Central Asia between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds

Adeeb Khalid

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 12, Number

2, Spring 2011 (New Series), pp. 451-476 (Article)

Published by Slavica Publishers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2011.0028

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/428998

Access provided at 4 Jan 2020 20:52 GMT from The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries
Articles

Central Asia between the Ottoman and

the Soviet Worlds
Adeeb Khalid

On 1 September 1920, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, accompanied by

local militias, undertook what tsarist armies had consistently chosen to avoid. It
stormed the gates of the city of Bukhara and overthrew the emir, Sayyid Alim
Khan. The need to assuage British fears about Russian expansion had meant
that when Russian armies conquered Transoxiana in the last third of the 19th
century, they had left the rulers of Bukhara and Khiva on their thrones, rul-
ing over much diminished territories and with their foreign relations under a
Russian protectorate.1 Russian armies had occupied Bukhara in 1910, but only
temporarily at the request of the emir in the aftermath of murderous sectar-
ian clashes between the city’s Sunni and Shi‘i populations. The existence of the
protectorate meant that Bukhara and Khiva remained beyond the reach of the
Russian Revolution. While the rule of the khan of Khiva crumbled in the face of
domestic insurgency, Alim Khan, ruling over the much larger realm of Bukhara,
sought to maximize his independence from Russia. The fact that Turkestan was
cut off by civil war from inner Russia until late 1919 helped him. By the sum-
mer of 1920, however, the Red Army had connected Turkestan back to Russia;
and Mikhail Frunze, commanding the troops, grew increasingly impatient with
the continued existence of the emirate. Against political opinion in Moscow, he
prepared the invasion over the summer and carried it out in September. Largely
for geopolitical reasons, Moscow chose not to incorporate Bukhara into Soviet

Research for this article was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, to whom goes my gratitude. I ben-
efited greatly from comments from participants at the workshop on “Models on the Margins” in
St. Petersburg and from two anonymous reviewers for Kritika. Special thanks to Michael David-
Fox for suggestions with regard to translating a tricky turn of phrase quoted here.
 1
  The best account of the establishment of the protectorates remains Seymour Becker, Russia’s
Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1924 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1968).

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 2 (Spring 2011): 451–76.
452 ADEEB KHALID

Turkestan after the conquest. Rather, the Red Army installed a “people’s soviet
republic”—a designation first dreamed up earlier that year when Khiva was simi-
larly stormed—with the Bukharan Communist Party (BCP) as its vanguard.
The BCP had been re-formed for the occasion with the forced merger of
an older BCP, founded in 1918 and consisting mostly of Turkestanis and Tatars
with only tenuous connections to Bukhara, and the more numerous party of the
Young Bukharans, a local opposition group increasingly radicalized after 1917
and organized in Soviet Turkestan. The Young Bukharans were notable for the
fact that their traditions of Muslim reform tied them in meaningful ways to late
Ottoman debates. Thus it came about that an offshoot of the Ottoman political
world took root in the maelstrom of the Russian Revolution.
In this article I explore the ways in which post-Ottoman and early Soviet
models of political and social action and of cultural transformation floated back
and forth across the imperial boundaries before 1914. This was a period of great
ferment in which models radicalized rapidly and became intertwined in unex-
pected ways. The Young Bukharan case represents in an especially acute form
the predicament of Muslim reformers in the Russian Empire, who existed at the
intersection of the Russian and Ottoman intellectual worlds. The collapse of the
old order in both empires in 1917–18 set into motion a period of intense trans-
formation in the political and cultural horizons of Muslim intellectuals of both
empires. The Bolsheviks were always alert to the national and colonial dimen-
sions of the Russian Revolution, and many Muslim intellectuals in the Russian
Empire (and some in the Ottoman) found their model very attractive. At the
same time, late Ottoman models of political and cultural reform of Muslim
society, albeit interpreted in a radicalized form, continued to exert considerable
influence on Muslims in both empires. The central concern of this paper is to
examine the ways in which late Ottoman and early Soviet models intersected in
Central Asia.

Models across Empires

Trade, education, Sufi initiation, and pilgrimages connected Muslim com-
munities of the Russian empire to many parts of the broader Muslim world,
from India through Arabia to Egypt. For the modernist reformers who began
to emerge in the late 19th century, however, the most significant node of inter-
est by far was the Ottoman Empire. The attraction of the Ottoman Empire for
Muslim reformers lay not in some primordial religious or ethnic solidarities—as
the much abused terms “pan-Islamism” and “pan-Turkism” imply—but rather
in the fact that the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful (largely) sovereign
Muslim state left in the age of empire. The focus on the Ottoman Empire for the
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 453

modernist reformers was new and made possible by a transimperial Turcophone

public space that existed for a few decades around the turn of the 20th century,
one in which a nascent press and commercial publishing brought Turkic-reading
audiences in the Russian and Ottoman empires together. Combined with easier
transport that led to considerable movement of people, both elite and nonelite,
these decades saw the emergence of a transimperial community of intellectuals
that imagined new kinds of ties among themselves, new collective affinities, and
new models of action.
This public space had a specific geography tied to the imperial geopolitical
realities of the age. It began in the 1880s with the rise of a nonofficial Ottoman
press and of commercial publishing in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman-
language press dated back to 1831, but its impact had been minimal until con-
siderably later. It was, ironically, in the post-Tanzimat “constitutional despotism”
(1878–1908) of Abdülhamid II that the press appeared as a financially viable
concern. Its center was in Istanbul, although provincial newspapers appeared as
well.2 Steamships and the nascent modern postal system carried these publica-
tions to the Turcophone communities of the Russian Empire. Turkic-language
publishing had existed in the Russian Empire for over a century by then, but
little of it was commercially feasible and few newspapers received permission to
publish. A major landmark came in 1883 with the establishment in Bağçasaray
(Bakhchisarai, in the Crimea) of the bilingual newspaper Tercüman/Perevodchik
(Interpreter), which under the tireless editorship of Ismail Bey Gasprinskiy
quickly acquired a readership that spanned the Turkic-reading communities of
the Russian Empire and extended well into the Ottoman Empire and beyond.
Tercüman remained the only major nonofficial Turkic-language periodical in the
Russian Empire until the revolution of 1905 and acquired a position of great
influence out of proportion to the size of the Crimea. The period after 1905
saw an intensification of this public space, and Turkic-language newspapers
emerged in large numbers in the Tatar lands and in Transcaucasia.3 Not only
was Tercüman joined by a large number of newspapers in the Russian Empire,
but the Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a feisty,
 2
  On the Ottoman press, Fuat Süreyya Oral, Türk Basın Tarihi, 2 vols. (Ankara: Yeni Adım
Matbaası, 1967–70); and Hasan Duman, İstanbul Kütüphaneleri Arap Harflı Süreli Yayınlar Toplu
Kataloğu, 1828–1938 (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 1986)
have not been superseded; on the Hamidian period, see Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Unimagined
Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University,
1996).
 3
  The best account of the Muslim press of the Russian Empire still is Alexandre Bennigsen and
Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national chez les Musulmans de Russie
avant 1920 (Paris: Mouton, 1964).
454 ADEEB KHALID

