainians, and cooperated with the Poles.

(L) Wrangel inspecting White pilots, and (R) his functioning government

Was this all down to Wrangel’s personality?

Perhaps not so much. Actually, the Baron had been a champion of the conservatives within the White movement against the more ‘liberal’ Denikin. Wrangel spoke of the need ‘to make leftist policies with rightist hands’ and pronounced a policy of ‘With the Devil, but for Russia and against the Bolsheviks.’ [10] Every living White Guard, one assumes, had learned extremely harsh lessons in 1919. Popular opinion and practical common sense would have favoured this new approach.

Above, images of Wrangel from the Soviet point of view. ‘Three grenadiers’ labelled Iudenich, Denikin and Wrangel; Wrangel as Khan of the Crimea; and ‘The Tsarist gendarme, Baron Wrangel’

What made this approach possible was the fact that an overwhelming mass of White Guards were now concentrated in a stable, small, self-contained base area. Just as one example of how Crimea insulated the Whites from the chaos that had messed things up before, the Cossacks could no longer do the old loot-and-desert routine. They didn’t have horses anymore, let alone horses that could swim across the Black Sea. The character of the new regime had more to do with the new base than with any other factor. But it is one of those interesting moments when so many things, right down to the physical appearance of the leader, produce the same impression: this was a White army, but leaner and smarter, confronting Moscow with a new type of challenge.  

Home Page/Archives

Revolution Under Siege Archive

References

[1] Mawdsley, pp 302-309. Special thanks are due to Mawdsley, on whose book I relied heavily for this post. Dune, 180-198

[2] Beevor, pp 431-2

[3] Kinvig, p 311

[4] Smele,p 140

[5] Kinvig, p 309

[6] Smele, p 140. Dune, p 211. On the Greens, see the notes from Diane Koenker and SE Smith in Dune’s memoirs, p 187

[7] Kinvig, p 312

[8] Mawdsley, p 309

[9] Mawdsley, p 364

[10] Ibid, p 363

The new texture behind the ‘Revolution Under Siege’ text is from the Wikimedia Commons image ‘Rust and dirt’ by Roger McLassus. Not that anyone is eagle-eyed enough to notice, but it is important to credit people

23: Hell March (Premium)

In this post we trace the collapse of White Siberia in late 1919 and early 1920. This is Series 4, Part 2 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War .

Become a paying supporter to get access

Access to this article is limited to paying supporters. If you already subscribe by email, thank you. But if you want to become a paying supporter, please hit ‘Subscribe’ below.

Give me less than the price of a coffee, and you can access everything on this blog for one year.

Subscribe

Back to Home Page/ Archives

Revolution Under Siege Archive

5 ‘weird little guys’ of the Russian Civil War

I listen to Chapo Trap House and Hell on Earth, and those lads often coin a phrase – Maga Chud, Hot Couch Guy, Lanyard, etc. One of the little phrases they have pioneered on there, especially with reference to the podcast Blowback, is the idea that guys or weird little guys are a big part of what makes history interesting. They mean, basically, a character. A guy is some outrageous, fascinating, usually horrible individual, almost always a literal guy: Macarthur; Charlie Wilson in Afghanistan; Von Manstein and Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War. I think the ‘Great Man’ Theory of History is bullshit but I believe in the explanatory power of biography, particularly of the not-so-great man. An individual character can be a strong nail on which to hang a narrative.

My writing has progressed from an obsession with the Celts and the Gaels to an even deeper obsession with the Russian Civil War. That has involved wading through a sea of colourful characters. That’s no surprise: an empire collapsed, and with all institutions turned to dust, the force of personality briefly became a real material force. Any half-way charismatic character could ‘shark up a band of lawless resolutes’ and just have a go at conquering Russia.

I’m going to try and narrow it down to the five most interesting guys I’ve come across. But we can’t go with the obvious big names – Lenin, Trotsky, Kolchak or Denikin. For all their differences and their interesting features, these characters are straightforward. ‘Guys’ are hard to define but they have to defy expectations, or even to defy the laws of political gravity. It’s also difficult to rank them. Below, number 1 is definitely number 1 but the other four are joint second. Here goes.

5: Ataman Nikifor Hryhoriiv, aka Grigoriev, aka Servetnik

Top: Grigoriev and his movement, as depicted in a Red poster; bottom, Red army routing Grigoriev

Grigoriev was the pure distillation of the contemporary warlord. He fought for, or at least flirted with, literally every side that was active on his front of the war. Let’s go through the list. From the Tsarist Army he went to the Ukrainian Nationalist Rada (check); he helped overthrow them on behalf of the German-backed Hetman Skoropadsky (check); then he rejoined the Rada and helped overthrow Skoropadsky. Then he linked up with the Ukrainian Left SRs (check); next he brought his partisan horde into the Red Army and captured Odessa for them (check). In May 1919 he set up shop on his own when he launched a massive revolt against the Soviet power which covered about a third of Ukraine and which was accompanied by vicious anti-Jewish pogroms. After his revolt was put down he tried to make an alliance with Makhno and the Anarchists (check). They discovered that he had made a secret alliance with the Whites (check), so they killed him and brought his followers into their army.

