THE KAZAKH STEPPE: FROM EMPIRE TO UTOPIA

On the whole, all educated Kazakhs of that time had thoughts about the modernization of their society and were predominantly liberal, like the majority of educated people in Russia at that time. The Alash Movement, which was formed around the newspaper Qazaq in July 1917, gravitated towards the Russian right-liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet), which was involved in various parts of the Russian Provisional Government. The most prominent members of Alash were Akhmet Baitursynov, Alikhan Bökeikhanov, and Mirzhakup Dulatov, whom we have already mentioned.

However, the Kadets themselves were initially opposed to the federal structure of Russia, which also influenced the Alash movement’s hesitation in defending the idea of autonomy of Kazakh regions. Thus, the First All-Kazakh Congress in Orenburg in July 1917, influenced by the Kadet Bökeikhanov, did not make any statements about autonomy but only expressed the intention to do so. In particular, the idea was not to establish a unified Kazakh autonomy within the Russian republic, following the example of Ukraine, for example, where the Central Rada was formed at the same time. Instead, the focus was solely on autonomy for individual Kazakh regions, contingent upon ‘national differences and domestic conditions’. The liberal Bökeikhanov, although Chingisid by birth, was in no hurry to use the slogan of the revival of the Kazakh khanate. For him, it was unacceptable to return to archaic medieval practices or to use any monarchical associations as they seemed absolutely unmodern in the midst of the democratic revolution.

Nevertheless, a universal Kazakh symbol was chosen as the name of the movement. The word ‘Alash’ is a battle uran (war cry) that unites all Kazakhs, and its significance lies in the fact that each tribe had its own uran. The origin of the word is unclear. According to one legend, Alash is also the name of a common mythical ancestor. According to another, it is the name of Khan Akhmet, nicknamed ‘Alash’ or ‘Alacha’ from the Mongolian for ‘killer’ or ‘brave man’.iIt should be noted, however, that Khan Akhmet was not a Kazakh khan, but a khan of the Mongols, who were in competition with the Kazakhs Mukhamedjan Tynyshpayev, the commissar of the Provisional Government in the Semirechye Oblast, used to say, ‘Alash, Alash bolganda, Alasha khan bolganda’, which means that there was a time when all the Alash were united into one Alash nation and the khan was the Alash khan.

In any case, the liberals of the Alash Movement were inclined toward reaching a compromise with the Provisional Government. They saw the path to modernize Kazakh society through the formation of a kind of national-territorial autonomy and the implementation of the zemstvo model of local government. This meant rejecting strong leadership and focusing mainly on horizontal links between different political forces.

In November 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Üsh Jüz Party isimilar to the Russian Social Democrats in ideology was founded in Omsk. Its influence was basically limited to Omsk and neighboring Petropavlovsk. Üsh Jüz was founded by journalists Mukan Aitpenov and Kolbai Togusov. Aitpenov, in particular, did not believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat; he leaned towards being a somewhat spontaneous socialist and advocated for a Turkic-Tatar federation. However, for the Omsk Bolsheviks, the closeness between Aitpenov and Togusov was not so much ideological as it was rooted in their opposition to the Alash movement.

In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, Üsh Jüz was defeated. In the Petropavlovsk Uyezd, its candidate received votes in comparison to 1,100 of the Alash one. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks supported this party, which was thus able to expand its presence in the Kazakh regions. After the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in the spring of 1918 and the overthrowing of Soviet power in Siberia, the Üsh Jüz Party ceased to exist. Togusov was executed by the Whites. Aytpenov, who, by then, was the editor of the newspaper Kedei Sözi, died in 1920 under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

The Jadids were another political actor on the post-imperial map of Kazakhstan. In Russia, their emergence was associated with the activities of the Crimean Tatar thinker Ismail Gasprinsky (1851–1914). The name of the movement comes from the Arabic word jadid, meaning ‘new’. The Usul-i Jadid (translating to ‘new method’) movement emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the reform of the educational system within Muslim institutions. On a global scale, the Jadidis advocated the modernization of Islam, asserting that it was crucial to enhance the competitiveness of Muslim societies in light of the dominance of European states. They advocated for general progress for the benefit of society, for which education was essential. A characteristic example of the influence of their philosophy are the Young Turks, the Young Afghans in Turkey and Afghanistan at that time, and the Young Bukharians and Young Khivans in Russia, who all advocated for educational reforms in their regions. The Jadids opposed the conservative clergy who insisted on the unchangeability of tradition, including educational traditions. In general, they demanded the opening of the gates of ijtihad, or the independent reading and interpretation of the Koran. From a religious point of view, this meant abandoning the traditions that had been sanctified by the Hadith and the works of various Islamic scholars over centuries.

