A TALE OF TWO AUTONOMIES

The Alash Orda and the Turkestan Autonomy were proclaimed by groups who had emerged during the Tsarist period, sharing many things in common with thinkers in other Muslim societies (and the colonized world at large) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like their contemporaries, they were also trying to make sense of why they had been colonized. One group, who came to be known as Muslim modernists, offered an answer. They argued that Muslims needed to acquire knowledge of the modern sciences, technologies, and skills that had made Europeans so powerful. Beyond this broader orientation, the issues that different Muslim modernists faced varied widely and were specific to their local contexts.

In the Russian Empire, Muslim modernism focused specifically on reforming primary education, championing the ‘new method’ known as usul-i jadid, a phonetic approach to literacy that they believed would open the door to modern knowledge and learning. And so, the new-method school gave the movement its name: Jadidism.

For the Jadids, progress and civilization were universal phenomena that were not only achievable by all societies but also necessary for all. Those societies that fell behind because of 'negligence and ignorance' were conquered and marginalized. With political organization not being possible in the Russian Empire, the Jadids focused their critique on Muslim society itself. As Munavvar Qori Abdurashidxonov1¹Munavvar Qori Abdurashidxonovwas a leading figure of Jadidism in Central Asia, a reformer and educator from Tashkent. He established some of the first new-method schools in the region and wrote widely on the importance of modern education for Muslim society. wrote in 1906, 'All aspects of our existence are in need of reform.' This included the reform of customary religious practices, the inculcation of new forms of sociability through the establishment of benevolent societies, the cultivation of new literary genres and of theatre.

The Jadids also argued for change in the position of women, who should receive education to allow them to become 'better mothers and better members of the community’. This emphasis on women’s education was part of a broader vision in which the Jadids saw the entire community as needing to be uplifted and roused from its slumber of ignorance and heedlessness to take its rightful place in the world, a goal the Jadids often expressed through the metaphor of 'awakening'.

The most significant Jadid figures in Turkestan, such as Munavvar Qori, Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy, and Abdurauf Fitrat, were deeply rooted in Islamic learning. Their main interlocutors were other Muslim intellectuals from Tatarstan, the Caucasus, and the Ottoman Empire. They were fascinated by modernity and looked positively upon those countries—Russia, European states, Japan—who had achieved progress by cultivating knowledge. Fitrat made a British scholar the protagonist in one of his first political tracts, A Debate between a Bukharan Mudarris and a European (1911), in which the European out-argues a conservative Bukharan scholar and shows him the necessity of acquiring modern knowledge.

The Alash movement, on the other hand, emerged in somewhat different circumstances. Like the Jadids, its members were deeply concerned with improving the condition of their people, and the idea of ‘awakening’ was central to their vision. In fact, Mirjaqyp Dulatuly’s poem 'Oyan Qazaq!' (‘Wake up, Kazakh!’) was one of the most significant pieces of the new Kazakh literature that emerged in the early twentieth century.

At the same time, most of the leaders of Alash had Russian education and were intimately familiar with Russian politics. The most pressing question for them was settler colonialism—the settlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants on Kazakh lands that the Russian empire considered superfluous to Kazakh needs. Rosy images of Europeans were less useful to them. The hope was to ameliorate the legal disabilities under which the Kazakhs, designated as inorodtsy2²Inorodtsywas a legal classification in the Russian Empire that designated non-Slavic, predominantly indigenous populations of Siberia, Central Asia, and other regions, subjecting them to separate administrative rules and restrictions., existed in the Russian Empire. Yet no political organization was possible under the Tsarist regime.

The abdication of Nicholas II on 15 March 1917 and the subsequent end of the Romanov dynasty gave rise to feelings of immense hope and energy across the Russian Empire. For the non-Russian peoples of the empire, it was a moment of liberation and a chance to renegotiate their place in a new Russia. The public’s enthusiasm was palpable. In Tashkent, the poet Sirojiddin Makhdum Sidqiy published a long poem celebrating the 'new freedom’. In a short prose preface, he rhapsodized:

The long poem that followed had a refrain: 'Long live the just new government that gave liberty to us helpless subjects.'