Grigoriev is an easy pick for this list. He was notably rude and charmless, and he was pissed as a newt when he took Odessa. Frequently to be found RHUI – Riding a Horse Under the Influence – but he led from the front and for this he was admired by his men. In his drunken, fearless, martial, bigoted figure he embodied the chaos of his land in 1919. If the Reds had followed through on their plan to send him and his army to help the Hungarian Soviet, he probably would have ended up joining the Slovakians or something.

4: Larissa Reissner

Larissa Reissner was one of thousands of women who volunteered to fight in the Red Army, not to mention those who fought in, and even led, Red partisan forces.

She was also a great writer, and she left behind ‘Svyazhsk,’ an eyewitness account of the Battle of Kazan – in my opinion one of the best-written first-hand documents we have from this war.

After fighting in and writing about that battle, she went on to spy behind the Japanese lines in Siberia, disguised as a peasant woman. She was captured, because her disguise was utterly unconvincing, but she escaped. Along with her husband Raskolnikov (aka Ilyin, another contender for ‘guy’ status), she went to Kabul and negotiated a diplomatic agreement with the King of Afghanistan.

She knew many famous writers and artists, from Mandelstam to Akhmatova. Most Bolsheviks’ personal lives appear to have consisted of drinking tea and country hikes, but Reissner’s was far more interesting and colourful. Of how many people can we say that they conversed about poetry with Anna Akhmatova, and also spent a month in the squalor and danger of the frontlines at Kazan?

Larissa Reissner died young of typhus in 1926.  

3: Prince Pavel Rafalovich Bermondt-Avalov

This was a complex war, with foreign powers (Germany, Britain, Japan…) layered on top of national and ethnic movements (Estonians, Bashkirs, Armenians…), themselves layered on top of class factions (workers, peasants, intelligentsia, capitalists, landlords…). On top of that, people switched sides a lot (General X was a pro-German monarchist who was in favour of independence for Y nationality, now he’s a pro-Allied SR; tomorrow he will be a Red military specialist, but preparing a mutiny on behalf of the Green partisans…) For every political orientation, for every trajectory through this mess, there was an individual character, a guy.

Bermondt-Avalov is the best example. ‘Bermondtian’ came to mean a pro-German, anti-Baltic Nationalities anti-communist. He built up a White Army by recruiting Russian soldiers from German prison camps. As you might have guessed, he was a protégé of the German government, and became one of their instruments in trying to build up a Baltic German Empire in 1919 (Yes, after the war the Allies gave the Germans a chance to conquer the Baltic, just to have a go at the Soviets). For a time Bermondt-Avalov and co had to play nice with the British and the British-backed Latvian and Estonian Nationalists. But his German-backed Whites were very distinct from the Allied-backed Whites. While the latter marched on Petrograd, he decided it would be a great time to march on Riga – ie, to declare war on the British-backed Latvian government. The Latvian and Estonian Nationalists defeated him, but his war undermined the White attack on Petrograd.

I chose Bermondt-Avalov not because I know a whole lot about his personality, temperament, etc, but because he raised an army to fight the Reds and ended up fighting other anti-communists. He may have been more interested in establishing Baltic German power than in fighting communism, but the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive. The way things turned out, German-oriented Whites were a historical curiosity. But if the Allies had not intervened, or if the Germans had come out of World War One stronger, then the Bermondt-Avalovs would have represented something different.

He fled to Germany, served the Nazis, for some reason was deported to Yugoslavia in 1941, and went to the United States where he died in the 1970s.

2: Jukums Vacietis

Vacietis, AKA Vatsetis, is another guy who stood in the thick of the raging national and class cross-currents.

He was a son of farm labourers who rose through the ranks of the Latvian Rifles, an all-Latvian unit of the Tsar’s army. Unlike most of the soldiers of the Tsar they had strong and bitter reasons to resist Germany right to the end: if Germany conquered Latvia, then the arrogant Baltic German barons would oppress them and push them around even more than before. So even while revolutionary consciousness spread among the Latvians, their discipline and spirit did not diminish.

Vacietis and the Latvians were big supporters of the October Revolution. 72% of Latvian voters opted for the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917. In the early months of the Soviet Union the Latvian Rifles were pretty much its only trained and cohesive military unit.

And after the mutiny of Muraviev (a guy in his own right: adventurer, anti-Ukrainian chauvinist, Left SR, briefly head honcho in the Red Army – he mutinied against the Reds and tried to bring Red and White armies together to fight the Germans) … Where was I? After the mutiny of Muraviev, Vacietis was effectively commander-in-chief of the Red Army. He never joined the Communist Party but though he was a ‘non-party man’ there were few more reliable than him in the eyes of the military commissar Trotsky. He was a big heavyset guy in a flat cap, grumpy, hard to get on with, but unflappable, full of energy. He was chased out of Kazan, fleeing room-to-room from the Whites and Czechs after his staff mutinied. He had to flee across the river in a rowboat. But where he landed, an army cohered around him. He was key to the operations to retake the city a month later.

