THE KAZAKH STEPPE: FROM RUSSIAN EMPIRE TO SOVIET UTOPIA

The famine was a direct consequence of the policy of war communism that had devastated the rural economy during the three years of the civil war. Combined with the devastation of agricultural lands during the fighting and against the background of a terrible drought, this led to dire consequences for the population of vast areas, including the territory of the KASSR.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that Soviet Russia, after the civil war and the policy of war communism, had virtually no resources left to fight hunger. At the same time, the country was internationally isolated. This isolation was due to the ideology of the Bolsheviks, which undoubtedly made it difficult to establish contacts with the outside capitalist world.

However, in Soviet Russia at that time, the authorities did not hide the extent of the disaster. This is what made the situation in the early 1920s different from the severe famine of 1931-1933. In 1921, despite ideological restrictions, the Bolsheviks immediately turned to Western countries for aid. A paper published in the United States in 1927 said that "they (the Bolsheviks) were forced to ask the world, the world of capitalists, exploiters and bourgeois hypocrites, for help." In August 1921, Soviet representatives signed an agreement with the American Relief Administration (ARA) in Riga. As a result, food supplies began to arrive from the United States and were distributed throughout the country, including through the structures of this American organization.

There was another difference between the situation in 1921 and the famine of the early 1930s. The Soviet authorities not only turned to Western countries for help, but also created their own famine relief structure, Pomgol ("Relief for Starving"). In the Kazakh ASSR, for example, 1.7 million people were starving, of whom 161,000 received food through Pomgol and nearly 694,000 through ARA. Nevertheless, as a result of the famine, the population of Kazakhstan was reduced by about one million people.

In addition to famine, the policy of war communism led to numerous uprisings, which, as in the case of the Tambov uprising of 1920-1921, actually assumed the dimensions of a peasant war. Just as Alexander Suvorov had once commanded the defeat of Yemelyan Pugachev at the head of the regular army, the Tambov uprising was crushed by the Red Army under its most capable commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, using chemical weapons, artillery, and air power. In March 1921, Kronstadt, a naval fortress guarding the approaches to Petrograd, rebelled. Although the Bolsheviks were able to deal with this uprising, they made a sharp reversal in their economic policies. This was also different from the situation in the early 1930s. The Bolsheviks' power had not yet lost its flexibility, or perhaps it had simply not accumulated enough rigidity.

The 10th Congress of the RCP(b), the same one at which Safarov and Stalin declared war on the "colonizing kulaks" in Turkestan, met in March 1921, just as the Kronstadt uprising was under way. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was proclaimed. The main point was to replace the prodrazverstka, in which up to 70% of grain or livestock was forcibly confiscated, with a prodnalog (agricultural tax) of about 30%. The domestic food market was also restored. The country stabilized, consumption began to grow, and trade was established. For the first time since the outbreak of World War I in 1914, almost eight years later, came the first quiet and relatively comfortable years, which soon turned out to be the last before the transition to radical Stalinist reforms in the second half of the 1920s. The next time the country would catch its breath was in the 1970s.

In December 1922, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic signed a treaty establishing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Nothing changed in the status of the KASSR and Turkestan, both republics remained within the RSFSR, but now they were one step below their former position.

In principle, another option advocated by Joseph Stalin could have been realized. According to Stalin, all the republics should have been part of the RSFSR. However, this did not happen because of the position of Vladimir Lenin, who insisted on a union treaty with the right to leave the USSR. According to Lenin's logic, the power he was building was not to become the power of the Russian people again (at least in theory). It was the power of an idea that dominated all things national, including Russian, and was exercised by the forces of the Party and the Soviet authorities under its control. The party thus remained the vertical structure that permeated the autonomies and ensured the unity of the vast country while outwardly respecting the rights of nations to self-determination.

Mikhail Reiman reasonably noted that “contrary to the right to self-determination was the structure of the ruling party, which sought to create territorial organizations while resolutely rejecting the national principle in party building. This put the representatives of non-Russian nationalities at a disadvantage — for the very reason that the representatives of the Russian people usually had a significant numerical advantage in the party organizations of the autonomies.” Thus, according to the materials of a closed session of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) in 1923, “the number of Kazakhs in the party organization of the KASSR ranged between 6 and 12%, while in the population it was more than 50%.”