independent press. The Second Constitutional Period (1908–18) also saw the
emergence of a number of press organs of Muslim émigrés from the Russian
Empire. Mostly run by men from the Volga–Urals region (although a few
Azerbaijanis were also involved), these periodicals were critical of Russian rule
over Muslim societies, although they nevertheless retained a distinct (dare one
say “Russian”?) identity and differentiated themselves from the Ottoman public
they addressed.4
The major centers of this public space were Istanbul, Kazan, Tiflis, and
Orenburg, but it covered the two empires and extended beyond them. Iranian
Azerbaijan was connected to Transcaucasia (in 1905–6, the revolutions of Russia
and Iran overlapped in many important ways).5 Cairo was also an outpost, where
an Ottoman-language press appeared under the relatively mild conditions of
British rule. The newspapers appeared in various strands of Turkic, which in
written form were more or less intelligible across this grand geographical space.6
The audience of this press included many who could read Turkic, even if they
did not speak it. The Turkic press was a model for the press in Iran and even
Afghanistan. More significantly for our purposes, Bukhara, where the language
of culture and the chancery had long been Persian, became part of this reading
public. Tercüman as well as Ottoman newspapers (and, after 1905, Tatar ones)
appeared as the major vehicle for modern forms of knowledge in Bukhara.7
Newspapers from the two empires crossed back and forth across an imperial
boundary that was far from impermeable. Newspapers were read in both em-
pires; they quoted each other, reprinted articles or cartoons from each other, and
referred to each other as “our esteemed colleague” (mu’tabir rafikimiz). Writers,
 4
  Volker Adam, Rußlandmuslime in Istanbul am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges: Die
Berichterstattung osmanischer Periodika über Rußland und Zentralasien (Frankfurt am Main: Peter
Lang, 2002).
 5
  Mangol Bayat, Iran’s First Revolution: Shi‘ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1909
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sergo Orjonikidze was active in Tabriz, where he was
known as Gurjī Sergo, “Georgian Sergo”; see V. L. Genis, Krasnaia Persiia: Bol´sheviki v Giliane
(Moscow: Tsentr strategicheskikh i politicheskikh issledovanii/MNPI , 2000), 24.
 6
  The linguistic situation was in a great deal of flux as the emergence of mass publishing (and, in
the Ottoman Empire at least, the increasing presence of the state in the lives of its subjects through
documentation and schooling) forced the question of language reform and simplification to the
forefront. The established literary traditions of Ottoman and Chaghatay (eastern Turkic) were
challenged by movements for reform, aimed largely at bringing the literary language closer to the
vernacular, while proponents of new strands, such as Tatar and Kazakh, pressed their claim to the
status of literary languages.
 7
  The role of Tercüman and the Tatar press in Bukhara is well known; see, e.g., Sadriddin Ayniy,
Buxoro inqilobi tarixi uchun materiallar (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo narodov SSSR, 1926). For a refer-
ence to Istanbul newspapers being read in Bukhara in the 1890s, see Ahmad Makhdumi Donish,
Risola, yo mukhtasare az ta’rikhi saltanati khonadoni manghitiya (Dushanbe: Sarvat, 1992 [orig. ca.
1895]), 91.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 455

too, contributed to multiple newspapers throughout this public space. These

overlapping readerships created a venue where ideas from the differing political
landscapes of Russia and the Ottoman Empire (and the broader world in gen-
eral) interacted for the expression of new models for the future and new identi-
ties. It was in this common public space that a great many models of politics,
society, and culture developed. Authors and readers were differently located, of
course, on either side of the imperial border: if the strengthening of the state was
absolutely central to the concerns of Ottoman authors, then for their Russian
Muslim counterparts the state figured less prominently as the potential motor
of reform. Even in the “dissident” press established in Istanbul by émigrés from
the Russian Empire, we find a complex stance toward Ottoman society. Writers
envied the fact that the Ottomans possessed sovereignty, but they also scolded
them for not being more interested in (and solicitous of ) other Turkic popula-
tions of the world.8 Yet, for all this, we find a number of common themes in
these newspapers: authors were familiar with common models of progress, civi-
lization, reform, modernity, language, and identity, even as they debated them
and took various positions with regard to them. Many of these common themes
outlasted the shared public space and reemerged in the greatly altered conditions
of the postwar period.
The war in 1914 cut off the circulation of people and texts and disrupted
this transimperial public sphere, which revived in the greatly altered conditions
of 1918, when the collapse of the Russian war effort reopened the old imperial
boundary. Indeed, over the next few years, movement across it seems largely
to have been unfettered. From the outset, the Bolsheviks were interested in
organizing Communists among the Muslim populations of European Russia
but also in exporting the revolution to countries of the “East.” Moreover, the
Bolsheviks attempted early on to proselytize among the numerous Ottoman
prisoners of war in Russia. A number of periodicals in various Turkic languages
appeared that were read on both sides of the (former) imperial boundary. A
journal called Yeni Dünya (New World), published by the Central Bureau of
Muslim Socialists, appeared in Moscow as early as 27 April 1918.9 It was ed-
ited by Mevlevizade Mehmet Mustafa Suphi (1883–1921), a graduate of the
Istanbul Law School (İstanbul Hukuk Mektebi) and the École libre des sciences
politiques in Paris. Suphi had returned to the Ottoman Empire to teach, but
his political views landed him in exile in Sinop, from where he escaped across
the Black Sea to Sevastopol. Arrested in Russia as an enemy subject upon the
 8
  Adam, Rußlandmuslime in Istanbul, chap. 5.
 9
  It later moved to Bağçasaray and then to Baku. The full text of the Moscow and Bağçasaray
issues has been published (along with selections from the Baku issues) in modern Turkish �������
orthog-
raphy in Mete Tunçay, ed., Mustafa Suphinin Yeni Dünya’sı (Istanbul: BDS Yayınları, 1995).
456 ADEEB KHALID

outbreak of war in 1914, he was sent off to prison in the Urals, where he discov-
ered Marxism.10 Later on, Yeni Dünya became one of a number of periodicals
published in Muslim languages by the Central Bureau of Muslim Organizations
of the RKP(b) in 1919 and 1920.11 Although there was considerable discomfort
among the Bolsheviks over its line—a report in Narkomnats in 1918 opined that
the journal “reflects exclusively the moods and opinions of the petty bourgeois
intelligentsia”12—the journal nevertheless had the blessings of Soviet authorities.
Yeni Dünya lasted only until 1921, but the following year Narkomnats began
publishing a journal titled Kızıl Şark (Red East) from Moscow.13 Soviet publica-
tions in Ottoman (and in Azeri) were read in Anatolia in these years. They might
be seen as counterparts to the “dissident” émigré Russian Muslim press that had
existed in Istanbul on the eve of World War I. This revival of the Turkic public
space proved shortlived, however, and by 1924, the flow of publications was a
thing of the past, as new state frontiers crystallized.

Ottoman Models in Bukhara

Bukharan reform had begun in the early years of the century as a coalition of
various groups with an interest in introducing modern forms of education and
governance into Bukhara. These included merchants, newly integrated into the
global economy, who wanted new legal structures and educational opportuni-
ties for their sons; teachers who wanted to establish new kinds of schools; and
even some Islamic scholars (ulama) who sought to ground these changes in a
modernist interpretation of Islam. These aspirations were located in the broader
phenomenon of cultural reform that encompassed almost all Muslim communi-
ties of the Russian Empire, but unlike them, Bukhara still had a state that could
become the locus of reform. Although Persian (Tajik) had long been the lan-
guage of learning and the chancery in Bukhara and was spoken by the majority
10
  Yavuz Aslan, Türkiye Komünist Fırkası’nın Kuruluşu ve Mustafa Suphi: Türkiye Komünistlerinin
Rusya’da Teşkilâtlanması (1918–1921) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1997), 6–25. Suphi
was only one of many revolutionaries to have discovered Marxism in wartime detention in Russia;
the same was the case with Béla Kun, Georgi Dmitrov, and Jaroslav Hašek, as well as with numer-
ous ordinary prisoners of war.
11
  On the organization of Muslim Communists in European Russia, successively called the Central
Bureau of Muslim Organizations of the RKP(b) (1918–19), the Central Bureau of Communist
Organizations of the People of the East (1919–21), and the Central Bureau for Agitation and
Propaganda among Turkic Peoples of the CC RKP(b), see A. Ishanov, Rol´ Kompartii i sovetskogo
pravitel´stva v sozdanii natsional´noi gosudarstvennosti uzbekskogo naroda (Tashkent: Uzbekistan,
1978), chap. 1.
12
  “Obozrenie tiurkskoi sotsialisticheskoi pechati,” Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii
(GARF) f. 1318, op. 1, d. 420, l. 70.
13
  Mete Tunçay, Türkiye’de Sol Akımlar (1908–1925): Belgeler, 5th ed. (Istanbul: BDS Yayınları,
1991), 348–49.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 457

of the urban population (many of whom were bilingual), Bukhara’s relations

with Iran were complicated by sectarian differences. Moreover, after the installa-
tion of the protectorate, the Ottoman Empire, as much the more powerful state,
appeared to Bukharan intellectuals as the most relevant model to follow. It was
no coincidence that when Bukharan merchants established a benevolent soci-
ety to send Bukharan students abroad for a modern education not available to
them locally, they chose not Moscow or Tehran but Istanbul as the destination.
This choice was fateful, for it was through these students that not just Ottoman
state models but a fascination with Turkism came to define the parameters of
Bukharan reform.
The clearest example of fascination with Ottoman models for Bukharan
reform comes in the work of Abdurauf Fitrat (1886–1938), who spent the years
1909–13 in Istanbul as a student. In 1911, he used a fictional Indian Muslim
traveler as a sympathetic but stern outside critic to list the desiderata of Bukharan
reformers. As the Indian travels through Bukhara, he notes the chaos and disor-
der in the streets, the lack of any measures regarding hygiene and public health,
the complete lack of economic planning or public education, and the corrup-
tion of morals and improper religious practices. Government officials have no
concern for the good of the state; the ulama “drink the blood of the people,”
and ordinary people are victims of ignorance. The solution was for the emir to
fulfill his duties as a Muslim sovereign and to establish order through providing
modern education, public health care, and the establishment of economic poli-
cy.14 The Indian traveler, of course, is a literary artifice. The solutions proposed
by him have little to do with India; they all come from the hopes and desires of
late Ottoman reformers and the étatisme of the Young Turks.
Bukharan reform remained confined to secret societies and faced consid-
erable opposition in society.15 Russian observers called the proponents of re-
form “Young Bukharans,” in the manner of the Young Turks, and this was the
name the Bukharans adopted for themselves in 1917, when the reformers finally
emerged in public and attempted to force the emir into granting reform. But the
emir saw in the Russian Revolution an opportunity to reclaim the authority that
his forefathers had been forced to surrender to the Russians. The emir’s vision
of the future was built on the traditional vocabulary of Islamicate Central Asian
kingship; it had no place in it for the ideas that so enthralled the reformers. Faced
with the demands of the reformers, he equivocated for a while before turning

