THE KAZAKH STEPPE: FROM EMPIRE TO UTOPIA

With the gradual decline of the authority of the khans came the erosion of large estates. In earlier times, the owners of large herds of cattle were usually representatives of the Chingisid aristocracy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were no more large herds owned by individuals. Cattle herds were at the disposal of Kazakh clan communities, which made it very difficult to form a rural cattle-breeding aristocracy. Kazakh society lacked two important conditions for that to happen. First, there was no private ownership of land as it was all communally owned. Second, the use of hired labor was limited by kinship relations within the clan community.

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, there was no large capital in the steppe. The main economic centers were in the Russian cities, and representatives of local capital—mainly merchants and some industrialists—lived here. These were mainly Russian and Tatar businessmen. The latter controlled all the trade in the steppe regions.

Obviously, the virtual absence of large and medium-sized Kazakh capital, or investment, did not facilitate any change. Under normal conditions, capital could theoretically be invested in infrastructure construction, education, and healthcare—this was typical of British India. It is clear that in this context the interest of the Russian population was to prioritize Russian commercial capital. The Tatar trade capital in the Kazakh steppe invested more in religious issues, including education, but for a relatively limited group of people.

Overall, the economic opportunities of the traditional Kazakh elite had diminished significantly by the beginning of the twentieth century. Among other things, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the loss of income from the transit trade between Russia and Central Asia, which had been an important part of the Kazakh elite's income during the period of independence. At the same time, the cessation of the wars typical of the eighteenth century led to an increase in the Kazakh nomadic population, which, in turn, contributed to an increase in domestic consumption.

All these factors led to a decline in livestock trade in Russian markets, which had been an important part of the steppe economy since the mid-1700s and for most of the nineteenth century. Under pressure from the Russian settlers, more and more livestock began to be used for the internal consumption of the growing population as pastures became increasingly scarce.

In general, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Kazakh society saw a significant decrease in the numbers and influence of the local traditional elite. The most important figure in the Kazakh elite was the head of the volost. But the volosts themselves were too small for the heads to play a significant role outside them. In addition, the influence of the heads was weakened by intense inter-clan rivalry.

During the 1916 uprising, which was a fundamental political event in the early twentieth century for Kazakh society, its most prominent leaders were not connected with the traditional elites of Kazakh tribes.1¹The 1916 Uprising was a revolt of the peoples of Russian Central Asia against Russian settlers and imperial rule. It was triggered by labor mobilization during World War I. In particular, in the Turgai Oblast, the leaders of the uprising were Amangeldy Imanov and Abdulgafar Janbosynov, who came from the Kipchak tribe but were not part of its traditional elite.

At the same time, the Turgai rebels themselves were organized on the basis of the tribal system. Thus, those of them who belonged to volosts composed of Kipchak clans chose Janbosynov as their khan, while the rebels from among the local Argyns chose Sholak Ospanov, who was also unrelated to the traditional elite. In the harsh conditions of the 1916 uprising, they stood out for their personal qualities, and can even be called field commanders of their time. But the traditional elite was quite critical of them, calling them ‘horse thieves’.

A letter dated 23 May 1917 from Alikhan Bökeikhanov, then the government commissioner for the Turgai Oblast, to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Provisional Government is quite revealing. ‘The punitive expedition [that is General Lavrentyev's detachment] devastated the peaceful part of the uezd, which was plundered by the rebels led by professional horse thieves Abdulgafar and Amangeldy. I summoned the old men of both sides to the city of Turgai and proposed that they settle their civil claims peacefully. Abdulgafar and Amangeldy, unwilling to attend the meeting, left the uezd. The pacification of the uezd requires their arrest.’ In this context, the ‘old men’ convened by Bökeikhanov represented the traditional tribal elite.

Bökeikhanov's attitude is not surprising as the majority of educated Kazakhs were close to traditional society and its elite circles. Of course, the traditional elite as a whole could not have a positive attitude toward Amangeldy Imanov and Abdugafar Janbosynov when Bökeikhanov himself pointed out their reputation as ‘horse thieves’ or people inclined to violate the order existing in traditional society.

In fact, the rebels often targeted the local elite, accusing them of misconduct in the process of drawing up the lists of those to be mobilized for work in the rear. In general, the Kazakh tribal elite had long favored the local Russian authorities, interacting with whom played an important role in securing their position in Kazakh society. They acted as an influential intermediary in relations between Kazakh society and the Russian administration.

In this sense, the 1916 uprising was a clear indication of the crisis of the Kazakh authorities in this area. Their influence had already been significantly weakened in the previous decade by their inability to stop the resettlement of peasants from European Russia and the associated massive expropriation of land from the Kazakh population. In this sense, the Kazakh tribal elite found themselves in the difficult position of choosing between the interests of society and the land policies of the Russian authorities. According to Martha Olcott, ‘[t]he power of the clan leaders declined during colonial rule, largely because they could not perform their primary duty—the allocation of pastureland.’

Kazakh society found itself in a situation that could be called the traditionalism trap. The essentially old-fashioned traditional nomadic way of life was under increasing pressure from Russia, which had claimed the nomads’ main asset—land—without offering an alternative.

If Russia offered an alternative to traditionalism—which could only mean modernization, as the British did in colonial India—it would imply a change in the Kazakhs' way of life. However, the refusal to modernize traditional societies dependent on Russia, a typical feature of Russian colonial policy, in this specific case meant a gradual reduction of the space occupied by the Kazakhs without fundamentally changing their way of life.