Another force that could potentially influence the situation in Kazakhstan was the pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic movement in Russia, formed in the wake of the February Revolution and centered in Kazan. Its most prominent propagandists were Tatar scholars and public figures such as Akhmedhadi Maksudi (1868–1941). But he was not the only one. The Ossetian Akhmed Tsalikov (1882–1928) became an active supporter of the consolidation of the Muslims of the former empire. He criticized the idea of a federal structure for Russia's Muslim regions: ‘Federalism can lead to stagnation in some Muslim localities, it will force individual nationalities to marinate in their own juices, will suspend the exchange of manpower and cultural values. The Muslim world of Russia will come apart at the seams. The general Muslim feeling and consciousness will be replaced by the patriotism of the Volga-Kazan, Crimean, Bashkir, Kyrgyz, Sart, Tajik, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, etc. communities.’

Kazakh representatives actively participated in the political self-organization of Muslims in Russia. For example, Jahansha Dosmukhamedov from western Kazakhstan and Valikhan TanacheviValikhan Tanachev (1882–1968), a Kazakh political figure and jurist. from the Bukey Horde were members of the executive committee of the All-Russian Muslim Council, which was founded by the Volga Tatars in May 1917. However, from the point of view of the representatives of both the Bashkirs and the Kazakhs, if a pan-Muslim identity was to be based on the language and culture of the Volga Tatars, their own peoples would be assimilated into a so-called pan-Muslim or pan-Turkic nation, leading to their disappearance. Thus, both Kazakh and Bashkir politicians, with few exceptions, opposed any form of common identity. In this sense, they saw autonomy as a chance to create a nation-state.

We have previously mentioned that there were some educated Kazakhs—about 120 people had a Russian higher education. Several thousand more had a secondary or incomplete secondary education, with several hundred taking part in two all-Kazakh congresses in Orenburg in 1917. The total number of educated Kazakhs was probably about 7–8,000 people, which was the number of readers of the newspaper Qazaq. However, with a population of more than four million people, these figures seem insignificant.

The main priority for the majority of the Kazakhs at that time was not modernization at all, but the preservation of their traditional way of life. Kazakh public figures of the revolutionary era can hardly be called liberals in the classic sense of the word. Their attitude to the issue of land ownership is quite indicative. In the context of the Western European model of democracy, the private ownership of land constituted a fundamental aspect of the entire system. Democracy historically began with private ownership of land, around which the relevant institutions regulating property relations were built.

In the early twentieth century in Eastern and Central Europe, private land ownership was what largely ensured the stability of liberal democratic institutions in their opposition to the Soviets as class-based organizations. Small private owners, especially in the countryside, formed the base of the mass support for anti-communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and other countries. But there was no such mass support for democratic institutions in Russia. The bulk of the population was, in the conventional sense, more spontaneously socialist, demanding the preservation of communal land ownership.

Kazakh society was also opposed to the private ownership of land. On the one hand, this was due to the fear of having land ceded to peasant settlers from Russia. This happened, for example, to the Bashkirs, who sold their communal lands for next to nothing in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the opposition was also determined by the tribal and inherently communal structure of traditional Kazakh society. Private land ownership destroyed the existing mechanisms of solidarity within the community or clan, which were responsible for regulating land relations within the nomadic economy.

Under these circumstances, in 1917, educated Kazakhs could not fully support the liberal program of private land ownership. This is why Alikhan Bökeikhanov, the most right-wing liberal Kazakh politician of the time, publicly announced his resignation from the Kadets, the main liberal party in Russia. The same explanation applies to Akhmet Baitursynov's eventual defection to the Bolsheviks in 1919. As Isabelle Ohayon wrote: ‘Baitursynov and some of his allies from the Alash-Orda Movement supported the idea that tribal interests resembled a functioning community in which the bay helped out their allies and poorest members, and that such traditional modes of solidarity pertained to a certain form of communism.’ In general, on the issue of land ownership, Alash-Orda was closer to the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the most popular Russian party of the time. As early as the summer of 1918, they announced the abolition of private land ownership in the Kazakh territories, but left the final decision on the land issue to the Constituent Assembly.