14
  ‘Abd ul-Ra’ūf [Fitrat], Bayānāt-i sayyāh-i hindī (Istanbul: Matbaa-yi Hikmet, 1911).
15
  Adeeb Khalid, “Society and Politics in Bukhara, 1868–1920,” Central Asian Survey 19, 3–4
(2000): 367–96.
458 ADEEB KHALID

to conservative forces in society, with whose support he led a crackdown on the

reformers.16 By the end of the year, most reformers were in exile in Turkestan.
This exile reshaped their political horizons, giving them an abiding hatred
of the emir and a fascination with revolution as a modality of change. Yet, their
revolution was to be put at the service of the millat, “nation,” and the state,
rather than a class. They found shelter in Tashkent and Samarqand, where some
of them joined Russian political parties, while organizing the Young Bukharan
Party. They labeled themselves, at least in correspondence with Soviet authorities,
“the Revolutionary Party of Young Bukharans (Left Socialist Revolutionaries),”
with a central committee of five including Fayzulla Xo‘jayev.17 Through the
course of the year, the exiles organized politically, often with the help of the
Soviet regime. Fayzulla Xo‘jayev made his way to Moscow in the autumn of that
year, where he organized a Moscow bureau of the Young Bukharan Party and
established contact with party and Soviet authorities.18 The Young Bukharans
were enthralled by the political upheaval of the time and the possibilities that it
opened up. The Russian Revolution for them was an opportunity to modern-
ize the nation and to win national independence, something which they saw
as possible only with the help of the Soviet regime, with its anti-bourgeois and
anti-imperialist rhetoric and its own concerns with overcoming backwardness.
The tone of Young Bukharan writing in exile exhibits these passions very clearly.
The emir appears not as the last surviving Muslim monarch in Central Asia, as
the reformers had seen him before 1917, but as a corrupt, bloodthirsty despot
who lives off the toil of the peasants in his realm: “All his thoughts are of living
in luxury, and it is none of his business even if the poor and the peasants like us
die of starvation. ‘His highness’ is a man concerned only with eating the best pu-
lov, wearing robes of the best brocade, drinking good wines, and having a good
time with young and good-looking boys and girls.”19 For Fitrat, Alim Khan had
become a “monument of oppression”20 who had sold the honor of Bukhara and
Islam to the British.21
16
  For the complicated politics of Bukhara in 1917, see V. L. Genis, Vitse-konsul Vvedenskii:
Sluzhba v Persii i Bukharskom khanstve (1906–1920 gg.). Rossiiskaia diplomatiia v sud´bakh
(Moscow: Sotsial´no-politicheskaia mysl´, 2003), 84–106; R. Aizener [Reinhard Eisener],
“Bukhara v 1917 godu,” Vostok, no. 4 (1994): 131–44, and no. 5 (1994): 75–92; and Khalid,
“Society and Politics,” 387–89.
17
  Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistan (TsGARUz) f. 34, d. 70, ll. 25–27.
18
  Majid Hasanov, Fayzulla Xo‘jayev (Tashkent: Oz´bekiston, 1990), 31–32, 35.
19
  Abdulla Badriy, Yosh Bukhorolilar bechora xalq va dehqonlar uchun yaxshimi, yamonmi?
(Moscow: Yosh Buxorolilarning Maskav kamiteti, 1919), 4–5.
20
  Fitrat, “Buxoroning holi,” Hurriyat, 29 December 1917.
21
  Fitrat, Sharq siyosati (n.p. [Tashkent], 1919), 34. Fitrat here refers to the widespread accusation
that Sayyid Alim Khan had received British aid to fight revolution both at home and in Turkestan.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 459

In Bukhara itself, the emir strengthened his rule; and Young Bukharan
attempts to organize resistance on the ground met with little success. The
Bolsheviks gave help to the Young Bukharans as part of their general strategy
of encouraging revolution in the colonies (this was the heyday of their Eastern
policy, which involved the Bolsheviks funding numerous revolutionary organi-
zations), but they had reservations about the possibility of a movement against
the emir gaining any traction in Bukhara. They also did not think much of the
Young Bukharans, whose ideological credentials were suspect. “The Decembrists
of Asia, the Young Bukharans and the Young Khivans, have learnt nothing from
history,” wrote a commentator in Tashkent in August 1919. “They argue that
the oppressed people of Khiva and Bukhara have to be ‘liberated’ from outside,
with the force of the bayonets of the proletarian Red Army of Turkestan. That
the ‘liberated’ exploited masses could, through their ignorance, see their libera-
tors as foreign oppressors, is not their concern.”22 Moscow’s plenipotentiaries
also took this view upon their arrival in Turkestan that autumn. V. V. Kuibyshev
visited Bukhara in November 1919 and gave a harshly negative assessment of the
Young Bukharans, “who use our protection to act in a puerile, hooligan fashion
to no end and [thus] exacerbate our relations with Bukhara.” “The activities of
the Young Bukharans,” he continued, “should either be harmonized with our
policies, or we should proclaim urbi et orbi our negative attitude toward their
actions, which often have a purely predatory character.”23
Indeed, in the autumn of 1919, Russian relations with the emirate were al-
most warm. Bukhara was a source of grain during a time of famine in Turkestan
and a base for supplying the Red Army as well.24 A purely military solution was
also not deemed feasible. A. E. Aksel´rod, Soviet Russia’s resident in Bukhara, ar-
gued for a long-term solution in which a revolutionary movement and a Muslim
army raised from defectors from the emir’s army would eventually lead to change
in Bukhara. A military solution would create immense problems: “Destroying
the Bukharan army is very easy, but dealing with a two-and-a-half million-strong
population, located in mountains, would be completely impossible.”25 Aksel´rod
had a sympathetic audience in Moscow in the person of G. V. Chicherin, who as
British involvement in fact was minimal and did not extend beyond the supply of a small number
of arms to the emir.
22
  I. B., “Khiva, Bukhara i sovetskii Turkestan,” Izvestiia Tsentral´nogo ispolnitel´nogo komiteta
Turkestanskoi Respubliki RSF i Tashkentskogo soveta rabochikh, soldatskikh i dekhkanskikh deputatov
(Tashkent), 5 August 1919.
23
  V. V. Kuibyshev to Turkomissiia, 30 November 1919, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv
sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 122, op. 1, d. 45, ll. 1–1ob.
24
  V. L. Genis, “S Bukharoi nado konchat´…”: K istorii butaforskikh revoliutsii (Moscow: Tsentr
strategicheskikh i politicheskikh issledovanii/MNPI, 2001).
25
  Quoted in ibid., 4.
460 ADEEB KHALID

commissar for foreign affairs wanted full control over Soviet actions in Central
Asia in order to avoid difficulties with foreign powers, especially Britain. Lenin
was also in favor of a gradual approach based on local work in cooperation with
local noncommunist actors with the aim of creating a local uprising.
It was Frunze’s impatience and persistence (and distance from Moscow) that
led to a dramatic change in policy. Bukhara to him represented not a source of
grain but a haven for counterrevolutionaries and a hotbed of imperialist (British)
intervention, with no likelihood of an indigenous revolutionary movement: “To
form a revolutionary upsurge in Bukhara, it is necessary to wait not months but
years.”26 Such waiting was pointless, and Frunze pushed through with the inva-
sion, winning Moscow’s consent under various pretexts. Moscow insisted, how-
ever, that he work with local forces to give the invasion a veneer of revolutionary
legitimacy. Frunze forced the merger of the existing BCP (composed mostly of
Tatars living in Russian enclaves in Bukhara) with the Young Bukharans into a
new Bukharan Communist Party on the eve of the invasion.27 Thus began a dif-
ficult relationship between the Young Bukharans, now officially Communists,
and their sponsors in Tashkent and Moscow.

