Kolchak’s defeat also allowed the Reds to complete the conquest of Central Asia. In early 1918 the Russian railway workers and soldiers of Tashkent had established a Turkestan Soviet Republic. But it was cut off from the rest of Russia by the Orenburg Cossacks, who were Kolchak’s allies, and its influence was confined to the cities. The cotton-growing regions of the Ferghana Valley were controlled by the native rebels, known as the Basmachis, whose bands united the separate Turkic tribes (Uzbeks, Kirghiz and Tajiks) against the Russian-Soviet regime under the banner of ‘Turkestan for the Natives’. Punitive requisitionings from the Muslim population had sparked a dreadful famine during 1918, in which it is estimated that at least a quarter of the population died, and this gave the Basmachis almost universal support in the countryside. Since the divide between town and country was also a political and ethnic division, it was understandable that the Soviet regime was seen as a new form of colonial exploitation; which is largely what it was. When the Red Army arrived in Tashkent at the end of 1919 it set up a special commission to report on the Soviet government. It concluded that it had been dominated by ‘colonially nationalistic hanger-on elements’ and ‘old servants of the tsarist regime’ who used ‘the camouflage of the class struggle … to persecute the native population in a most brutal manner’. The tsarist colonial policy of banishing the Kirghiz pastoralists to the infertile regions and settling Russian colonists on the fertile plain had even been intensified. In the Semirechie region the local Soviet had introduced a slave economy, forcing the Kirghiz natives to work without payment on Russian peasant farms or risk execution. The attitude of the Bolshevik leaders in Tashkent towards this had been one of callous indifference. One of the Bolsheviks had been heard to say that the Kirghiz were ‘the weakest race from the Marxist point of view and must die out anyway.’91
Under pressure from Lenin, the Tashkent government slowly changed its attitudes after 1920. Land taken from the natives was returned; requisitionings were reduced, and brought to a halt from 1921 under the NEP; bazaars were allowed to reopen; mosques were taken out of Soviet control; and Koranic law, which the Tashkent government had abolished in 1918, was restored for believers. All this helped to quell the Basmachi revolt: by 1923 it had virtually been liquidated and remained only in the isolated eastern mountain regions of Uzbekistan and Tajikstan, where with the aid of the mujahaddin, it continued for several more years. Meanwhile, the Soviet regime pursued its policy of recruiting native élites. Over half the delegates to the Turkestan Party Congress in 1921 were Muslims, many of them from the old secular intelligentsia, or jadid, who saw in the regime a modernizing force. And indeed to a large extent it was. The new republics of Central Asia — Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Tajikstan — were all, in a cultural sense at least, built up as modern nations in the 1920s. Vast resources were invested in education at all levels, which greatly improved literacy rates. Special efforts were devoted to the training of a native political and technical élite. There was a boom in native-language publications for the new reading public. Most journalists, it is true, had to be recruited from the Volga Tatars, who were culturally more advanced than the Central Asians but not always conversant with the nuances of the local language. Thus one Uzbek daily, Kyzyl bairak, appeared for a time with the slogan above its title-head: ‘Tramps of the World Unite!’92 But such mistakes are bound to happen when a national culture is built up from scratch.
International relations complicated the Soviet conquest of the Caucasus. Turkey and Britain both vied with Russia for domination of this vital region after 1918. The Turks had designs on Azerbaijan, to whose population they were ethnically and linguistically related. They also wanted to keep Armenia weak in order to retain their hold on eastern Anatolia, which they had cleared of its Armenian population through the genocide of 1915. As for the British, they saw in the Caucasus a buffer protecting Persia and India from Russia. It was also rich in manganese and oil, which the British, in their best traditions of colonial piracy, were busily exporting from the Baku oil-fields whilst their troops were stationed there as a ‘protective force’. The brief independence of the three Caucasian nations (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) was almost wholly dependent upon the temporary postwar weakness of Russia and Turkey, the traditional powers in the region, and, at least in the case of the last two, the protection of Britain as well. On their own, these nations were much too small and ethnically divided to maintain their independence once Russia and Turkey began to reassert their domination in the region.