At around the same time, members of the Kazakh intelligentsia also enthused:

For both the Jadids and the Alash, this was an opportunity to put into action their hopes for the betterment of their societies, especially as everything seemed possible in that moment. In a series of sweeping legislative acts, the Provisional Government abolished all legal distinctions between citizens on the basis of rank, religion, sex, or nationality, and granted every citizen, including women, over the age of twenty the right to vote. Central Asians had become full and equal citizens of the new Russia.

The cities of Turkestan witnessed a rising fever for organization as all sorts of societies—cultural, political, religious—began to emerge. Despite the economic hardship, a number of newspapers began to be published. Activists formed an organization called the Shuroi Islomiya (Muslim Council) to serve as an umbrella for this new political activism. In the middle of April 1917, barely six weeks after the revolution, the Shuroi Islomiya organized the First Congress of Muslims of Turkestan in Tashkent. Like all congresses being held across the former empire, this did not have formal requirements for election or secondment. Various organizations nominated delegates, while others appeared on their own. After considerable debate, the congress voted in favor of broad territorial autonomy for Turkestan in a democratic federative republic for Russia.

We should note that the conference spoke in the name of the tsarist province of Turkestan, which included many Kazakhs but did not include Bukhara or Khiva. The autonomy would be territorial, with the people of Turkestan left to decide the fate of the region through democratic process.

A parallel movement emerged among the Kazakhs with a geographical focus farther to the north. A series of local conferences culminated in the First All-Kazakh Congress in Orenburg in July 1917, which drew delegates from all Kazakh communities of Central Asia, including those from Turkestan. That congress resolved that 'Russia should be democratic parliamentary republic' and that 'the Kazakh oblasts should receive territorial-national autonomy’. This position was quite close to that of the Turkestan congress, even though the Kazakh resolution did not state explicitly that Russia should become a federal republic. The 'Kazakh oblasts' could be in the Steppe Krai3³The Steppe Kraiwas an administrative territory established by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, encompassing much of modern-day northern and central Kazakhstan, and served as a key region for imperial settlement and control over the Kazakh steppes. or in Turkestan. The congress also stressed the importance of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, that great hope of the revolution, and approved a list of individuals who should be included as candidates.

The euphoria of the February revolution led men—and they were almost all men—to take on multiple obligations and tried to fulfill them all at the same time. Today, we are amazed at the sheer energy these men had, as they went from one gathering to another, from one city to another, juggling countless roles along the way.

For example, Mustafa Shokay was in Petrograd, working for the Muslim Fraction of the 4th Duma. Born into a family of Kazakh aristocracy in аn auliAul means ‘village’ in Kazakh, and typically encompasses 100–200 yurts. near Perovsk (now Qyzylorda), Shokay attended the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, and he took the first train he could find to Tashkent. As did Ahmet Zeki Velidi, a young Bashkir academic who was deeply invested in Turkic unity. They both played important roles at the First Congress of Muslims of Turkestan.

The revolution had thrown open the political arena to former inorodtsy, but it had not broadened the linguistic scope of power. As a result, to make themselves heard, the inorodtsy had to speak in Russian. In Turkestan, most Jadids were not fluent enough in Russian to adequately engage in this new politics. Therefore, a leading part in the new politics, when faced with the state, was taken by a few Turkestanis with Russian education, such as Ubaydulla Khojaev and Toshpulatbek Norbutabekov. Turkestani Kazakhs such as Shokay also played a very important role. And thus, we should think of Turkestani politics in 1917 as an alliance between the Jadids and other Muslims fluent in Russian but who had earlier played little part in Jadid-style cultural reform.