He got in hot water in 1919 – partly for losing a debate over strategy, and partly because he fantasized out loud in front of his comrades about maybe someday being the next Napoleon. He was replaced with the less temperamental Sergei Kamenev (another non-party military officer who gets too little credit). He became a professor at the Red Army military academy after capital charges against him were proved false. But like most of his contemporaries in the Red Army, he did not survive the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s.  

1: Baron Roman Von Ungern-Sternberg

What can one say about the ‘Mad Baron’? Where do you start?

Ungern was one of those Baltic Germans that the Latvians were so worried about. If he’s anything to go by, they were right.

He was the most violent and cruel figure in this whole continent-spanning war. That’s saying something. He punished and killed people in painful and elaborate ways that you wouldn’t even think of if you put your mind to it. Murder without process was an everyday occurrence in his domains, and military discipline was like something from Saw. But it’s not obvious that he was a sadist, exactly; his motivations were even more twisted and demented.

He was a Buddhist of some kind, also influenced by Theosophy, but Lutheran in origin, Orthodox insofar as he served Tsarism. He believed in magic and occult secrets. Other White Guards looked to Europe to save them from Revolution, but Ungern saw Europe as the epicentre of the revolutionary earthquake. I am obliged to give him grudging points for consistency and rigour in that he rejected the whole Enlightenment and modernity along with the October Revolution.

His remedy for the revolutionary storm in the West? In the words of one of his disciples: ‘Here in these historic plains [Mongolia and adjacent parts of China and Russia] we will organize an army as powerful as that of Genghis Khan. Then we will move, as that great man did, and smash the whole of Europe. The world must die so that a new and better world may come forth, reincarnated on a higher plane’ (Alioshin, Dmitri. Asian Odyssey, H Holt and Company, New York, 1940, p 15).

Unlike most other White warlords, he did not get drunk, have orgies, or amass a fortune. He gave his own money to support his soldiers. He liked animals, or at least hated humans; if someone served bad food to the horses, he would lock them up and force them to eat it for days. He hated the Chinese, but idolized the Mongolians with an extreme romanticism.

It is sometimes said that he believed himself to be the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan. That’s probably not true. But the Mongolian theocracy declared that he was the reincarnation of another important figure from Mongolian history. They were grateful to him because he drove out the Chinese occupying forces from Mongolia – in the process carrying out an unbelievable sack and slaughter in the Mongolian capital city. So far, things were going well for his dreams of world conquest. But Mongolian communists, backed by the Soviets, soon defeated him, and he was tried and executed on Soviet soil.

There are too many other big characters to name or describe, and I will probably want to revise this list on further reading and reflection.

Honourable mentions to Shkuro, Mai-Maevskii, Frunze, Tukhachevsky… and at least twenty others.

Home Page/ Archives

Scourge of God: The Basmachi

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.

Enver Pasha’s charge was an episode in a movement known as the Basmachi, the subject of this short post. This is a part of Class War and Holy War, a mini-series attached to my bigger project Revolution Under Siege.

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.

But the movement was not finally destroyed until the early 1930s, the period of forced collectivisation and repression on a hitherto unseen scale.

Conclusion

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.

Revolution Under Siege archive

Home page/ archive

Class War and Holy War: (4) Tackling ‘A Russian Ulster’

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.

According to Rob Jones:

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.

[Jones]
Delegates of a Tatar language conference in Kazan

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.

Class War and Holy War: (3) Breaking the Siege (Premium)

Most of the placenames mentioned below. Thanks Google Maps

Become a paying supporter to get access

Access to this article is limited to paying supporters. If you already subscribe by email, thank you. But if you want to become a paying supporter, please hit ‘Subscribe’ below.

Donate less than the price of a coffee, and you can access everything on this blog for one year.

If you don’t feel like donating, most of my posts are still 100% free, so browse away, and thanks for visiting.

Subscribe

Go to Home Page/ Archive

Sources

Class War and Holy War: (2)  Railways and Nomads

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.

Class War and Holy War: (1) Revolution on the Silk Road

During the Russian Civil War the Soviet Republic was a besieged fortress. What’s less well-known is that it had an outpost thousands of kilometres away in Central Asia, centred on the city of Toshkent (Tashkent) in modern-day Uzbekistan. The Toshkent Soviet was itself a Red island surrounded by enemies, and its struggle for survival, like the broader Civil War, was a drama rich in ironies and sudden reversals, sometimes horrifying, sometimes inspiring. It is also a historical curiosity: a revolutionary workers’ republic in the heart of Asia, where Muslim farmers and nomads outnumbered the Russians ten to one. It demands attention as a kind of scientific ‘control’ for the Soviet experiment; there was another Soviet Union, separated from the main one for a long time, and unlike the Soviets of Hungary and Bavaria, it survived.