Thus, educated Kazakhs were unwilling to change the traditional way of life too radically. This was partly because they were still part of it, or at least connected to it, and partly because they had no real opportunity to do so. There were too few educated Kazakhs, and they had no institutions to rely on anything other than the structures of traditional society. In 1917, the Kazakh political movement was just beginning to address the organizational issues of creating the necessary institutions for an imagined autonomy. This was different from the situation of educated Indians in British India, who already had a system of local government, representative power, taxation, and an apparatus of state violence in the form of the police and army. After the collapse of the British Empire, these institutions formed the basis of Indian and Pakistani statehood.

Nevertheless, the desire to independently resolve issues important to Kazakh society became a unifying factor for almost all of its elements. Therefore, in 1917, the Kazakh political movement and its traditional society acted as a united front. Only through joint efforts was it possible to achieve better conditions for the Kazakhs within the framework of the liberal processes taking place in Russia. It was an inevitable compromise between the idea of modernization and the everyday life of a very conservative tribal society.

Evidence of this compromise can be found in the records of the Second All-Kazakh Congress held in Orenburg in December 1917. This was the one that declared Kazakhstan's autonomy under the Alash-Orda Provisional People's Council. For example, the introduction of zemstvos as a form of self-government was considered in the light of the internal contradictions that characterized the election of the chiefs of the volosts during the time of the Russian Empire. In court, Kazakh customary law (adat) was to be applied rather than Sharia or other norms. Most importantly, educated Kazakhs had to take into account the tribal structure of Kazakh society. Accordingly, clans and tribes were considered subjects of the political process in Kazakh autonomy. The materials of the Congress stated: ‘... to approve the desire of the Argyn clans to enter the united Kazakh-Kyrgyz Autonomy and to entrust the Kazakh-Kyrgyz Council with the appropriate communication with the authorities of the Turkestan Autonomy in this matter’.

In some ways, the situation in the Kazakh steppe resembled the general situation in Russia. While a part of the Russian urban population tended toward liberal and democratic values and adapted to them well enough, the majority, including urban workers, sought to preserve the rather archaic way of life of the conventional peasant community. The majority of the Kazakh population also seemed to want to preserve the rather archaic way of life of the tribal nomadic community. The educated Kazakhs, who created their own political institutions, had to reckon with these sentiments.

As long as the Provisional Government remained in power, its most loyal supporters from the Alash Movement enjoyed widespread support. It should be noted that during this period, there was no such conflict of interests within Kazakh society as occurred in the Turkestan Governorate in 1917 between the traditional elite and local modernizers from among the Jadids. During the July 1917 elections for the Tashkent City Duma, the Jadids were defeated by a political organization led by the local religious elite of the Ulama, known as Shuro-i Ulema, with Kazakh Serali Lapin at its helm. This was because the Ulama saw the Jadids as direct competitors for influence in the Muslim community of Russian Turkestan as well as in the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. The Ulama believed that the Jadids were trying to change the way of life of the Muslim community and thus deprive them of power.

In the Kazakh society of 1917, there were no such conflicts. On the contrary, with few exceptions, we can observe a unified position of all of Kazakh society. This was due, among other things, to the fact that the traditional society did not consider the idea of modernizing the Kazakh way of life as a realistic prospect. In fact, educated Kazakhs, unlike Turkestan Jadids, gave their traditional elite no cause for fear. In 1917, Kazakh society was united by a common challenge to the Russian Empire's policy of resettlement and the opportunity to exert some influence over it. People saw the Alash Movement as a force that had found a common language with the new government and could influence its policies.

The situation with the elections to the Constituent Assembly in the Turgai region in 1917 is quite revealing. It was here that the Kazakh Bolshevik Alibi Jangeldin ran for elections. It is significant that he was a native of these places and came from the Kipchak tribe, which formed a significant part of the population of the Turgai Oblast. And it was here, in 1916, that the revolt took place, in which the Kipchaks took an active part. Jangeldin was one of its leaders.

Although he was a Kipchak, a participant in the 1916 revolt, and a close friend of Amangeldy Imanov (one of the leaders of the revolt), Jangeldin's list received only forty-one votes in the election, while the Alash list received 54,897. Part of the reason for this is that Jangeldin was baptized before the 1917 revolution and took a new surname, Stepnov. The fact of Jangeldin's baptism could not but alienate the Turgai Kipchaks. But this is not the main reason.