Turkestan’s Kazakhs were also prominent in Alash politics. The All-Kazakh conference in July 1917 approved a list of candidates for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, including Shokay and Sanjar Asfendiyarov, Kazakh figures prominent in Turkestani politics. The list also included a number of people who were not Kazakh but were close friends of the Kazakh movement, such as Ubaydulla Khojayev and Vadim Chaikin.

However, the optimistic resolutions of the Turkestan and All-Kazakh congresses about autonomy came to nothing. By the autumn of that year, law and order had deteriorated all across the former Russian empire. The revolution had turned into state collapse.

The authority of the central government in Turkestan deteriorated very quickly. On 31 March, the Tashkent sovietiA soviet, originating from the Russian word for ‘council’, was a grassroots workers' or soldiers' council that emerged as a key revolutionary body during the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, later becoming the foundational political unit of the Soviet government. arrested Aleksey Kuropatkin, the governor-general, and deported him to Petrograd. The Provisional Government appointed a Turkestan Committee to be its representative in Turkestan, and four of its nine members were Muslim. They included Alikhan Bökeikhanov from the Semipalatinsk Oblast in the Steppe Krai and Muhametjan Tynyshbayev from Semirech’e (Jetisu), both prominent leaders of the Alash movement.

The committee, however, proved to be quite ineffective, especially since it was faced with implacable opposition from the Tashkent soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, which represented only Russians and other Europeans. As a result, Turkestan was cut off from Petrograd and Moscow for the next two and a half years until the Red Army re-annexed Turkestan in the winter of 1919–20. In the meantime, local developments took their own course. Indeed, all of Central Asia experienced a colonial revolution in which Russians, organized in soviets, took power in the name of a proletariat that did not exist in Central Asia.

In Tashkent, the local soviet attempted a putsch, a coup, as early as September. While that was put down by military forces sent from the center, the Tashkent soviet finally took power by 1 November after pitched battles with army units loyal to the Provisional Government. It subsequently declared that since 'there are no proletarian class organizations among the native population,' the 'inclusion of Muslims in the organ of supreme regional power is unacceptable at the present time.' Similarly, Soviets representing Russians and/or Ukrainians took power in one city after another in the Steppe Krai.

In the meantime, the Bolsheviks seized control at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, declaring that they ruled on behalf of the soviets. At that point, they were condemned by all other socialist parties for having usurped the revolution. It is important, then, to remind ourselves, that the Russian revolution and Soviet power were not identical. In fact, the Soviet takeover was very much a betrayal of the promises of the February Revolution.

Faced with this treachery, the Shuroi Islomiya organized another Muslim conference, this time in Kokand, some distance away from Tashkent, which proclaimed Turkestan autonomous on the basis of the promises of the February Revolution:

Turkestan was to remain part of the Russian state but enjoy wide territorial autonomy. The Turkestan Autonomy envisaged a regional constituent assembly in which one third of the seats would be guaranteed for non-Muslims, even though the latter’s share of the population was much smaller. The twelve-member Turkestan Provisional Government included Muslim activists from across the spectrum, except the religious leaders of Tashkent, who had been implacably opposed to the Shuroi Islomiya. Its first prime minister was Mukhametjan Tynyshbayev4⁴Mukhametjan Tynyshbayevwas a prominent Kazakh engineer, statesman, and key figure in the Alash autonomy movement who later contributed to early Soviet administrative structures in Central Asia.. However, he soon left for Orenburg, where the Alash movement had organized the Second All-Kazakh Congress in December 1917. He was replaced by Mustafa Shokay, another Kazakh.