The People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara as a Post-Ottoman State

The short life of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (or BNSR after its Russian
initials) was marked by bilingualism in both the linguistic and ideological senses
of the term. The Young Bukharans made Uzbek the official language of the state
(under the emirs, Bukhara had no “official” language, but the chancery, as well
as the madrasas and the literary life in general, functioned in Persian) and used it
exclusively in all internal correspondence of the state. Communication with their
Bolshevik handlers or supervisors was carried out only in Russian. This language
divide went farther. When Young Bukharan leaders corresponded in Russian
with soviet and party figures (whether in Bukhara, Tashkent, or Moscow), they
spoke “Bolshevik” in the sense that their memos were strewn with references
to toiling masses, class struggle, and prospects of world revolution—in short,
the language one expects to find in Soviet archives. But in their internal corre-
spondence—and especially in the documents generated by the lower and middle
levels of the bureaucracy—we find a very different conceptual vocabulary. These

26
  Quoted in ibid., 27.
27
  Genis (ibid.) provides an excellent account of the debates within the Bolshevik leadership on
the fate of Bukhara. The unification of the Bukharan Communist Party and the Young Bukharans
provoked a great deal of resistance among the members, and the meeting proved quite rau-
cous. See A. K. Akchurin, “Vospominaniia o dvadtsatom gode v Khive i v Bukhare,” in Sbornik
statei k desiati­letiiu Bukharskoi i Khorezmskoi revoliutsii (vospominaniia uchastnikov Bukharskoi i
Khorezmskoi revoliutsii) (Tashkent: Uzbekskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1930), 46–49.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 461

documents speak the language of a Muslim modernist politics as it evolved in

late Ottoman debates over the future of the Ottoman state and the Muslim
world in general. There is little question that this latter was the native language
of the Young Bukharans, while their use of the Bolshevik idiom was dictated
by expediency. Attention to the conceptual vocabulary of the vernacular docu-
mentation therefore is immensely revealing of the political underpinnings of the
BNSR.
One of the first acts of the new government was to establish a newspaper
(the emirs had resolutely refused the introduction of this innovation into their
territory and had pressed the Russian political agency in Kagan to suppress
two vernacular newspapers that began publishing in that enclave in 1913) as
the official organ of the new order. The first issue carried the banner head-
line, “Bukharan Compatriots! May Your Freedom and Equality Be Blessed!”
(Buxoroli vatandoshlar! Ozodliq va tenglikingiz muborik bo‘lsun!). Underneath
was a diatribe against the emir by Fayzulla Xo‘jayev, which accused the emir
of exploitation, corruption, and indifference to the needs of “our sacred home
Bukhara” (muqaddas yurtimiz bo‘lgan Buxoro). Xo‘jayev also sketched out a
trajectory of the new regime he represented: 10 or 15 years ago, some people
began to worry about reform, but the emir not only did not listen to them
but actually persecuted them. There was no mention of communism, Russia,
or 1917.28 This narrative of the reformers’ struggle against despotism and for
rights and equality for the people and independence for the state was the
dominant representation of the Young Bukharan government in the months
that followed. The government also hurried to convene a congress of the peo-
ple, which met in the emir’s summer residence outside the city as early as 6
October, where too the emphasis was on the end of despotism and the fact that
“the [new] government is just and the supporter of the people.”29
For the Young Bukharans, the end to despotism and the proclamation of
freedom and equality were in the service of the people (xalq, millat) and the
homeland (yurt, vatan). “Brothers!” exhorted one activist, “the old regime op-
pressed you because of your ignorance. Brothers, come, join the Communist
Party and become the masters of your own rights. Give your children the ben-
efit of knowledge and education [ilm maorifdan behramand qilib], open schools
where such have not been opened, [and] eliminate the immoralities that had
taken root under the old government.”30 Another author in the same issue—an
active reformer from Tashkent who had been a member of the RKP(b) since
28
  Fayzulla Xo‘ja, “Kun to‘g‘di,” Buxoro axbori, 9 September 1920.
29
  “Buxoroning ilk quriltoyi,” Buxoro axbori, 11 October 1920; TsGARUz f. 47, op. 1, d. 8, l. 47
(from a felicitationary speech by Domla Ikrom).
30
  Muhammad Said, “Xitobnoma,” Buxoro axbori, 26 November 1920.
462 ADEEB KHALID

1918—saw the main goals of the moment as including the creation of a na-
tional army, the political education of local youth about the new order, and the
destruction of the supporters of the old order, all in keeping with the “spiritual
conditions and way of life” of the local population.31
The transformation of Bukhara from the patrimony of a dynast to the home-
land of a Bukharan people or nation was the result of a new political imagination
that had emerged in the previous two decades.32 Now the task was to ensure the
independence of the state, its territorial integrity, and its strengthening through
economic development and the establishment of modern regimes of power. In
short, the Young Bukharan agenda was one of national salvation through revo-
lutionary means. This agenda was inspired by the late Ottoman state, but it was
to be carried out in Soviet conditions, using Soviet institutions.
The Bukharan revkom established an extraordinary commission for struggle
with counterrevolution (BukhCheka) on 31 August 1920, even as the fighting
continued. In the following weeks, the revkom issued a number of decrees estab-
lishing ministries, regularizing the working of courts, putting all Muslim educa-
tion (maktabs and madrasas) under the oversight of the Ministry of Education
(and nationalizing their property), placing all mosques under the jurisdiction
of a Ministry of Pious Endowments (waqf ), and creating new administrative
divisions in the state.33 Other concerns of the government clearly indicated a
new sensibility toward the population and new aspirations to modernity and
civilization. In 1921, we find the Central Executive Committee of the republic,
the successor to the revkom, discussing the necessity of creating a modern prison
to be housed “in a building specially designated for the purpose by the govern-
ment, as in civilized states,”34 and promoting sport and physical culture among
the youth.35
In September 1921, the Council of Ministers (xalq nozirlar sho‘rosi) sent
out a circular to all local soviets exhorting them to follow proper bureaucratic
procedure in all respects, to keep good accounts, and to collect taxes efficiently.
These tasks were important because

the wrong policies of the emir had left our state among the most backward
states in the world in terms of science and technology, industry, agriculture,

31
  Laziz Azizzoda, “Bu kunning vazifasi,” Buxoro axbori, 26 November 1920.
32
  I have explored this point further in “From Noble City to People’s Republic: Re-Imagining
Bukhara, 1900–1924,” in Historical Dimensions of Islam: Essays in Honor of R. Stephen Humphreys,
ed. James E. Lindsay and Jon Armajani (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2009), 201–16.
33
  TsGARUz f. 46, op. 1, d. 117, ll. 45ob.–46.
34
  Ibid., f. 47, op. 1, d. 150, ll. 106, 49ob., 60ob., 60, 45ob.–46, 12ob.
35
  Ibid., d. 595, passim.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 463

or commerce. As a result, today 2 percent of our people can read and write,
and the remaining 98 percent cannot, and as a result are completely ig-
norant of the world. Because our commerce was based on old principles,
there is no real commerce in our state. Instead, our merchants have become
middlemen between Russian merchants and our peasants: that is, our com-
merce sells the wealth of the peasant to other countries … [and] all the
profits from the commerce goes to other countries. … It is well known that
a state that is unable to find the proper path of commerce cannot have
industry either. 36

It was on such propositions that the Young Bukharans’ economic policy was
based. Another position paper, also from 1921 (but, maddeningly, unsigned),
surveyed the present economic situation and tried to elaborate a course of ac-
tion. “The economy of our republic is in a crisis that deepens day by day,” it
began.