In April 1923, the 12th Congress of the RCP(b) was held in Moscow, where much attention was paid to national policy. In particular, this congress defined a line of struggle against the remnants of "Great Russian chauvinism and local nationalism," which made it possible, if necessary, to exacerbate the contradictions between the Russian and indigenous populations, to shake up the local élites, in short, to open up the possibility of Moscow's constant intervention as arbiter in the life of the republics. In general, the Bolshevik variant of "divide and rule" required constant campaigns launched from the center to keep local administrators in perpetual tension and mutual competition. After the peak of such campaigns, a "struggle against occasional overzealousness" was usually announced, allowing the winners of the intra-élite scramble to settle down and balance the situation.

In 1923, the USSR set itself the task of "rootification" of the state apparatus. Rootification meant increasing the share of national cadres in the administrative system of the national republics. The Bolsheviks' creation of this neologism — "rootification" — became part of their decolonization rhetoric, which consistently supported the claims of the local population and placed them above the interests of “outside elements.”

In the KASSR, this led to a struggle by the Kazakh communist élite against the domination of the "Orenburgers," whom Saken Seyfullin, chairman of the KASSR Sovnarkom, even called "the evil of Kirghizia" in one of his complaints to Moscow. Turar Ryskulov, in turn, called them “an organ of the dictatorship of the Orenburgers over Kirghizia.” The essence of the accusations was that the "Orenburgers" were preoccupied with their own region, did not hand over to the Kazakhs the lands stolen from them by the "kulaks," and were in no hurry to train new personnel from among the Kazakhs for the needs of autonomy. In their justification, the Orenburgers referred to the explosive situation in the Russian communities and the low level of education of the Kazakh population.

For example, the party leader of Kazakhstan, Georgy Korostelev, wrote to Moscow that “after receiving the title of Kyrgyz commissar, such a person would go to the steppes and sit there for 5-6 months without ever visiting his own commissariat.” Rhetorical exaggeration aside, it is easy to believe that Kazakhs did not really aspire to a bureaucratic career. In fact, the situation that was characteristic of the Volosts under the Empire or during the February Revolution was reproduced. Kazakh society retained its traditional way of life, preferring to minimize any interaction with the Russian state. "The nomads were, in effect, a ‘state within a state,’ shielded from the direct influence of the Soviet authorities."

But in the empire the Bolsheviks were building, no one could be left to their own devices. The Soviet state, gripped by the idea of "social engineering," sought to penetrate the social structure of Kazakh society and change it forever.

Another nexus of intra-élite tension was formed over the status of the Kazakh Republic. For example, the GPU (State Political Directorate) reported that in March 1923 a meeting of natives of the KASSR with representatives of the Bashkir, Tatar, and Turkestan republics on the formation of the USSR was held in Moscow in the hotel room of Saken Seyfullin, chairman of the Kazakh SNK (Commissariat). Seyfullin, Mendeshev, Asylbekov, Murzagaliev, and Mukhtarov from the KASSR participated in the meeting. The main speaker was the Tatar political figure Mirsaid Sultan-Galiyev. Shortly after the meeting, he was arrested and expelled from the party.

Sultan-Galiyev noted in his speech that one should strive to join the USSR because "the position of the other autonomous republics will be reduced to that of a governorate." He was echoed by Abdollah Asylbekov, a member of the Kyrgyz Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b): "We must by all means gain a place in the Union, and if we don't, we should give up everything and let them liquidate any autonomy, because nothing will work out anyway." The authors of the report noted that the chairman of the CEC of the KASSR, Mendezhev, behaved with restraint, and Seyfullin "did not come out at all."

Nevertheless, Moscow would not elevate Kazakhstan to the status of a union republic until 1936. One reason for this was that the process of creating an all-Kazakh national-territorial autonomy had not yet been completed, although, as we recall, the transfer of the Kazakh regions of Turkestan to the new autonomy had been discussed as early as July 1920. However, the "Orenburgers" were removed from the administration of the autonomy in October 1924, and in February 1925 the capital was moved from Russian Orenburg to Kazakh Ak-Mechet (soon renamed Kyzylorda), located on the Orenburg-Tashkent railroad. Interestingly, one of the decisive votes for the choice of Ak-Mechet was cast by Nikolai Yezhov, the future architect of Stalin's mass repressions and then a staff member of the Kyrgyz Regional Committee of the All-Union CP(b). Following the transfer of the capital, the Orenburg Oblast was removed from the KASSR in April 1925 and became part of the RSFSR.

