The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

Edward Dennis Sokol

With a Foreword by S. Frederick Starr

© 1954, 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sokol, Edward D., author.

Title: The revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia / Edward Dennis Sokol ; with a foreword by S. Frederick Starr.

Description: Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. | Originally published: 1954. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043854| ISBN 9781421420509 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421420516 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420503 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421420511 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Asia, Central—History—Revolt, 1916. | World War,

1914–1918—Asia, Central. | Genocide—Asia, Central—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DK858 .S65 2016 | DDC 958.43/083—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043854

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Foreword, by S. Frederick Starr

Preface

1 The Revolt of 1916

2 The Economic Background to the Revolt of 1916

A. Russian Economic Interests in Central Asia before the Conquest

B. Russian Economic Policy towards the Sarts

1. Land Policy

2. The Introduction of American Cotton

3. The Russians in Turkistan

C. Russian Economic Policy towards the Nomads

3 The Political Background to the Revolt of 1916

A. The Administration of the Country

B. The Political Situation up to 1898

C. The Andijan Uprising

D. The Political Situation after 1898

1. Enquiry of Count Palen

2. The Political Situation among the Sarts

3. The Political Situation among the Kazakhs and Kirghiz

4 The Revolt of 1916: First Phase

A. War Comes to Turkistan

B. The Reaction of the Natives to the War

C. The Supreme Command of June 25

D. Meeting of the Governors of the Central Asian Krai

E. The Revolt among the Sarts

F. The Appointment of General Kuropatkin as Governor-General

5 The Revolt of 1916: Second Phase

A. The Revolt of the Kirghiz and Kazakhs

1. The Announcement of the Supreme Order

2. The Revolt in the Steppe Oblasts

3. The Revolt in Semipalatinsk

4. The Revolt in Semirechie

5. The Flight of the Insurgents to China

B. The Revolt of the Turkomans

6 The End of the Revolt

A. Group Participation in the Revolt of 1916

1. The Well-to-Do Groups

2. The Poor

B. The Question of Foreign Influence

C. Measures Taken for the Securing of Peace in the Future

1. Military Measures

2. Administrative Measures

D. The Balance Sheet of Damage Suffered

E. The Dispatch of Workers to the Front

F. The Duma and the Revolt

7 The Revolt in Retrospect

A. The Early Soviet Interpretation of the Revolt

B. The Recent Soviet Interpretation

C. In Summing Up

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

A century ago approximately 270,000 Central Asians—Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and especially Kyrgyz—perished in one of the most ghastly mass deaths in modern history. This horrific killing took place when Russian officials attempted to draft natives of the region to fight and provide labor service for the tsar during World War I. In addition to those killed outright, tens of thousands more died while trying to escape over treacherous mountain passes into neighboring Xinjiang, China. Even today, bones of victims of this disaster continue to wash out from the rocky bottoms of deep crevasses in the Tian Shan mountains.

The scale of this demographic disaster is hard to grasp. Recent experts calculate that the Kyrgyz, who suffered most heavily, lost fully 40% of their total population.¹ All age groups suffered, but younger males died in disproportionate numbers, causing a demographic breakdown that is still felt today. It is estimated that had the tragedy of 1916 not occurred, the population of the Kyrgyz Republic would be twice what it is today.

Unlike the Armenian genocide, which was unfolding in Turkey at almost the same time, this mass killing of more than a quarter million people has been largely expunged from the world’s historical consciousness. There are good reasons for this. Even as the last phase of the 1916 Uprising was taking place in Turkmenistan, Lenin and his Bolsheviks were overthrowing the tsarist government in St. Petersburg and establishing Soviet rule. During the first years after the Bolshevik coup, informative articles on the events of 1916 appeared in Russia, but by the end of the 1920s these ceased. As Lenin’s heirs strove to establish the Soviet Union as a multinational empire, the tragic events of 1916 became a taboo subject. They disappeared from the history books, and the Central Asians themselves were forbidden to delve into them. With the exception of a couple of minor studies from the 1960s, the scholarly literature on the 1916 Uprising dates mainly from the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR. But even today the Putin government bans access to the tsarist archives in Moscow, where records of the events leading up to 1916 and of the Uprising itself are housed.