We cannot export the goods that we produce and cannot get sufficient
quantities of goods that we need. The paper money with which we pay
Russian workers living on Bukharan soil is backed by nothing more than
the command of the government. Thus these payments represent a tax on
the people of Bukhara, as is the food supplied to Russian troops stationed
in Bukhara. … This can be solved only through the pooling of the resources
of the rich. It was this joint effort of thought and of wealth that ensured the
development of commerce and industry in Europe. But since the creation
of joint-stock companies is not possible in the Soviet conditions in which
we live, this role has to be played by the state.37

While these concerns are generic to developmental nation-states, the link to

late Ottoman concerns with “saving the state,” something shared by all stripes of
Muslim opinion in the empire, is also clear here. Traces of this concern can be
found among the Young Bukharans both in form and content. The use of Uzbek
as the language of state led to the creation of a new vocabulary, which was heav-
ily Ottomanate, as were the republic’s chancery styles and practices. The visual
evidence of the vernacular documents, as well as their tone and general sensibil-
ity, are striking in this regard.38
The most significant channel for the transmission of Ottoman influences
was the transimperial public space described above. In addition, several leading
figures among the Young Bukharans had studied in Istanbul. Abdurauf Fitrat is

36
  Ibid., f. 48, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 32ob.–32.
37
  “Bukunki iqtisodiy holatimiz,” TsGARUz f. 46, op. 1, d. 170, ll. 19–20.
38
  See more in Adeeb Khalid, “The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim
Sources,” Welt des Islams 50, 3–4 (2010): 335–61.
464 ADEEB KHALID

perhaps the most important case, but Usmonxo‘ja Po‘lodxo‘jayev, a cousin of

Fayzulla Xo‘jayev’s and briefly head of the Bukharan state in 1921–22, had also
spent four years in Istanbul. Rahmat Rafiq (1884–?), another Young Bukharan,
first went to Istanbul only in 1918 after being exiled from Bukhara. He spent
over a year in Anatolia with the resistance before returning to Bukhara in 1921.39
He became an important figure in the BCP, rising to membership in the cen-
tral committee. Fayzulla Xo‘jayev had studied in Moscow but publicly cred-
ited Fitrat with drawing him into the Young Bukharan movement.40 He himself
could write in an elaborate Ottoman style.41
Yet another channel of Ottoman influence was the large number of Ottoman
officers, former prisoners of war stationed in Siberia, who were released and left
to fend for themselves after Brest-Litovsk. As they made their way home through
Central Asia, they found their modern education in a Turkic language a prized
possession. Many of them became schoolteachers in new-method schools, where
their penchant for martial music and drill imparted a new ethos to the new
schools. Some of them became prominent in Bukhara as well. Said Ahroriy
(1895–1931), who was editor of Buxoro axbori and then served as Bukharan
consul in Baku, was born in the Ottoman Empire to a father who had gone
on the hajj from Khujand in the Ferghana Valley and never returned. Ahroriy
went to an Ottoman officers school and served at Gallipoli in World War I be-
fore being taken prisoner by the Russians. He was in Tashkent in 1918 where
he opened a branch of Türk Ocağı, the network of political clubs that Turkist
activists had established in the Ottoman Empire after 1908, and was active in a
number of other endeavors. He went to Bukhara in 1920 and joined the BCP.42
Nevertheless, Ahroriy’s was an unusual case among the Ottoman officers who
found themselves in Central Asia in these years. Most of them were men seeking
to make a living in a strange land and not missionaries for a cause, let alone the
“Turkish emissaries” with whom Russian authorities had been obsessed since the
turn of the century.
The Soviets themselves paid lip service to the idea of Bukhara’s sovereignty
in returning all Russian enclaves on the territory of Bukhara (established in the
treaty of 1873, these contained the railway, all railway stations, and were home
to the only Russian settlements in the protectorate) to Bukharan control. The
new government set out to establish diplomatic relations with its neighbors,
sending a mission to Afghanistan, and others to Moscow, Iran, and the (post-
39
  Rahmat Rafiq, “Biograficheskii ocherk” (ca. 1924), RGASPI f. 62, op. 4, d. 633, l. 293.
40
  “Buxoro jumhuriyatining xarbiya noziri birodir Fayzulla Xo‘ja,” Buxoro axbori, 5 February
1923.
41
  See a note by him in RGASPI f. 544, op. 4, d. 30, ll. 75–76.
42
  Xolida Ahrorova, Izlarini izlayman (Tashkent: Sharq, 1998), 12–60.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 465

Ottoman) government of the national assembly in Turkey. Bukhara established

an embassy in Kabul, although the arrival in the city of the deposed emir com-
plicated matters a great deal, and relations between Bukhara and Afghanistan
never really took off. A mission was sent to Ankara where it was received by
Mustafa Kemal himself.43 By 1923, BNSR had representations in Kabul, Tbilisi,
Moscow, Tashkent, Samarqand, and Khorezm, and agents (oqsaqqol ) in Perovsk,
Kazalinsk, Ferghana, and Merv.44 In addition, it had established a trade repre-
sentation in Berlin and had spent considerable amounts of money in sending
students to Germany for higher education. In 1921, the Bukharan Communist
Party sought entry into the Comintern as an independent party (“like the
Germans”), rather than as a satellite of the RKP(b).45
The Soviets, of course, had no interest in supporting a Muslim modernist
state on the post-Ottoman model, and they acted to incorporate Bukhara into
mainstream Soviet life as quickly as possible. Bukhara thus was no exception to
Soviet policy in regard to the various republics that had emerged on the territory
of the former Russian Empire in the years of the Civil War. Bukhara’s pecu-
liar status as a “people’s soviet republic” was a product of geostrategic consider-
ations of 1920, when a sense that a purely military solution would not work had
kept the Bolsheviks from annexing the emirate outright. But unlike the other
nominally independent states of the period, such as Ukraine or the Far Eastern
Republic, which had served the Soviet state as buffers against hostile neigh-
bors, Bukhara was seen as a revolutionary outpost in the “East.” The dramatic
events of 1919, when Afghanistan had been able to force Britain to recognize
its independence, had changed the diplomatic calculus in the region. While the
Bolsheviks remained wary of British designs, fear of British retaliation did not
figure in policy toward Bukhara once Chicherin’s reservations on this account
had been disregarded in 1920. Rather, the Soviets attempted to bring Bukhara
in line as quickly as possible. From the outset, the Politburo paid a great deal of
attention to Bukharan affairs, as did authorities in Tashkent. Soviet authorities
had little respect for the political stances (not to mention their lack of “ideologi-
cal steadfastness”) of the Young Bukharans even though they had been inducted
into the BCP. In September 1921, Mikhail Tomskii, the chair of the Turkestan
Commission of the RKP(b) and thus Moscow’s plenipotentiary in Central Asia,
reported to Lenin about the leadership in Bukhara: “As before, they continue
to sabotage us with bread and to beg for money. The more one finds out about
the political lines of the various ‘communist’ groups here, the worse it gets.
43
  “Buhara Heyet-i Murahhasasının Kabul Merasiminde İrad olunan Mühim ve Tarihî Nutukları,”
Sebilürreşad 19 (1922): 261–62.
44
  RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 51, l. 84.
45
  Ibid., f. 61, op. 1, d. 33, l. 1.
466 ADEEB KHALID

They try to outdo each other in their Russophobia. They make very good use of
their own position and godlessly swindle us both politically and economically.”46
The Young Bukharans’ hesitations in carrying out the directives of the center
added fuel to the fire and produced a range of reactions, from condescension to
hostility.
The BCP’s attempt to join the Comintern as an independent party en-
countered resolute opposition from the RKP(b), and the BCP was admitted to
the Comintern in April 1921 only as a “sympathetic organization,” and then
quickly merged into the RKP(b) on 1 February 1922. Similarly, Moscow had
little patience with the Young Bukharans’ attempt at establishing their own
foreign relations. Moscow blocked a Turkish delegation from visiting Bukhara
in 1922 and in 1923 shut down all of Bukhara’s foreign representations. But it
was economic affairs that brought out the hostilities most clearly. The Soviets
assumed that the BNSR would subordinate its economic policies to the inter-
ests of the Soviet state and that Bukhara would supply goods (most important,
food and cotton) to the RSFSR and trade primarily with it. The BNSR gov-
ernment’s attempts at running its own policy provoked hostility. Immediately
after the revolution, the Bukharan government refused to give up all of its
grain, cotton, and astrakhan wool for barter trade with the RSFSR. “During
my stay in Bukhara I found a completely unexpected situation,” wrote the
representative of Narkomvneshtorg [the People’s Commissariat for Foreign
Trade] to Moscow. “I had expected that they will speak to me in a communist
manner [po-kommunisticheski], from the commonality of the interests of the
two republics, but that there is not much in common is clear from the fact that
the Bukharan republic has ‘declared private property sacred.’ Apparently, it is
not easy to disavow the ‘sacred’ even for a communist government if that gov-
ernment is headed by Mansurovs. … In a word, the Bukharan revkom wants
to conduct its own foreign trade.”47 This hostility was also replicated among
functionaries’ modest positions, such as one D. G. Rozhanskii, the acting di-
rector of Turkvneshtorg [Turkestan Agency for External Trade], who wrote to
A. M. Lezhava, the RSFSR commissar for external trade:

From the attached minutes of my meetings with the Bukharan government

you will see their position on the question of barter. The position is such that,
were it not necessary to account for considerations of a political and dip-
lomatic character, I would bank on the complete (temporary) curtailment
46
  M. P. Tomskii to V. I. Lenin, September 1921, in D. A. Amanzholova and O. I. Gorelov,
“ ‘Peresmotrite delo s baranami’: Pis´ma M. P. Tomskogo V. I. Leninu. 1921 g.,” Istoricheskii
arkhiv, no. 4 (2000): 11.
47
  Vladimirov to L. B. Krasin, 9 December 1920, in Ekonomicheskie otnosheniia sovetskoi Rossii s
budushchimi soiuznymi respublikami, 1917–1922 (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1996), 187.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 467

of all allocations from our side, in order to confront Messrs Muhitdinovs

and Khojaevs with the consequences of their real petty-shopkeeper policies.
You will see that under the noble screen of accountability to the people,
Bukharan authorities follow the principle of the primitive Uke [pervobyt-
nogo khokhla]: “Cough up the money and take away the goods.”48

Indeed, diplomatic and political considerations often fell by the wayside.