A literal fortress in Kokand, modern-day Uzbekistan

‘For nearly two years,’ wrote the Bolshevik Broido, ‘Turkestan was left to itself. For nearly two years not only no Red Army help came from the centre in Moscow but there were practically no relations at all.’ (Carr, 336) What’s this Turkestan? It was their name at the time for, broadly speaking, the lands we now call Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. A more recent historian writes: ‘The survival of Soviet power in Turkestan is another testament to the popularity of the Soviet revolution and the weakness of other forces.’ (Mawdsley, 328)

Ultimately the Revolution would bring massive changes to Central Asia, which included:

  • Land redistribution at the expense of the feudal rulers;
  • The expulsion of vast numbers of racist and violent Russian settlers;
  • The birth of the states which would become Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Kazakhstan;
  • The enormous expansion of schools, universities and libraries.

(Dilip Hiro, Inside Central Asia, Overlook Duckworth, 2009, 2011, p 31, 33)

But when you read on about the massive forces ranged against it – from White Guards, Muslim rebellions and British intervention to the racist attitudes of many local Soviet leaders toward the Muslim majority – you will wonder how this revolution survived for a single year.

Class War and Holy War: Revolution Under Siege in Central Asia, 1918-1920 will be a three- or four-part miniseries branching off from my series Revolution Under Siege.

(I’m grateful to this article on an exhibition titled ‘Posters of the Soviet East’ by the Mardjani Foundation for many of the images I have used in this series, including the cover image for this post.)

For example: this poster from the 1920s in Tajik. ‘Peasant: Don’t elect these people. They were your enemies and they remain your enemies.’ I assume they are landlords and clerics.

How people lived

My readers are mostly from English-speaking countries, where ignorance reigns about Central Asia. The only reference point common to most of my readers is a mockumentary starring a guy from London posing as a representative of the Kazakh government, who says outrageous things in a funny accent (‘Very nice, how much?’ – ‘You are retarded?’ etc), his Polish-Yiddish ‘hello’ standing in for Kazakh.

Not to get up on my high horse. All I know about Central Asia is what I read in a handful of books over the last few months. But learning proceeds by successive approximations. I’ll be guilty of mistakes and omissions, but anything is better than nothing. For knowledge – obviously not for laughs – I reckon I can probably improve on Borat. 

To visualise these peoole, first let’s exorcise from our minds images of Sacha Baron-Cohen’s jaunt around an unsuspecting Romanian village. The best place to start is by sketching how the people lived in this region around the time of the Revolution.

Imagine a house with a courtyard surrounded by a wall high enough to block you from seeing in from outside. In the house lives a father with a white beard who wears a turban and a long black jacket. Under his patriarchal authority live his sons and their wives and children, each in their own room which opens on the garden and courtyard. None of them can read.

(Dilip Hiro, Inside Central Asia, Overlook Duckworth, 2009, 2016, 20-30)

If they are poor, there is no glass in the windows, and the children and even babies go naked while their only set of clothes is being washed – even in the snows of winter. The ubiquitous item of clothing is the khalat, a loose gown.

The house is part of a community built near an oasis or a river in a landscape of ‘sparsely populated and starkly contrasting reaches of steppe and mountains.’ (Smele 228) They make a living through farming, commerce and handicrafts. The white-bearded old men of the locality are in charge. They answer to beks, landlords who administer justice. The Muslim clerics are another source of authority, divided into two schools: the conservative Qadim and the modernising Jadid. There are 8,000 Islamic schools in the region but only 300 national schools.

(Hiro, 50. Rob Jones, ‘How the Bolsheviks Treated the National Question,’ from internationalsocialist.net, 31 Mar 2020, https://internationalsocialist.net/en/2020/03/the-russian-revolution).

The bek might sentence a criminal to hanging, shooting or beating or to the public humiliation of face-blackening. Above the bek there might be a khan or emir, who answers in turn to a white Orthodox Christian in distant St Petersburg, the Tsar of Russia, whose forces conquered the region only within the last two or three generations.

Mountains in the Kyrgyz Republic

These are the settled people: 4 million Uzbeks, who spoke a Turkic language, and their close neighbours, the million Persian-speaking Tajiks. The Fergana Valley lies between the two, an area rich in cotton which, under the Tsar, has been intensively developed and commercialised.

Then there are the nomads. Imagine another house, this one made of felt and furs, which the women of the family can assemble or take down in a few hours. The Kazakhs, whose name means ‘Wanderer,’ are the most numerous, 4.5 million of them divided into three ‘hordes’ between the Caspian Sea and the border of China. The most stubbornly nomadic of the Kazakhs are distinct as the ‘Forty Tribes,’ the million Kyrgyz who live on the eastern plateaux, brave draft-dodgers and rebels. By the Caspian Sea live several Turkmen tribal groups, nomads whose numbers add up to another million. The nomads live by nomadic stock-breeding, along with marginal agriculture and the caravan trade.