The one exception to this general silence, and a very worthy one, appeared in 1954, when an enterprising young American scholar, Edward Dennis Sokol of Johns Hopkins University, published the short book that is here reissued. Sokol modestly considered his study to be a pioneering work rather than a definitive study, but his accomplishment was impressive by any standard. He exhaustively researched all published sources available at the time, and especially the documents and articles that were issued in such early Soviet periodicals as Krasnyi Arkhiv (The Red Archive). Moreover, he presented his findings in a calm and dispassionate manner that allows readers to draw their own conclusions.

The very structure of Sokol’s book reflects his realization that the 1916 Uprising was about more than the drafting of young Kyrgyz and other Central Asians to fight with the tsarist army in World War I or to staff Russia’s arms factories. By devoting nearly half of his study to the specific policies of Russian rule in Central Asia he implies that 1916 marked the culmination of several generations of steady Russian encroachment against the land and rights of the indigenous peoples and the product of the utter corruption that permeated Russian rule there. The 1916 Uprising, then, was a revolt against Russian colonialism in all its dimensions—economic, political, religious, and national—and not simply a draft riot. It is worth noting that this view is emphatically shared by the Kyrgyz scholar and diplomat Kuban Mambetaliev, who has recently published an important collection of papers on the Uprising drawn from archives within Kyrgyzstan.²

The 1916 Uprising was region-wide in scope, but it assumed a different character in every part of Central Asia. Among the settled peoples of the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan (to whom Sokol refers with the old term Sarts) and on the Merv oasis in Turkmenistan, the focus was on the usurpation of cotton land by Russian settlers and the government’s demand that local farmers turn over part of their crop to the state, in addition to paying taxes. They rightly understood that this form of corvée labor was similar to serfdom that had been abolished in Russia. In mountain areas in Kyrgyzstan and East Kazakhstan the Turkic peoples objected to being forced to raise poppies to produce opium needed to treat wounded soldiers on the European front. Religious and national concerns also played a part, although Sokol cautions against overemphasizing these factors.

The common element among all these contributing factors was the relentless usurpation of native lands by Russian settlers and the Russian state and the deep corruption that accompanied it. This process had been going on since the Russians’ first appearance in Central Asia. It took the proposed draft and the requisition of ever more meat and cotton from Central Asia to drive the Turkic and Persianate populations into outright rebellion. Or did it? Sokol cites an extensive study by one G. I. Broido, who was a firsthand observer of the Uprising and who reported in detail on what he had seen. Written in September 1916, while the last phase of the Uprising was still under way, Broido acknowledged all the various background factors but then offered a stunning hypothesis, namely, that the tsar’s colonial bureaucrats and military leaders deliberately fomented the Uprising to justify the seizure of more land from the Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Tajiks. It is worth noting that Broido was a member of the Bolshevik Party that would seize power in Petrograd a year later.

Broido’s thesis has recently garnered support from Kuban Mambetaliev, editor of the newly published collection of documents cited above, who republished extracts from it.³ However, for now this remains a hypothesis that must be carefully tested in each of the many regions in which the Uprising welled up. This will require detailed studies of the Uprising of 1916 in each of the countries of the region. Even though Russian officials have closed the main Moscow archives to scholars, there are relevant materials from the tsarist era in the archives in each of the countries of Central Asia, and especially those in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Almaty (formerly Vernyi), Kazakhstan. A careful examination of these sources will go far towards establishing whether Russian colonial administrators deliberately fomented the Uprising of 1916 in order to provide a pretext for seizing native lands.