The detachment of the Orenburg Oblast resulted in the loss of the territorial border with the Bashkir ASSR. Although the border was nominal, it was of great importance to Moscow. They could not help but remember Zeki Velidi Togan's proposal to create a Bashkir-Kazakh republic. Moreover, Moscow also took into account the ideas of the unity of Turkic-speaking peoples, which had been very popular since 1917. The Orenburg region, with its predominantly Russian population, actually divided two national autonomies — Bashkir and Kazakh. In this case, it is appropriate to draw an analogy with the creation of the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic. There is an opinion of Yuri Zhukov on this matter. He believed that its creation was connected with Moscow's desire "to divide in two the vast Cossack zone stretching from the Don to the Volga and further to the Urals by means of their [the Kalmyks'] autonomy." Continuing this analogy, in the case of the Orenburg Oblast, it turned out that it was cutting through a potentially huge zone of Turkic-speaking peoples. In this case, Orenburg actually separated not only the Bashkir ASSR from the Kazakh ASSR, but also the Volga Tatars from the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia.

On June 12, 1924, on the eve of the ousting of the "Orenburgers," the Central Committee of the RCP(b) adopted a decision on the implementation of national-state demarcation in Central Asia, which meant the creation of national-territorial autonomies in place of Soviet Turkestan. On October 24, 1924, the 2nd session of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR adopted the corresponding decision. In February 1925, the constituent congresses of the Soviets of the Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics were held. The Tajik Autonomous Soviet Republic was initially established as part of the Uzbek SSR. In May 1925, the 3rd Congress of Soviets of the USSR incorporated the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs into the USSR.

In April 1925, the 5th Congress of Soviets of the Kazakh ASSR formalized the adoption of new territories from the former Turkestan with the majority Kazakh population - these were Sirdaryo Oblast, the northern part of Semirechye Oblast and 6 volosts of Samarkand Oblast. The Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast was also included in the KASSR. In general, the majority of Kazakhs now found themselves in a national-territorial autonomy. At the same time, the southern part of the Semirechye Oblast became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast within the RSFSR. In June 1925, the Kyrgyz ASSR was renamed into the Kazakh ASSR, which gave back to our nation its historical name.

This increase in area in 1925 made the Kazakh ASSR the largest autonomy within the RSFSR. The withdrawal of the Orenburg Oblast significantly reduced the Russian community in Kazakhstan, although it remained the second largest. According to the 1926 census, the total population of the republic was 6,500,000, including 3,713,000 Kazakhs, 1,279,000 Russians, 860,000 Ukrainians, 213,000 Uzbeks, 118,000 Karakalpaks, and 51,000 Germans.

The transfer of the capital and the incorporation of Turkestan regions into the KASSR shifted the conditional center of gravity of Kazakh autonomy from the former border zone of interaction between the Kazakh steppe and Russia to the south, which meant that the KASSR moved closer to Central Asia, while its ties to the Russian regions of Siberia and the Urals weakened.

In addition, the processes of national and state separation in Central Asia led to the filling of the Kazakh section of the KASSR leadership with very active Kazakh communist politicians from among the former leadership of Turkestan. Of particular note is Sultanbek Khodzhanov, who was the first deputy of the Central Executive Committee of Turkestan in 1924. After the split, Khodzhanov became the second secretary of the Kazakh regional committee of the RCP(b). In addition to him, we can mention Uraz Dzhandosov, who worked in Turkestan as the head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda and was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan.

The arrival of the Turkestan Kazakhs changed the situation in the system of traditional relations in Kazakh society. Until 1924, the KASSR included territories inhabited mainly by Kazakhs of the Middle and Junior zhuz. Accordingly, the leadership of the KASSR was dominated by natives of these tribal structures of Kazakh society. In 1925, the KASSR included the territories inhabited mainly by Kazakhs of the Senior zhuz. Among the Turkestan communists were also natives of this zhuz, such as Turar Ryskulov and Uraz Zhandosov, and those who belonged to the Chingisids, such as Sanzhar Asfendiyarov. In addition, Sultanbek Khodzhanov was a representative of a separate group of Khojas. It is believed that this group originated from the Arab missionaries during the spread of Islam. Representatives of this group lived mainly in southern Kazakhstan.