The Alash list in Turgai won the overwhelming majority of votes of the Kazakh population, despite Bökeikhanov's negative, but well-known, attitude toward the recognized leaders of the revolt, as mentioned in the previous lecture. In Turgai, tens of thousands of residents took part in the 1916 revolt. It seems that the heroes of the revolt—Amangeldy Imanov, Abdugafar Zhanbosynov, and Alibi Jangeldin—theoretically had every chance of gaining electoral support at least among the Turgai Kipchaks. Moreover, unlike Imanov and Zhanbosynov, Jangeldin was educated. He managed to study at the history department of the Moscow Orthodox Theological Academy and made a trip around the world. Nevertheless, the traditional society in Turgai preferred the list of the Alash Party. After all, for the first time in the history of Kazakhs in the Russian Empire, their representatives, like Bökeikhanov in the Turgai Oblast, were a part of the power structure and had a chance to solve the problems of society using political methods.

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks in January 1918 and the outbreak of the civil war effectively ended the political life of the Alash Movement in its quest to join the structures of the more liberal Russian government through democratic elections. All the efforts by the Alash Movement and the Alash-Orda government to begin state-building during the civil war were, in fact, rearguard actions after a brief period of liberalization in Russia.

During the Russian Civil War, there were proponents of political dictatorship on both sides. On one side were the Bolsheviks with their ideas of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was, in fact, the dictatorship of a single political party centered in Moscow. On the other side were right-conservative politicians from the ranks of the White Movement, who were very critical of national movements.

The members of Alash-Orda tried to do the best they could under these difficult conditions, but for a traditional society, their attempts were not convincing. The main problem was that the traditional tribal society of the Kazakhs wanted to avoid state control in general, not only from the Russian authorities, but also from the Alash Movement. In fact, as long as traditional Russian power existed, it was in demand as a mediator. With its disappearance, though, it was difficult to justify the existence of such a government. Large tribal formations, which theoretically could have had a larger agenda, had not existed in the steppe for a long time. As for the tasks on a national scale formulated by the educated Kazakhs of Alash, they clearly went beyond the usual interests of local Kazakh communities.

In fact, after the failure of the liberal project in Russia, which essentially ended in January 1918, small Kazakh tribal structures focused on solving local problems. Many small volosts, which in organizational terms were clan units, structured their policies independently in accordance with the tactical situation in the areas where they lived. Their interest in solving general Kazakh problems also depended on the circumstances they found themselves in.

Naturally, this weakened Alash-Orda's position in any negotiations with any Russian power. Its representatives had no large power behind them. In the conditions of the civil war, force was the main argument in politics, which was clearly demonstrated by the Bashkirs.

The influence of the Bashkir political movement led by Zeki Velidi1¹Zeki Velidi(1890–1970), a leader of the Bashkir national liberation movement, publicist, and orientalist. He founded the Bashkir Autonomy in 1917 and, after a conflict with the Bolsheviks, went to Turkestan, where he played a role in organizing an insurgent movement against Soviet power. He emigrated in 1923 and passed away in Istanbul. Togan was determined by its ability to mobilize the military and material resources of the Bashkirs. Moreover, the Bashkir territories were in the center of the confrontation between the Red and White armies in the Urals: thus, they could have a great influence on the course of events. At the very least, the tactical situation on the line of confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the White forces in the Urals and Siberia depended on whom the Bashkir troops would support in the civil confrontation in Russia.

Kazakh society was larger in number and occupied a much larger territory than the Bashkirs, but the Kazakh political movement’s ability to mobilize the resources of the population was rather limited. The various branches of the Alash-Orda government faced considerable difficulties in taxation in their attempts to form government bodies. This created the greatest difficulties in the formation of the army (militia, as it was called). For example, at the height of the civil war in June 1918, Bökeikhanov signed a decree on the recruitment of militia. Each volost was to send thirty men with full equipment. However, malnutrition, a lack of clothes and shoes, sickness, and deprivation forced the men to flee from the detachments to their home villages. In Semipalatinsk, which was declared the capital of Alash-Orda at the Second All-Kazakh Congress, 1,200 militiamen gathered, but due to the lack of weapons and funds required for maintenance, the Alash-Orda was forced to disband the conscripts. As a result, the government did not have any substantial military formations that could play an independent role. In the future, they would be under the command of the various White armies and dependent on their supplies.

Thus, after 1918, traditional Kazakh society no longer believed in the possibility of integrating Kazakh representatives into the Russian government as part of the liberalization process, which had seemed quite realistic in 1917. Accordingly, the political authority of educated Kazakhs, who, in 1917, were considered influential intermediaries between the new Russian authorities, declined. At the same time, relatively small Kazakh clans sought to avoid new obligations in the chaos of the civil war. Taxation and mobilization into the army of the Alash-Orda government were often perceived by them as superfluous and unnecessary obligations. In practice, this meant that the fate of the Kazakh people in the near future would be decided by other forces, based on their own ideas of the proper world order.