In 2015, President Almazbek Atambayev of the Kyrgyz Republic signed a decree, On the Centennial of the Tragic Events of 1916. In it he noted that over a long period of time a strict policy of silence had smothered study of the Uprising and suppressed public knowledge of them. The year 2016, he concluded, was the right time to bury the dead, whose bones are still to be found in the bleak mountain passes, and to honor them by reconstructing the history of their lives and the story of their grievous deaths. The decision of Johns Hopkins University Press, together with the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, to republish Edward Dennis Sokol’s valuable monograph is an important step in this direction.

S. Frederick Starr

Chairman

Central Asia–Caucasus Institute

Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

Johns Hopkins University

Preface

The purpose of this study is to serve as an introduction to a period of history which has long suffered from neglect. This must be regarded as something in the nature of a pioneering work rather than a definitive study inasmuch as some of the Russian sources pertinent to the Revolt of 1916 were inaccessible to me despite great efforts to secure them. I am only too well aware that additional light should be shed on many aspects of the revolt in order to obtain a clearer picture.

All dates in this study are in the Old Style of the Russian calendar.

I wish to express my gratitude for the assistance given me by my professors and many colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University, without whose help and cooperation this study would not have been possible.

To Miss Lilly Lavarello goes my great appreciation for doing an excellent job in typing the manuscript in spite of the inherent difficulties of the subject matter. The staff of the History department library at the Johns Hopkins University must be mentioned for the many courtesies and assistance rendered as must the New York Public Library for their dispatch and efficiency in providing photostats of some of the material.

E.D.S.

April 1954

The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

1

The Revolt of 1916

The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia is an aspect of the history of the First World War and of the history of Russia which has, unfortunately, been sorely neglected in the English literature on the period. Where dealt with at all it receives but casual mention in a paragraph or two at the most. The great attention has been devoted to the February and October Revolutions and the great events attendant upon these upheavals, so œcumenical in their ramifications and significance. Yet the Revolt of 1916 sounded the first rumble of the oncoming disaster and in it there participated in one form or another the eleven million native peoples of Russian Central Asia. Though brutally suppressed, the discontent did not abate but broke out anew in the summer of 1917; the Revolution of October was anticipated in Turkistan by a local coup in September 1917 of the central executive committee of the Tashkent Soviet which overthrew the authorities of the Provisional Government. The Revolt of 1916 was both the prelude to the Revolution in Russia proper and the catalytic agent which hastened the alignment of forces in Russian Central Asia. The Revolution found the lines more sharply drawn and the people more definitely committed to one camp or another than would have been the case had no revolt occurred.

The Revolt of 1916 had still another significance in that it was the final expression of Tsarist policy towards minorities. The revolt is a mirror which in its facets shows the success of the contact and symbiosis of different cultures and different peoples. It provided the acid test which showed how firm these contacts were.

The revolt deserves study for still another reason. It provides an elementary expression of that revolt of Asia against the rule of the white man which is occupying so much of our attention presently. A close corollary to this is the age-long struggle of Islam against the infidel; this also finds its expression in the Revolt of 1916.

Finally, the revolt embodies in the same framework the response of two very different peoples, the nomads and the settled folk, to the encroachment on their liberty and very existence. Each responded in a way consistent with its background, tradition, and history.

In view of the general lack of knowledge about the region of Russian Central Asia or Russian Turkistan it seems pertinent to make a few general remarks about the peoples, their religion, and the land they occupy, before proceeding to the subject proper. The region is a land of great contrast, physically interspersed by desert and oasis, the aspect of the latter heightened by the gloom and desolation of the former. The traveller, exhausted by traversing the desert wastes of Kara Kum and Kizil Kum looks upon such oases as Samarkand and Bukhara, prodigal in verdure, as indeed something out of the Arabian Nights. Water in this region is synonymous with life itself and it alone makes possible the great contrasts between the desert and the cultivated portions of the area. The region of Tsarist Russian Turkistan may be divided into three natural areas: (1) to the west, the province of Transcaspia, composed principally of deserts, whose rivers reach no lake but disappear into the sands; (2) in the centre, the three provinces of Syr Darya, Samarkand, and Ferghana and the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara, vassal to the Russian Government. These units within the Russian Empire were situated in the hydrographic basin of the Sea of Aral, into which flowed the two principal rivers of the country, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya (the Oxus and Jaxartes of the ancients); (3) to the east, the province of Semirechie, situated in the hydrographic basin of Lakes Balkhash and Issik Kul¹ and the river Chu.