A few months later, Muxtor Saidjonov, the minister for economic affairs, had
an argument with the representative of Turkestan’s Commissariat of Food
Supply. The argument provoked a complaint from Iurenev, the plenipoten-
tiary representative (as successors to the tsarist-era political agents were called)
of the RSFSR; and as a result, Saidjonov was promptly relieved of his duties.49
In 1923, we find Iurenev’s successor Pozdnyshev accusing the whole Bukharan
government of discriminating against Russians in hiring practices and calling
for an end to them.50
In the end, the relations between Soviet Russia and the BNSR were always
completely asymmetrical. The Young Bukharans had been placed in power by
the Soviets and could never break free from their grip. Although the Bolsheviks
continued to find only chaos and backwardness in Bukhara, by 1923 they
felt strong enough to begin squeezing out the most obstreperous members of
the government. By the time Pozdnyshev complained about discrimination
against Russian cadres in Bukhara, he had already presided over a purge of
the Bukharan cabinet, forcing the removal of four of its most “nationalist”
members, as well as the reconstitution of the Central Committee of the BCP.
Successive purges of the BCP greatly reduced its membership rolls and re-
duced the maneuverability of its leaders. The national delimitation of Central
Asia in 1924 spelled the end of the BNSR, as the three existing republics of
Bukhara, Turkestan, and Khorezm (Khiva) were replaced by ethnoterritorial
republics that entered the Soviet Union as union republics. The delimitation
was routinely touted at the time as Central Asia’s second revolution, as a pro-
cess that was to ensure the success of Soviet construction in the region. These
claims were not too far off the mark. The delimitation did signal much greater
central control of the region and the end of the Ottoman model of political
development there.

48
  Rozhanskii to Lezhava, 14 February 1921, in Ekonomicheskie otnosheniia, 197.
49
  TsGARUz f. 48, op. 1, d. 6, l. 47ob. (27 July 1921). In his note conveying the news of
Saidjonov’s ouster, the chair of the Council of Ministers felt compelled to assure Iurenev that
Saidjonov’s conduct was due to ill health and not hostility to Soviet power.
50
  Ibid., f. 56, op. 2, d. 4, l. 28 (circular, 6 November 1923).
468 ADEEB KHALID

Muslim Communists and Turkish Developments

Bukharan developments present in heightened form the much wider phenom-
enon of the continuing impact of Turkish developments on the Muslim com-
munities of the nascent Soviet state. Turkish developments exercised a deep
fascination on native cadres in Central Asia. As I have said before, this impact
cannot be understood simply as “pan-Islamism” or “pan-Turkism” but rather
requires us to think in terms of shifting loyalties and identities in a time of tu-
multuous change.
The vernacular press followed developments in Anatolia closely. In the un-
certain years between 1918 and 1920, there was no clarity as to what the re-
lationship between social revolution and national liberation was going to be.
Even Shalva Eliava, the chair of the Turkestan Commission of the RKP(b)
Central Committee that arrived in late 1919 to establish the writ of the center in
Turkestan, was reported as saying that Soviet power does not require a social rev-
olution of the East: it was sufficient to bring about national liberation.51 In the
general revolution of geopolitical suppositions in the aftermath of the October
Revolution, the Ottomans appeared as enemies of imperialism (represented by
the British and the French), and after the Armistice, its victims, especially once
“nationalist” resistance to Entente occupation began in 1919. The Central Asian
reading of events in Anatolia was entangled with Soviet posturing on the “Eastern
Policy,” with its claims of liberating the “East” from imperialism, which featured
very prominently in the local press in those years. Soviet power presented itself
as the main succor of oppressed peoples in the world and, conversely, all antico-
lonial movements as its potential allies. In 1919, Kazım Bey, an Ottoman officer
sent to Afghanistan during the war as part of a German–Ottoman mission to
lure that country into war against the British, showed up in Turkestan, exhorting
the locals to unite with the Soviet government to fight the British, the “enemies
of the freedom and independence of all humanity and the constant enemy of
Muslims.”52 In January 1920, he was joined at a meeting, hosted by the Tashkent
old city ispolkom, by one Hüseyin Hilmi Bey, a representative of the “Anatolian
assembly,” in making the same plea.53
The ensuing struggle led by Mustafa Kemal was seen similarly in global an-
ticolonial terms. One author wrote of Greece and Armenia, against whom the
Ankara government fought on different fronts, as the “small Entente” acting

51
  Quoted by Abu Turg’ud (pseud.), “Toshkandda bo‘lg‘on rovutlarda,” Ishtirokiyun, 24 December
1919.
52
  Ishtirokiyun, 22 March 1919.
53
  Mirmullo Shermuhammadov, “Eski shahr ‘Ijroiya qo‘mita’ sida sharafli bir majlis,” Ishtirokiyun,
13 January 1920.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 469

as a proxy for the “big Entente.”54 Kemal’s victories against the two sides were
celebrated in Central Asia. In October 1922, a meeting at the recently founded
Central Asian Communist University heard that the “present struggle of the
Grand National Assembly, the only independent Muslim-Turkic government
in the East, is the struggle between the oppressed East and the tyrannical
West.”55 In the same week, the ispolkom of the old-city soviet in Tashkent
held a “solemn demonstration” of the “toiling Muslim masses of Tashkent,
together with the Red Army and Russian workers,” to mark “the brilliant vic-
tories gained by the troops of the Great National Assembly over Greece, the
protégé of English imperialism in Asia Minor,” and to express “their solidarity
in the matter of the struggle of Turkey for its national liberation.”56 Once the
Grand National Assembly established itself as the state power in Turkey, its
negotiations with the Entente at Lausanne and its internal political develop-
ments continued to be reported in considerable detail.57
Soviet Muslim support for the Turkish nationalist cause had impeccable
revolutionary credentials, but there can be little question that it reflected a spe-
cial fascination with Turkey. Developments in the other countries, especially
non-Muslim ones such as China, did not produce anything similar. This fas-
cination was based in the affective ties that had knit the Ottomans with the
Muslims of the Russian Empire in previous decades. It was rooted in common
discourses of Turkicness much more than in Islam. As one commentator put it,
the issue of the caliphate was a weapon in the hands of “perfidious Albion (the
English)” (makkor Olbiyun [inglizlar]) for use against the Muslim world, for
it set Arabs against Turks and provoked the sell-out sharif of Mecca to revolt
against the Ottomans. For the author, the answer to the question of who should
get the caliphate was clear: the Turks, who had held the title since the time of
Sultan Selim (who, in defeating the Mamluks of Egypt in 1517, had been able to
claim the caliphate), and who were now fighting valiantly; anything else would
be sheer ingratitude (kufron-i ne’mat).58 The caliphate itself tended to recede in
importance over these years. By 1924, the nationalists had so supplanted the

54
  “Kichik ontonto yiqildi va katta ontonto yiqilmoqdadir,” Mehnatkashlar tovushi (Samarqand),
26 December 1920.
55
  S., “Turklarga yordim,” Turkiston, 20 October 1922.
56
  Telegram to the Turkish Grand National Assembly, October 1922, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv
goroda Tashkent f. 12, d. 78, l. 116.
57
  Speeches by Kemal reported in Turkiston, 17 February 1923 and 6 March 1924; forthcoming
elections in Turkiston, 8 June 1923; and the establishment of a new political party (the Yeni Halk
Partisi) in Turkiston, 21 November 1923.
58
  Abu Turg‘ud, “Xilofat masalasi va Turkiston musulmonlari,” Ishtirokiyun, 16 March 1920.
470 ADEEB KHALID