(Smith, SE, Russia in Revolution, 57)

These 11 or 12 million scattered Muslims, who mostly identify not with any national project but with the local clan, village or oasis, are held by the centrifugal force of the 78 million Russians of the Empire, 3 million of whom live in Central Asia. (Mawdsley, 31, 38)

Silk roads and iron roads

This region was once the nexus of the world, ‘full of the traditions and monuments of an ancient civilisation’ along the legendary trade routes known as the Silk Roads. (Carr, 334) Around 1000CE it used to be said that the sun doesn’t shine on Bukhara – Bukhara shines on the sun. In 1918 it was still considered the holiest city in Central Asia, difficult of access to non-Muslims. Mary (Merv) was ‘Queen of the World’ until the Mongols sacked it. Samarqand was famous for its beautiful turquoise domes, and as the one-time capital of the vast empire of Timur Bek, known and feared in Europe as Tamerlane. There were also sites associated with a recent history of resistance, such as Geok Tepe, where the Turkmens made their heroic last stand against the Tsar in 1881.

(Teague-Jones, Reginald, The Spy Who Disappeared, Gollancz, 1990, 1991, 55)

During the time of our story all these peoples and cities are lumped together in three vague regions: Kazakhstan, ‘Trans-Caspia’ (modern-day Turkmenistan) and ‘Turkestan’ (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to us). Got that? Turkestan and Turkmenistan are not the same place. Most of these groups were intermingled throughout the region, rather than having their own exclusive territories. Also, the Russians mistakenly called the Kazakhs ‘Kyrgyz’ and the Kyrgyz ‘Kara-Kyrgyz’… And then there’s the Kalmyks…

But I’ll try to stay on course. Just remember that these different communities and identities are no more and no less complex than, say, those of Europe – just less familiar to the English-speaking reader.

Crossing the deserts and mountains and valleys are two railway lines and some telegraph wires. They are the slender threads by which Imperial Russia sends in settlers and extracts cotton. By 1917 there are many Russians in Central Asia, concentrated in their cities, depending on the metal threads, or else spread out in farming settlements, clashing with the natives over land and water rights. Cotton production has boomed since Tsarist rule began in the 1860s, machine-compressed bales of cotton exported by the thousand over the railways, north-west to Orenburg, or west to the Caspian Sea. But the link to a global capitalist market is a mixed blessing: now and then the market crashes with devastating results for local people: ‘a bumper crop in Louisiana could spell disaster for Fergana.’ (Smele, 18)

The iron roads have transformed Toshkent, an ancient site whose name means ‘city of stones.’ 2,000 Tsarist soldiers crossed the river one night in 1865 and seized the town; since then the Europeans have built a grid-patterned ‘new town,’ wide boulevards lined with silver poplars, turtle-doves on the rooftops. Hundreds of thousands of Russians migrated there to serve as clerks, technicians, skilled and semi-skilled workers, not to mention soldiers. There they enjoy electricity, piped water, trams, phones, cinemas, and a commercial district. It is a city of 500,000 people. Rents are high. Sedentary Uzbeks work the less prestigious jobs in cotton processing. Like in another region associated with cotton, the South of the United States, the front seats on the trams are reserved for white people.

(Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze, Oxford Univeristy Press, 1984, 2001, 21. Hiro, 27)

This is a diverse and colourful region. One day at a train station in 1918 in modern-day Turkmenistan, ‘Russian peasants in red shirts, Persians, Cossacks and Red soldiers, Sart traders and Bokhariots, Turkmans in their gigantic papakhas [hats]… pretty young girls and women in the latest Paris summer fashions’ could be observed clamouring at a counter for tea and black bread. (Teague-Jones, 57)

Cotton picking in Kokand, late 19th or early 20th Century

World War One brings first difficulties and then devastation. The price of cotton plummets, those of consumer goods rise. The Tsarist government requisitions horses. Early on, food is more plentiful here than in other parts of the empire. Captives from the armies of Germany and (far more so) Austria are sent here in their thousands – 155,000 by the start of 1917. (Mawdsley, 328) There are eight squalid prisoner-of-war camps in the vicinity of Toshkent alone. Food becomes scarce later in the war, and the captives begin to die in terrible numbers.