Another great contrast is provided by the variations in level. The steppes and desert of the west are succeeded by the mountains of the east and southeast. Here is found Mt. Kaufmann (now Mt. Stalin) the highest peak in the Soviet Union (23,000 feet) and to the south of it the Pamirs, the Roof of the World. A final contrast is provided in the matter of population distribution. Whereas in the great cities the population was as dense as in the cities of Europe, in the desert areas it was very sparse.

The name Turkistan signifies in Iranian land of the Turks yet the name is inaccurate. Inhabited by an Iranian people since time immemorial this population was subjected to a series of conquests, displacements, and interpenetrations by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Mongols, and others. Though each of these people left its mark, the basic strain of the population remained as before Iranian. The most serious changes in the country were effected by the Arabs and the Turks, the one imposing Mohammedanism on the country and the other the Turkish language.

Of the peoples occupying the area some are of quite pure Iranian provenience, such as the Tajiks, a sedentary people who are especially adept at agriculture. Others are Turko-Mongols, inhabiting their conical kibitkas or felt tents and carrying on a nomadic existence. These include the Kirghiz and Kazakhs. In Tsarist times both were called Kirghiz to distinguish them from the Cossacks, the same word being used in Russian to signify Cossack and Kazakh. Where need arose the Kirghiz and Kazakhs were differentiated between by calling the Kazakhs, Kirghiz-Kazakhs and the Kirghiz, Black or Kara Kirghiz.² The Kazakhs occupied the area of the Kirghiz steppe (now Kazakhstan). The Kirghiz roamed over the region on the T’ien Shan and Pamirs. Both peoples are related in origin, culture, and economy and both pay a nominal allegiance to the Mohammedan religion.

The Turkomans are also Turko-Mongol in race, inhabiting the southwest of Turkistan. They are a hardy nomad people who put up a magnificent resistance to the Russian conquest. Formerly they were much addicted to plundering and made forays to the south as far as Farah, 150 miles south of Herat, bringing back Persian girls for the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara. These slave girls were married off to the local population further strengthening the Iranian strain of the population. The Turkomans, together with the other nomads, Kirghiz and Kazakhs, made up 30% of the total population of Tsarist Russian Central Asia.

In addition to the pure Iranian strain the sedentary population includes mixtures of the Turko-Mongol and the Iranian. These people inhabit the oases of the east. They include the Sarts³ and the Uzbeks; the latter are thought to be related to the Seljuk Turks⁴ though now containing a heavy admixture of Iranian blood. Both the Sarts and the Uzbeks are industrious and active people.

Mention should also be made of the 228,000 native Jews. Though oppressed by the native governments they prospered much, especially in the cotton trade. They were located notably in Samarkand and Bukhara. With the conquest of Central Asia by the Russians there began an influx of Russian Jews into the country. Other alien elements to come included the Persians, who came as traders, artisans, and workers in great numbers (Ashkhabad was a Persian city), Armenians, and others from the Caucasus who introduced a strong trading element. The problems created by the influx of Russian colonists into the country will be dealt with in a later chapter.

Russian Turkistan does not present a formidable problem in the matter of language, being unlike the Babel of the Caucasus. With the exception of the district of Samarkand and the mountainous parts of the former khanate of Bukhara (present-day Tajikistan) all speak one of several mutually intelligible dialects of the Turkic language. It is in the matter of religion