Ottomans as the object of interest and affection that the abolition of the caliph-
ate in March was reported entirely matter-of-factly in Turkestan.59
By this time, the Turcophone public sphere had been ruptured again,
as newspapers and other publications could not cross the new Soviet bor-
ders. Turkic-language newspapers in the Soviet Union were dependent on
Soviet news agencies for their news. Turkestan’s Russian-language newspaper,
Turkestanskaia pravda, also covered Turkish events. The difference lay in the
much greater prominence accorded to the news in the vernacular press, and
in the commentary on the news, for which vernacular newspapers continued
to have considerable latitude until at least 1927. Even later in the decade,
when that latitude was greatly constricted, the press continued to report on
the transformation of Anatolia that began with the establishment of the re-
public. The Kemalist reforms took place in close chronological proximity to
their counterparts in Central Asia. Scholars have noted that party authorities
often worried that Kemalist reforms in the cultural realm provided an alterna-
tive non-Soviet model for Central Asia and fretted about being outflanked in
that respect.60 The tone in the Uzbek press was quite different. Nothing exem-
plifies this better than the question of women’s liberation. Turkish women ap-
peared early in the Uzbek press as paragons of modernity.61 On the eve of the
hujum, the campaign against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, the newspaper
Qizil O‘zbekiston (Red Uzbekistan) noted (incorrectly, as it turned out) that
Turkey was carrying out a sartorial reform for women, which would ban veil-
ing in public.62 Such reporting almost suggested that Turkish developments
were a model for or a parallel to Soviet efforts. The effect was to render Soviet
reforms less exceptional and more normal for the Muslim world. The time
for such acknowledgment of linkages of Central Asia to the broader Muslim
world had run out by then, however. Soon it became politically impermissible
to draw such parallels.

Communism and Kemalism: Awkward Allies, Jealous Rivals

In Taksim Square, the symbolic center of modern Istanbul, stands the Monument
to the Republic. Commissioned from the Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica in

59
  “Xalifalik bitirildi,” Turkiston, 9 March 1924.
60
  Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in
Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 218–20;
Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), 81–82.
61
  “Turk xonimlari ozodliq yo‘lida,” Turkiston, 13 June 1923.
62
  “Turkiyada ham paranjiga hujum,” Qizil O‘zbekiston, 21 February 1927, 1; “Turklarda xotinlar
kiyimi masalasi,” Qizil O‘zbekiston, 8 June 1927.
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 471

1928, the monument is typically heroic, featuring 11-meter tall statues of 15

figures looking defiantly into the future. Only a few of the figures represent his-
toric individuals (the rest represent “the people”), but peering over the shoulder
of İsmet İnönü, the hero of the war of liberation, prime minister, and Atatürk’s
successor as president, is S. I. Aralov, the first Soviet ambassador to Ankara, his
head covered by a Lenin cap. The monument thus freezes in stone the diplo-
matic entanglement of Soviet communism and Kemalism at the moment of
their births that both sides later came to find embarrassing.
The Soviet and the Kemalist regimes shared many features: a civilizing mis-
sion, an aspiration to remake culture, a defiant attitude toward the international
geopolitical order, and a jealous regard for their territorial integrity. They also
used similar forms of mobilization.63 The Russian Civil War and the Turkish
“war of liberation”—the founding moments of the two regimes—overlapped in
the Caucasus. The nationalists in Anatolia looked to the nascent Soviet govern-
ment for military aid, and contacts begun in 1919 led to a treaty of friend-
ship signed in March 1921.64 The Turkish side did well in these interactions.
Ottoman negotiators at Brest-Litovsk had secured the return to the Ottomans of
the provinces of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, lost to the Russians in 1878, and al-
though Batum was eventually not retained, the Anatolian nationalists were able
to fight off attempted expansion by Armenia in 1920.65 Since both were revi-
sionist states in the post-Versailles world order, their mutual relations remained
cordial until 1935, but they were never without a healthy dose of skepticism and
caution as well.
In 1920, even as they began to negotiate with the nationalists under the
command of Mustafa Kemal, the Soviets continued to cultivate the cooperation
of Kemal’s bitter rival Enver Pasha, as well as patronizing Mustafa Suphi, the
founder of the Turkish Communist Party. The Baku Congress of the Peoples of
the East (September 1920) had both Enver and a representative of the Ankara
government present, in addition to Mustafa Suphi.66 It was only with Kemal’s
military successes in 1920 that the Soviets decided to bank on Kemal and to
63
  A comparison of the Soviet and Kemalist projects is one of the main concerns of my
“Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative
Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, 2 (2006): 231–51, although there is much more to be done in
exploring the parallels between the two.
64
  Bülent Gökay, A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism,
1918–1923 (London: Tauris Academic, 1997). See also Salahi Ramsdan Sonyel, Turkish Diplomacy,
1918–1923: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish National Movement (London: Sage, 1975).
65
  The complicated relations between Soviet Russia and the nationalist resistance are examined by
Michael A. Reynolds, “Buffers, Not Brethren: Young Turk Military Policy in the First World War
and the Myth of Panturanism,” Past and Present, no. 203 (2009): 137–79.
66
  Aslan, Türkiye Komünist Fırkası, chap. 3.
472 ADEEB KHALID

send Enver off to Central Asia.67 The Soviet connection with Suphi and the
Turkish Communist Party founded in exile in Baku proved longer lasting but
tended to be put on the back burner when faced with needs of the state.68
Soviet opinion of republican Turkey remained ambivalent for much of the
1920s, with classically Orientalist themes coexisting with revolutionary rheto-
ric. A journalist visiting Turkey in 1924 focused primarily on the exotic and
the negative: Istanbul’s “noise and liveliness are not really urban but somewhat
resort-like, made by the crowd and not by work or creation,” while Turks “are
sluggish and do not like to hurry. … Seeing people stand or sit for hours in im-
perturbable contemplation, it appears that time here is measured not in minutes
but in years.”69 But Turkey’s transformation by Kemal was noted by scholars and
the authorities and caused some debate about the “Kemalist revolution” as a
conceptual category. The most immediate cause of interest in Kemalism was the
developing situation in China. Could China follow the same path that Turkey
had under Kemal? Many observers of Turkey felt positively about the revolution
wrought by Kemal. In 1927, in an article published by the organ of the Central
Asia Bureau of the VKP(b), the Orientalist V. P. Osetrov argued that Kemalism
was a specific type of “Oriental revolution,” characterized by the “hegemony of
the native bourgeoisie, which acts against the development of the proletarian
elements or an agrarian revolution,” but which “grows in the struggle against
foreign imperialists and pursues a program of political and economic indepen-
dence for the country.” Given, however, that the anti-imperialist revolution was
still ongoing and that there was no competing agrarian or proletarian revolu-
tion in place, Osetrov argued that the “Turkish revolution … is an element of
the global anti-imperialist front and therefore Kemalism still is a revolutionary
factor.”70 He pushed this point further in a lengthier treatment of the subject
that appeared the following year and provided considerable detail to argue that
the main social base for the Kemalist revolution was the peasantry, whose inter-
ests the regime’s étatisme had protected.71

67
  The dalliance of the Bolsheviks with the Ottoman triumvirs remains to be fully explored, but
see Kamoludin Abdullaev, Ot Sin´tsziania do Khorasana: Iz istorii sredneaziatskoi emigratsii XX veka
(Dushanbe: Irfon, 2009), 198–232; V. M. Gilensen, “Sotrudnichestvo krasnoi Moskvy s Enver-
Pashoi i Dzhemal´-Pashoi,” Vostok, no. 3 (1996): 45–63, is entirely oblivious to Turkish sources.
68
  Bilal Şen, Cumhuriyetin İlk Yıllarda TKP ve Komintern İlişkileri (Istanbul: Küyerel Yayınları,
1998).
69
  L. Seifullina, V strane ukhodiashchego islama: Poezdka v Turtsiiu (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel´stvo, 1925), 59, 74. Despite the title of the book, there is little discussion of Islam in it.
70
  Irandust (pseud.), “Sushchnost´ kemalizma,” Za Partiiu, no. 2 (1927): 64, 68.
71
  Irandust (pseud.), Dvizhushchie sily kemalistskoi revoliutsii (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatel´stvo, 1928).
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 473