In 1916 the government tries to conscript the peoples of Central Asia for combat and forced labour. The Kyrgyz and Kazakh nomads start a guerrilla war in response, backed up by settled Uzbeks protesting in Toshkent and Kokand. The Tsar responds with a fury that will not be matched until the period of forced collectivisation under Stalin. Three years later an eyewitness will record that once-busy villages are still absolutely deserted. At least 88,000 are killed in the crackdown led by General Ivanov-Rinov, and twenty percent of the region’s population flee into China. (Smele, 20-21)

Revolution

So the Muslims of the Russian empire anticipated the Revolution with their failed rising. They were also active participants in the 1917 Revolution – though the most active elements were not those of Central Asia but their distant cousins, the Muslim minorities who lived around the Volga and the Urals. There were great Muslim congresses in 1917, from which emerged three political tendencies:

  • The Jadids – modernising clerics who called for ‘land to the landless’ and to ‘expropriate the landlords and capitalists.’ These were stronger on the Volga than in Central Asia.
  • The Qadims – conservative clerics, who called for Islamic law for Turkestan. Their organisation, the Council of Ulema, was the only real political party among the Central Asian Muslims.
  • The Alash-Orda – these Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads demanded the return of land from Slavic settlers.

It is interesting that there was no prominent demand for independence or any obvious signs of Pan-Turkism.

(Hiro, 31-3)

When the October Revolution took place, it was obvious even from the distant vantage point of revolutionary Petrograd that there would be profound consequences for Central Asia. After the 650 delegates of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets seized power they immediately ‘resolved to decolonise the non-Russian areas of the Tsarist Empire.’ (Hiro, 33)

A voice from Central Asia, albeit a Russian one, was heard at the congress. The Menshevik-led railway union declared a strike against the new Soviet power, but it was clear that they did not speak for all railway workers. ‘“The whole mass of the railroad workers of our district,” said the delegate from Tashkent, “have expressed themselves in favour of the transfer of power to the soviets.”’ This decision of the Toshkent rail workers in favour of Soviet power was to have historic consequences.

(Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. III, Ch 47, ‘The Congress of the Soviet Dictatorship,’ Gollancz, 1933, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch47.htm)

This was the age of the “white man’s burden,” when moderate British politicians spoke approvingly of “maintaining White Supremacy” in India; when a racial equality clause was rejected for inclusion in the Versailles Treaty; when almost all of Africa was under the control of a handful of European empires.

In this context, to declare support for self-determination, up to and including full independence, was a revolutionary act. Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik party as a whole showed a bold and liberatory approach in this respect.

In Finland, a few hours by boat from where the delegates met, the resolution on self-determination was given effect within days. Six months later, however, the Finnish socialists had been killed in their tens of thousands by a triumphant White Finnish army. The episode raised uncomfortable questions about the Soviets’ support for national minority rights and self-determination. The Finland events illustrated the tension between the principle of self-determination and the cruel realpolitik of a world still dominated by imperial and bourgeois forces. Nationality and religion could be employed as flags of convenience for the threatened ruling classes to play divide and rule and to rally a constituency against the demands of the poor and the working class. The equal and opposite danger was that the Revolution would be used as an excuse to re-impose the old centralised, top-down and racist order. These were the rock and the hard place between which the Revolution would have to navigate. In this delicate task the inexperienced revolutionaries at the helm in Toshkent would fail utterly.

National Chauvinism


The Toshkent Soviet had zero Muslims in its highest tiers of authority. In fact, Muslims were openly excluded from such positions in a resolution of the Toshkent Soviet of December 2nd 1917. (Carr, 336)

How much of this is sociology bleeding into nationality? The difference between Russians and Muslims was in a sense just the local version of the difference between workers and peasants. Relations between the cities and the villages were often extremely tense during the Civil War. Was this not just the familiar urban-rural divide, with different trappings?

But the national-religious division in Central Asia was much deeper and more violent. The Russian worker was two, one or zero generations removed from the village, spoke the same language and practised the same religion as his rural cousins. The Russian settler in Central Asia was a stranger whose impositions were backed up by the force of an empire. This informed the ‘pronounced chauvinism of local Bolsheviks.’ (Smele 232) Almost all of these Bolsheviks, by the way, were recent recruits to the party; there were few Social Democrats in Central Asia pre-1917, and they had not split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. (Carr, 337) Hence they lacked any grounding in basic party policy on nationalities.

Throw in three years of total war and a year of revolution, and it was all-too-easy for some Russian workers to default to chauvinism and racist violence.

The indisputable example of this is the Kokand massacre. In all the history of terror in the Civil War, there are few parallels with the events in Kokand in February 1918. But before we deal with that event, we’d better explain how the October Revolution took place in Central Asia.

October in Toshkent

China Miéville has a novel called The City & The City in which two states occupy the same physical space, each wilfully ignoring the other, the inhabitants carefully ‘un-seeing’ citizens of the other city. Central Asia in the revolutionary period was a bit like that. Two peoples living parallel lives went through parallel revolutions. Large numbers from the ten-to-one Muslim majority rose up in a guerrilla struggle in 1916, as we have seen. The Russian workers in Central Asia, meanwhile, were thousands of kilometres from Petrograd or Moscow, but those railway lines and telegraph wires were like neural pathways, rapidly transmitting stimuli and responses. There developed a Toshkent Soviet and a Toshkent Red Guard 2,500-strong. Not only did it keep step with the Soviets of European Russia, it seized power for 5-6 days a month before the October Revolution with the support of a Siberian regiment. (Hiro, 34) Here the Social Revolutionaries and not the Bolsheviks held a majority in the Soviet. The uprising was suppressed by Kerensky’s Provisional Government with military force. But this provoked a backlash: forty unions participated in a general strike against the imposition of martial law.

(Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. II, Ch 37, ‘The Last Coalition,’ Gollancz, 1933, p 344. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch37.htm)

Just seven days after the storming of the Winter Palace in distant Petrograd the Toshkent Soviet took power again. This time Soviet power was here to stay. The new commissars included as many SRs as Bolsheviks. Sometimes it becomes quite obvious that revolutionary politics is sociology with guns: the key force behind the Toshkent Soviet was the working class of the city, especially the railway workers. The president was a Bolshevik, F.I. Kolesov, a railway worker like most of his fellow commissars.

Railway workers featured in a multilingual poster produced in Toshkent in 1920. The caption, I assume, indicates that this is the front cover of ‘Toshkent Railway Hunks Topless Calendar 1920.‘

The Turkestan Bolsheviks were weak. They only held their first conference as late as June 1918, at which a grand total of 40 delegates were present. Nationally, the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition broke up in March 1918; in Toshkent the coalition continued into 1919.

But the parallel revolutions were set to collide.

In September a Muslim congress had taken place in Toshkent, producing a demand for autonomy and Islamic law in Central Asia. (Hiro, 33) On 26 December a mass demonstration of Muslims took place in Toshkent – a crowd of hundreds of thousands filled the streets with people, horses and religious banners. The marchers wore white turbans, colourful silk coats and high leather boots. This demonstration descended into bloodshed after demonstrators attacked the town prison and freed the prisoners. Next they tried to seize the arsenal, the jail and the citadel. The Soviet intervened with machine-guns. (Hopkirk, 23)

By the start of 1918, two rival governments had arisen: the Toshkent Soviet and the Kokand Autonomous Government. Kokand was a mud-walled caravan city, a few stops eastward on the railway. The Kokand government was an alliance of modernising Jadids and conservative Qadims, (Smith, 192), a continuation of the Muslim conference of September, which had gathered 197 delegates from Syr Darya, Bukhara, Samarqand and Fergana. Its programme, according to Carr (336) included the maintenance of private property, religious law and the seclusion of women. ‘It received support from bourgeois Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks’ but in general the national-religious question was paramount.

The Kokand Massacre

Through most of January the two sides tried to negotiate, without success.  

The Kokand Citadel was still occupied by revolutionary Russian soldiers. The forces of the Kokand Autonomy made a failed attack on the Citadel in early February, and the soldiers inside appealed to Toshkent for aid. An army set out at once by rail, a haphazardly-gathered force: Russian soldiers and Red Guards, and former POWs from Central Europe, and mixed in with these, mercenary elements out for loot. The army crossed the red-tinted mountains by the 2,000-metre-high Kamchik Pass and descended into the Fergana Valley. This army laid siege to the walled Old City of Kokand. One week later, reinforcements arrived from Orenburg; these forces had just defeated the Cossack Ataman Dutov and his Muslim allies, the Alash-Orda.

After another week the city walls were breached, and the carnage began. For three days the forces of the Toshkent Soviet looted and murdered in the city. Homes, mosques and caravanserais were burned or desecrated. Somewhere between 5,000 and 14,000 civilians were murdered in this rampage, apparently ‘almost 60 per cent of the population.’

(Hiro, 36, Hopkirk, 25, Smith, 192)

A graveyard in Kokand, modern-day Uzbekistan

Along with the roughly concurrent events in Kyiv, the massacre in Kokand was an important early outlier of violence from the Red side. What the Kokand and Kyiv violence had in common was that they were carried out by forces at a remove from the Bolshevik-led government; the Kyiv forces were led by the adventurer Muraviev who later revolted against the Soviets, while the Toshkent forces likewise had a weak Bolshevik presence and had little contact with Moscow. More damningly, both early outliers of terror were carried out in non-Russian areas of the former Tsarist Empire, which points to racist motivations.

The similarities end there; in Kyiv, the Red forces targeted mostly officers and the death toll may have been in the hundreds and not the thousands, while in Kokand, the terror was a sack and massacre worthy of the Crusades. A Danish officer recorded that every one of the participants in the medieval-esque conquest of Kokand came back to Toshkent rich. ‘Elsewhere in the Fergana Valley armed Russian settlers terrorized the natives,’ adds Smith.

That was the end of the Kokand government. But the Soviet project would pay a heavy price for the brutal actions of the Toshkent commissars. The massacre was a key event in triggering the Basmachi rebellion, a guerrilla war which would, as we will see in future posts, torment the region for years to come. 1918 saw 4,000 Muslim kurbashi, ‘fighters,’ begin to wage guerrilla war in the Fergana Valley.