The split in Central Asia was explained by the Bolsheviks' commitment to national-territorial autonomy. But it was not easy to create statehood on the national-territorial principle in Central Asia. Within the oases of Central Asia itself, many population groups clung to their own self-identification. These included sedentary settlers as well as nomads and semi-nomads. In particular, sedentary inhabitants could be identified by their territory of residence — the inhabitants of Bukhara, Ferghana, and Tashkent. The self-definition of many of them was connected, among other things, with the term "Sart." Finally, there were linguistic differences; for example, Sarts could be either Turkic-speaking or Iranian-speaking.

Nomads and semi-nomads, as well as those who had already settled in the oases, identified themselves by tribal affiliation. For example, the common name "Uzbeks" united a number of tribes - Ming, Mangyt, Kungrat, Yuz, Lokai, and some others. In addition, there were Turkic-speaking tribes in the region that were not considered Uzbeks. In particular, the Karluks and Kipchaks belonged to the groups that migrated to Central Asia either before the arrival of the nomadic Uzbek tribes, as the Karluks, or after them, as the Kipchaks. There were also groups of mixed origin, such as the very interesting Kurama group in the Tashkent oasis.

The statehood of the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara was connected with the dynasties of the respective Uzbek tribes. In Khiva these were the Kungrats, in Bukhara the Mangyts. In another important Central Asian state, the Khanate of Kokand, which existed in the 19th century, the local dynasty belonged to the Ming tribe. The territory of these khanates was inhabited by people from various Central Asian communities. In Khorezm, there were settled Uzbeks, nomadic Turkmens, Karakalpaks, Kazakhs of various tribes. In Bukhara, they were Iranian and Turkic-speaking Sarts, in the eastern mountainous part - highland Iranian-speaking communities. Nomadic tribes such as Lokai Uzbeks and Ersari Turkmens also lived there.

As a result, there were many different identities in Turkestan, both localized identities peculiar to a particular region and more general ones, such as Sarts or Uzbeks. In addition to the Turkic-speaking population of the settled oases, there were numerous Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpaks in the region. But all of these peoples occupied areas on the periphery of the central sedentary oases of Central Asia. The Turkmens lived in the desert and semi-desert areas between Khorezm and Iran. The Kyrgyz lived in the mountainous and foothill regions of eastern Central Asia. The Kazakhs roamed the north.

By 1920, there were three state entities in the region, far removed from the principle of national-territorial autonomy. These were Turkestan itself and two more formally independent republics - Bukhara and Khorezm. The latter were created in place of the former oriental despotic states and inherited their social and ethnic structure. Accordingly, with the presence of a number of ethnic groups, identities and individual tribes in these two republics, it would have been difficult to realize the concept of national-territorial autonomy. Turkestan, on the other hand, united many ethnicities and identities. It was a kind of mega-republic.

Thus, in Central Asia, the Bolsheviks had to deal with the creation of new nations, which was a prerequisite for the establishment of autonomies along national-territorial lines. Either way, Moscow found it preferable to deal with a number of republics and their competing élites rather than with a unified Turkestan and its leadership, which, it should be remembered, could claim a more significant role.

As early as 1920, the Bolsheviks rejected the ideas of Turar Ryskulov and local Jadids regarding the Turkic Republic and the Turkic Communist Party. Sultanbek Khodzhanov, who proposed the formation of a Central Asian federation along the lines of the Transcaucasian federation, which included Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, also put forward similar plans during the disengagement process. For Khodzhanov and his followers, this seemed more promising than the transition to the establishment of an autonomous and non-self-governing Kazakh republic within the RSFSR. Significantly, a 1958 work by a Soviet historian from Uzbekistan called this position "pan-Turkism."

However, Khodzhanov's idea did not only evoke pan-Turkist associations. It was questionable from an administrative point of view. Isaac Zelensky, who headed the demarcation commission and was the head of the Central Asian bureau of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, wrote in this connection: "To organize the management of economic life from Tashkent or Turkestan in the remote regions of Kyrgyzstan, bordering on Siberia and the Urals, with the existing lines of communication, is a hopeless business. The "two birds in the bush" of the future controversial benefits of the economic unification of Kyrgyzstan with the Central Asian republics should be preferred to the "one bird in the hand" of the cessation of national disputes in these republics. It is necessary to give the newly formed republics a chance to strengthen and understand themselves."