Stalin, however, had already spoken. In May 1927, he had proclaimed to an

audience of Chinese students in Moscow that “a Kemalist revolution is possible
only in countries like Turkey, Persia, or Afghanistan, where there is no industrial
proletariat, or practically none, and where there is no powerful agrarian-peasant
revolution. A Kemalist revolution is a revolution of the top stratum, a revolution
of the national merchant bourgeoisie, arising in a struggle against the foreign im-
perialists, and whose subsequent development is essentially directed against the
peasants and workers, against the very possibility of an agrarian revolution.”72
Scholarly analyses of Kemalism gradually fell in line. Osetrov’s book was at-
tacked for its “opportunism” and its general political and academic weakness,73
and, with the geopolitical situation shifting rapidly, Kemalism was consigned to
the camp of counterrevolution in Soviet thinking by the mid-1930s.74
Kemal, for his part, had little patience for rivals to his power, and although
he was prone to using rhetoric very close to that of the Bolsheviks in dealings
with the Soviet state, he could not countenance an independent communist
party. When members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly organized a
Turkish Communist Party in 1920, Kemal promptly banned it, and in a bra-
zen move, established an official “Communist Party,” with a central commit-
tee stacked with generals and officials. In early 1921, when Mustafa Suphi and
his companions sought to enter Turkey, their boat sank in the Black Sea off
Samsun. Kemal did permit the establishment, under the leadership of Sharif
Manatov, a Bashkir Communist, of the Türkiye Halk İştirakiyun Fırkası (People’s
Communist Party of Turkey) as a legal party. Nevertheless, once the republic had
been declared in 1923, Kemal strengthened the rule of his Republican People’s
Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) and began to squeeze out other political forces.
In 1925, the government used the Law for the Maintenance of Order to shut
down all communist parties and newspapers. This was followed by a series of ar-
rests in May 1925, which resulted in lengthy prison sentences for the accused. In

72
  I. V. Stalin, “Talk with Students of the Sun Yat-Sen University” (13 May 1927), in his Works,
13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 9:261–63.
73
  Z. Feridov, “Kemalistskaia Turtsiia i fashizm (o ‘kontseptsii’ Irandusta i kemalistskom opyte),”
Revoliutsionnyi Vostok, no. 7 (1929): 56–69. Osetrov was able to defend himself (Irandust [pseud.],
“Neskol´ko slov o kemalizme,” Revoliutsionnyi Vostok, no. 8 [1930]: 53–71), but his critic was
given the final word: Feridov, “Otvet Irandostu,” Revoliutsionnyi Vostok, no. 8 (1930): 72–84.
74
  Already in 1931, in denunciations and statements of self-criticism, Kemalism had taken its
place alongside capitalism and nationalism as a form of ideological corruption; see the statement
before the Central Control Commission of the VKP(b) by several young Uzbek Communists ac-
knowledging that their mistakes “would have led to the restoration of capitalism and to Kemalism”
in Uzbekistan: RGASPI f. 62, op. 2, d. 2575, l. 43. On the broad outlines of Soviet–Turkish
relations in this period, see B. M. Potskhveriia, Turtsiia mezhdu dvumia voinami: Ocherki vneshnei
politiki (Moscow: GRVL, 1992), 201–28.
474 ADEEB KHALID

1936, with relations with the USSR deteriorating, the government introduced
new articles of the penal code that banned all organizations advocating class
struggle or other “divisive” platforms.75
In a way, the underlying suspicion crystallized the lines that separated the
two regimes over the course of the two decades discussed here. The overlapping
civil wars and the related demographic disasters led to immense movements of
populations, and large numbers of Muslims from the Caucasus emigrated to
Turkey. Turkey was a major destination for Muslim intellectuals from the for-
mer Russian Empire, many of whom had been active in the Civil War as lead-
ers of national movements. The Bashkir Ahmed Zeki Velidî Togan, the Tatars
Ayaz Ishaki and Sadri Maksudi, the Young Bukharan Usmon Xo‘ja Po‘lodxo‘ja
o‘g‘li (Osman Kocaoğlu), and former Basmachi leader Ko‘rshermat provide a
sense of the scope of this movement. By the early 1930s, Istanbul was home to
a feisty but fractious émigré community, complete with a polemical press. The
experience of exile and political defeat gave the émigrés an intense dislike of the
Soviets and radicalized their nationalism. They not only represented an anticom-
munist lobby in the country but also played a substantial role in nationalizing
the republic.
The Kemalist state pursued a carefully crafted policy of demographic
management through immigration and resettlement. Turkish culture and, in-
creasingly, Turkish “race” became the main criteria for permitting entry into
the republic. Nevertheless, this policy fell victim to the rivalry with the Soviet
Union. Initially, Muslims from the USSR enjoyed privileged access to Turkish
citizenship, but this changed over the course of the 1930s, as the Kemalist gov-
ernment became increasingly suspicious of Soviet Muslims and their possible
use for espionage. In 1933 refugees “not of the Turkish race” coming over the
Soviet border from the Caucasus began to be denied entry, and in 1937 this
turned into a blanket refusal to admit refugees from the Soviet Union.76
There was a reverse flow of people as well. The Soviet Union was the desti-
nation of many Turkish citizens, many of whom were associated with the left.
In the early years, there were Turkish students at Communist University for the
Toilers of the East. Perhaps the most interesting and well-known case is that of
the poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63), who spent eight years in Soviet lands in the
1920s.77 He returned in 1928 but faced considerable persecution and spent a
75
  George S. Harris, The Origins of Communism in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution
Press, 1967).
76
  Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? (London:
Routledge, 2006), 97–98.
77
  Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet
(London: Palgrave, 1999). The best source for Nazım’s time in the Soviet Union in the 1920s is
CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN AND THE SOVIET WORLDS 475

great deal of time in jail. Eventually, in 1950, under threat of another sentence,
he escaped to exile in Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. This exchange
of exiles is symbolic perhaps of how the entangled origins of the two regimes
came to be denied and common models disavowed.

Conclusion
The story I have told here is not, strictly speaking, one of models being borrowed
among actors at the margins of Europe. Rather it is a story of models floating
across imperial boundaries and of deeply intertwined histories of different ac-
tors, all of which came to be disavowed. Print allowed the modern intellectuals
of the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire to become part of the politi-
cal worlds of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires. It was in this space
that models moved back and forth across imperial boundaries and, in a time of
cataclysmic change, were transplanted to new locations. The Russian Revolution
made it possible for the Young Bukharans to attempt to implement what were
essentially Ottoman models in the republic they found themselves running. The
Ottoman model itself was drastically radicalized by imperial collapse and trans-
formed into Kemalism, the early history of which paralleled closely that of the
Bolshevik state.
The events described here also remind us of the enormous purchase the idea
of revolution had in the aftermath of World War I. Revolution could be read in
many different ways, but the idea of a radical remaking of the world appealed
to many across intellectual, political, and ethnic divides. They also remind us
of the existence in the early 20th century of an Ottoman political world that
extended far beyond the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire itself. Muslims,
whether statesmen in Afghanistan and Iran or intellectuals in colonized areas
such as Bukhara, saw Ottoman attempts at strengthening the state, building
modern institutions, and modernizing culture and Islam itself as a model for the
reconciliation of Islam and modernity. There is considerable irony here, for it
was in its moment of weakness that the Ottoman Empire came to be the center
of attention—indeed, of affection—of Muslims beyond its borders in a way it
had never succeed in becoming before.
But perhaps the most significant conclusions to be drawn are historio-
graphical. The Bukharans never could develop a historiography of their own,
and we are left with Soviet and Kemalist projects to contend with.78 Both were
equally loathe to acknowledge these parallels, let alone to see them as models
the memoir by a friend who accompanied him in his travels: Vâlâ Nureddin, Bu Dünyadan Nâzım
Geçti (Istanbul: Remzi, 1965).
78
  The post-Soviet historiography in Uzbekistan is primarily a variation on the Soviet theme and
equally unwilling and incapable of exploring the complexities of the BNSR.
476 ADEEB KHALID

or borrowings. The refusal to acknowledge parallels or common models was

largely rooted in reasons of state. The official historiographies of the two regimes
came to locate each of them in firmly teleological trajectories, one of class tran-
scendence, the other of national redemption; both required the subordination
of messy historical detail to grander narratives. Thus, despite the fact that the
Bolshevik and Kemalist regimes were forged in the same cauldron of postwar
collapse and had been tied together in many tangible ways at the moment of
their emergence, the mere acknowledgment of the use of alternative models
very quickly became politically inconvenient in both places. Uncovering the
entanglements and the borrowings helps place both the Soviet and Kemalist
projects in their time and place and explains why the idea of the BNSR as a post-
Ottoman state is not as odd as it sounds.

Dept. of History
Carleton College
One North College Street
Northfield, MN 55057 USA
akhalid@carleton.edu