‘Barbaric deeds were performed by both sides’ in the Civil War in Central Asia, writes Hopkirk (4). ‘Some of those carried out in the name of Bolshevism would have dismayed Lenin.’ Alarmed by events in Turkestan, which they probably only had partial knowledge of, Moscow authorities sent P. A. Kobozev to urge a change of course.

The Toshkent Soviet still had other opponents in neighbouring towns. Under the Tsar autonomous kings had ruled in parts of Turkestan, ‘the already enervated and last remnants of the Mongols’ Golden Horde’ (Smele, 232) and these emirs and khans fought hard to hold onto their lands and titles. The Reds took Samarqand, though the troops there soon mutinied; a trainload of Austro-Hungarians put down the mutiny after a brief clash.

Bokhara, Uzbekistan, in 2010

Bokhara proved a tougher nut to crack. President Kolesov showed up outside its gates one day with a large force of soldiers, some artillery, and an ultimatum. He sent a delegation into the city demanding the Emir’s surrender. The Reds were counting on supporters inside the walls, left-wing Muslims associated with the ‘Young Bokhara’ movement. The Emir played the Reds, strung them along, then struck hard. He had the rail lines cut behind them, had their delegation all ambushed and all but two killed, had many of their allies in the city seized and murdered. A massacre of Russians ensued; hundreds were killed. The Reds fired a few shells, then ran out of ammunition. They high-tailed it back to Toshkent. In another scene reminiscent of China Miéville, they had to cover a part of the distance by tearing up railway tracks behind them and laying them down ahead. They signed a treaty with Bokhara on March 25th.

In short: the Reds took Samarqand, but Bokhara stayed independent under its old feudal ruler.

Hell breaks loose

I should emphasise here that most of my information, unavoidably, comes from British and other Western European observers and writers, though Dilip Hiro is more balanced.

Kobozev, the agent sent from Moscow, soon saw his work bearing fruit. In April 1918 the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Republic was established at a Regional Conference whose proceedings, in an encouraging sign, were held both in Russian and in Uzbek. The ban on Muslims in high government posts was removed (Carr, 338) and ten liberal or radical Muslims were included in the government. (Smith, 192) There were numerous Muslim supporters of the Soviet even from day one, and even prominent Muslim Bolsheviks. (Smele 228) A Kazakh named Turar Ryskulov joined the party in September 1917 and held high positions. There was also the prominent Volga Tatar Bolshevik leader, Sultan Galiev, who led an autonomous Muslim Communist Party. Many people from the Central Asian nationalities had joined the Red Army voluntarily by the end of 1918. (Hiro, 39)

These encouraging developments were rapidly cut across. From May all hell broke loose across the Soviet Union. Central Asia was no exception. The rise of the Czechs, Cossacks and White Guards cut off Toshkent from Moscow. World War One was still raging: a Turkish army advanced on Baku, threatening another key link. There was a Cossack host threatening from the north, a Menshevik-Turkmen government to the west, and British intervention from Persia to the south. A more detailed account of this will follow in the next post.

It is interesting that the bloodshed in Kokand has been neglected by historians and writers, including those whose narratives emphasize revolutionary violence. These events don’t fit the usual moulds of Red Terror, either the excesses of mobs of sailors, or the executions carried out by the Cheka and Revolutionary Tribunals. It resembles more the White-Guard pogroms – a case of racist and brutalised rank-and-file being let loose by the commanders on a defenceless population. It’s not difficult, either, to see in it a continuation of the history of revolt and repression in Tsarist Central Asia since the 1860s.

I have come across no contemporary mention of the Kokand massacre by either White or Red sources. Correspondence from Lenin to President Kolesov amounts to hurried telegrams from the chaotic summer of 1918, guardedly promising help that I assume never materialised. Scholars who have more access or time than me might be able to shine a light here.

Perhaps once Moscow had re-established a stable link with Toshkent and the scale of the settler-colonial violence became clear, heads would have rolled. But by the time that link was made, many of those responsible were already dead and buried. As for how they wound up dead, and how the Toshkent Soviet survived the killing of its key leaders – that, too, will have to wait for the next post.    

Go to Revolution Under Siege Archive

Go to Home Page/Archives

The cover image, by the way, is from 1927 so it’s not strictly contemporary. The caption, in Russian and Uzbek, reads ‘Don’t let them destroy what was built over ten years.’

Beevor’s Russia, Part 3: The Myth of Exceptional Violence (Premium)

Street fighting during the Civil War. From the Mosfilm movie The Sixth of July, dir Yuli Karasik, 1968

Become a paying supporter to get access

Access to this article is limited to paying supporters. If you already subscribe by email, thank you. But if you want to become a paying supporter, please hit ‘Subscribe’ below.

Donate less than the price of a coffee, and you can access everything on this blog for one year.

If you don’t feel like donating, most of my posts are still 100% free, so browse away, and thanks for visiting.

Subscribe

Go to Revolution Under Siege Archive

Go to Home Page/ Archive

Sources