The Second All-Kazakh Congress also proclaimed national autonomy for the oblasts inhabited by Kazakhs, who were to join the Russian Federation as equals alongside other nationalities. The congress voted for the formation of an executive body for this government called Alash Orda, and it guaranteed representation for non-Kazakh inhabitants of the republic: ten of the twenty-five seats in the governing council were promised to non-Kazakhs. The government was headed by Alikhan Bukeikhanov5⁵Alikhan Bukeikhanovwas a Kazakh statesman and intellectual who founded the Alash political movement and served as the first prime minister of the Alash Autonomy., while Shokay also participated in the congress

The ideals of both these autonomies derived from the February Revolution and the liberal decrees of the Russian Provisional Government and were pitched against the usurpation of the revolution by the Bolsheviks. They were both driven by a group of people with close ties to each other. Their basic premise was the same—to keep alive the promise of the February Revolution against the betrayal of the Bolsheviks. Yet, despite their convictions, both were equally unprepared for the challenges ahead.

Neither the Shuroi Islomiya nor the Alash movement had contemplated full sovereignty in 1917 (nor had any other national group in the Russian Empire, except perhaps the Poles, whose lands were under German occupation). This was mostly due to the sober realization that all the power in Central Asia lay with the Russians: they had the guns and the force. Further, there were no tuzemtsy, or ‘natives’, in the imperial administration. There would have been no one to staff the bureaucracy of an independent state. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Turkestan Autonomy, Shokay, then in exile in Europe, wrote that no one at the congress in Kokand supported the idea of outright independence because an independent Turkestan would not have had a military or a bureaucracy. The idea of declaring independence was a nonstarter in 1917.

The Tashkent soviet saw the Turkestan Autonomy simply as an avantiura, a reckless gamble by the national bourgeoisie that was meant to dupe the local population and oppose the revolution started by the Russians. From the very beginning, its tone was derisory, and as soon as it could muster the resources, it sent a military expedition to Kokand. The Turkestan Autonomy had almost no military resources, and the Kokand soviet in the new city had not submitted to it. The Red Guards from Tashkent wreaked havoc on the city, eliminating the autonomous government but also destroying a large part of the old city in the process. The Tashkent soviet, which pretended to rule all of Turkestan, then declared all the members of the Turkestan Autonomy to be outlaws and arrested all those that it could.

Alash Orda, on the other hand, lasted longer than its Turkestani counterpart. This was largely because unlike Tashkent, there was no established centre of Soviet power on the Kazakh steppe. European-dominated soviets took power in town after town, but their authority was always contested by various White forces6⁶The White forcesor the Whites, were a loose coalition of former tsarist officers, monarchists, liberals, and other factions who lacked a unified ideology but were bound together by their shared opposition to the Bolsheviks.. This circumstance allowed Alash Orda to maneuver the situation in a way that was not possible for the autonomous government in Turkestan.

Alash Orda’s claims to rule were challenged by both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and its ability to govern remained tenuous at best. During 1918 and 1919, it raised a militia and fought alongside the Whites but was forced to negotiate with the Bolsheviks as they emerged victorious in the steppe over the course of 1919. By January 1920, the Bolsheviks had formed a tactical alliance with Alash Orda, whereby Alash organizations were incorporated into soviet and party units, and prominent Alash leaders acquired positions within the Soviet framework. In October 1920, the Soviets proclaimed a Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a territorially autonomous part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR)7⁷The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic(RSFSR) was the largest and dominant constituent republic of the Soviet Union, serving as its political and economic core from the USSR's formation in 1922 until the union's dissolution in 1991..

Something similar had happened in Turkestan in 1918. The central government in Moscow was not fond of how Tashkent’s Russian communists were behaving. It sent Petr Kobozev as a plenipotentiary envoy to Tashkent, who managed to force new elections on the Tashkent soviet and force the entry of Muslims into the new organs of power.

In April 1918, the fifth Congress of Soviets of Turkestan declared Turkestan an autonomous Soviet republic within a socialist Russia, a Soviet equivalent to the autonomy proclaimed in Kokand in November. By 1920, then, both Alash Orda and the Turkestan Autonomy had been replaced by their Soviet equivalents. This was the final destruction of the hopes of 1917.