Zelensky repeated the official thesis that the demarcation was intended to stop "national disputes." In reality, as so often before, the Bolsheviks sought the opposite. To manage a society that Moscow does not fully understand, and Central Asia can be seen as such, it is always better to divide it into separate components and play them off against each other. In many ways, this is why national-state demarcation has left the region with so many potentially problematic border areas, and not just border areas.

For example, this is precisely the reason why practically all the republics in the neighborhood of the Uzbek SSR, which occupies a central and potentially dominant position in the region, have large Uzbek communities. At the same time, Uzbekistan itself has many representatives of the neighboring peoples. However, it is the numerous Uzbek diasporas in other republics, and now in independent states, that are potentially of great importance.

Even Tashkent was disputed. For the Kazakhs, Tashkent was important as the main urban center on the border between the settled areas of Central Asia and the Kazakh steppe. Until 1924, Tashkent also played an important role in Kazakh society as a major cultural center. At least in this sense, the KASSR was noticeably inferior to Turkestan. Many educated Kazakhs from the former Alash-Orda movement lived in Tashkent and were engaged in cultural and educational work, publishing magazines and writing books. In addition, Tashkent already had a university. In 1923, the first Central Asian university was established on the basis of the Turkestan University, where Kazakhs also studied. Therefore, it is natural that Tashkent was of great value to the KASSR as an important economic, political, and cultural center of a large region.

Because of these circumstances, Kazakh politicians in the Turkestan leadership fought vigorously for Tashkent to become the new capital of the KASSR. Since the rural areas around Tashkent were dominated by the Kazakh population and the Kuramas, former nomads whose identity had not yet been fully defined, this was seen as an important reason for incorporating the city into the KASSR.

The report of the deputy head of the organization and distribution department of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), Vladimir Cherny, written on October 13, 1924, is instructive: "The border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan is in the area of Tashkent, around which there is the greatest struggle: the Kyrgyz, who want to get Tashkent, justify their claims by the fact that around Tashkent, i.e. in Tashkent Uyezd, the majority of the population consists of Kyrgyz. To this end, large demonstrations took place in Tashkent a month ago." In June 1924, Otto Karklin, deputy chairman of the Central Asia Central Committee of the RCP(b), reported that Sultanbek Khodzhanov "passionately defended the transfer of Tashkent to Kazakhstan, since it "historically appears to be nothing more than an Uzbek and Sart colony in the territory of the Kyrgyz nomads" and "is of extremely decisive importance for the Kyrgyz population of Turkestan as its only cultural center," so that a formal separation of the city from Kazakhstan would contradict the principles of the Soviet authorities on the national question."

Another part of the Turkestani élite, however, wanted to keep Tashkent for the new Uzbek republic. In the Asian part of the city, the majority were from the traditionally settled peoples of Central Asia who spoke the Chagatai language.

In this case, the interests of the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow on the one hand and the Uzbek élite on the other coincided. Tashkent was the historical center of the imperial possessions in Central Asia, well able to balance the formerly independent Bukhara and Khiva. Moreover, in the early and mid-1920s, the Kazakh ASSR did not cause Moscow as much trouble as Central Asia, where an active war with local insurgents (called Basmachi) was going on. By 1924, the KASSR was already an internal Russian province, while Uzbekistan continued to open up to the south and east. This was probably the reason why the newly created Uzbek SSR immediately became part of the USSR, while the KASSR remained an autonomous republic within the RSFSR.

The struggle for territory and population during the period of national state demarcation could only lead to increased competition between the new republics and complicate their future relations. As Terry Martin wrote: "Drawing any national border creates ethnic conflict. The Soviet Union literally drew tens of thousands of national borders. As a result, every village, indeed every individual, had to declare an ethnic allegiance and fight to remain a national majority rather than a minority. It is difficult to conceive of any measure more likely to increase ethnic mobilization and ethnic conflict." This situation was particularly characteristic of Central Asia, because in some cases ethnic identification remained uncertain and because the majority of the population lived in ethnically non-homogeneous areas.

The new borders affected the interests of local communities, and this inevitably led to conflicts at all levels. Irina Morozova wrote that "1924-1926 was a period of endless and bitter clashes between Kyrgyz and Russians, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Tajiks, Kyrgyz and other Central Asian nationalities over land redistribution and watersheds."

Overall, the conflicts in the region undoubtedly made the task of external governance easier for Moscow. The division of Turkestan into separate republics, the emergence of conflicts between them over territory and population, and then the emergence of class-based contradictions within them was indeed a way of governing this complex region.