In addition to the British model in India, there was another model of colonialism that was implemented in North America and Australia, for example. This was characterized by the gradual removal of societies with a traditional way of life into reservations. There, in principle, their way of life could be preserved for a very long time, while a kind of replica of normal European society, with all its institutions, including private land ownership, was created in the vacated areas. In this case, the demand for land was the main incentive for European colonization. This was facilitated, of course, by the insecure status of land in the traditional societies of North America and Australia. The lack of modern institutions in these societies, including those regulating the right to land, provided Europeans with the excuse to push them to the periphery, where they could maintain their traditional way of life.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian economy had new priorities, which were most vividly expressed in the agrarian policy of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who pushed the resettlement of the densely populated governorates in central Russia and the development of land in the Asian part of the empire.2²The Stolypin Reforms spearheaded by Petr Stolypin (1862–1911), who served as the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire from 1906 to 1911, aimed to destroy the peasant commune and establish individual farms. One key method involved resettling peasants from densely populated central provinces to the periphery. The nomadic economy of the Kazakhs began to look archaic in the eyes of the Russian authorities. It used up too much land that could be used for the interests of Russian agricultural production instead.

Kazakh society was instinctively focused on preserving its traditionalism and habitual way of life, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, this was no longer possible. As land dispossession increased, nomadic society was able to retain only those lands that were deemed unsuitable for agricultural production by Russian settlers.

The fate of the nomadic peoples was in the hands of the authorities of the agrarian states, who had no specific incentive to maintain the traditional ways of their dependent nomads. In China, for example, the nomadic way of life remained quite widespread in both northern Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia for most of the twentieth century. This was largely because the land in these steppe areas was of little interest to China's normal model of agricultural production. Chinese authorities did not go beyond external control over nomadic communities, part of which was the division of the nomads into small units under Chinese administration. As a result, Mongolian nomads generally maintained a traditional way of life on the periphery of Chinese agrarian statehood.

The same cannot be said of the Russian Empire. Because of its acute interest in land, Kazakh traditional communities were under strong pressure. The division into small territories (volosts) under the control of the Russian administration did not allow them to play an independent role in the process of land distribution.

In general, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kazakh nomads did not have very favorable prospects. They could preserve their traditional lifestyle only in regions that the Russian authorities permitted them to inhabit, which were typically areas less suitable for agriculture. It should be said that even today in Asia, there are still some nomadic communities leading a traditional way of life, but only in peripheral spaces like mountainous or desert areas.

In this sense, the aftermath of the 1916 uprising could only accelerate the process of Kazakh society's loss of land. On 16 October 1916, a meeting was held under the chairmanship of Alexei Kuropatkin, the governor general of the Turkestan Governorate. Documentation of the meeting later declared: ‘The Governor-General declared that he considered it necessary to take away from the Kyrgyz all those lands where Russian blood had been shed, and since in the area of Lake Issyk-Kul and along the Tekes valley, the rebellious Kyrgyz had destroyed and burned more than 1,000 houses and killed about 2,000 souls of the Russian people, it was natural that all these lands should be taken away from the use of the Kyrgyz and converted into Russian settlements. However, on the map presented by the deputy head of the state property the borders of the proposed lands are not drawn correctly, and thus it is necessary to try to create a separate territory with Russian population not only within ethnographic, but also within geographical borders, which is why His Excellency suggested to draw the borders along the mountain ranges both from the northern shore of Issyk-Kul and from the southern shore. Similarly, he considered it necessary to withdraw from the use of the rebellious Kyrgyz of the Jarkent Uezd of the AtbaniKazakh Tribe Alban. clan all the lands along the Tekes River valley and the Chalkudesu valley, Karkara Yaylak, and the lands of the rebellious Kyrgyz of the Pishpek Uyezd along the Keben valley and a part of the Chuy valley.’

Later, in January 1917, on the eve of the fall of the Russian monarchy, the authorities began to gradually implement these plans. For example, after the February Revolution, on 12 March 1917, the inhabitants of the Pishpek Uezd sent a letter to the new Russian government. In this letter, they asked for cancellation of the orders of the military governor.iGeneral Kuropatkin These orders, with the number 886, had been issued on 12 January 1917 and were regarding the transfer of the Kyrgyz from fifteen volosts of the Pishpek Uezd to the newly created Naryn Uezd. ‘Eighty thousand Kyrgyz of both sexes are to be evicted. The area iin Naryn is completely deserted and unsuitable for agriculture or animal husbandry. The Kyrgyz are threatened with slow extinction there ... Most of the Kyrgyz to be displaced did not take part in the 1916 uprising.i1916 Uprising. We appeal to the humanity of the new government, we ask them to cancel the punishment imposed by the old government and not to evict us from our lands and leave us in the Pishpek Uezd, where we have been living since time immemorial.’

Russian peasant settlers played an important role in suppressing the 1916 revolt. The process of their resettlement in Asia itself contributed to the creation of separate Russian enclaves among the local Asian population. In the 1920s, Soviet historian Pyotr Galuzo wrote: ‘... the Russian settler must ... be the backbone of Russian domination in the region against the Muslim population.’

Here it is also worth noting that the idea of establishing settler communities as a bastion of Russian influence in Asia was closely tied to the organization of peasant society in Russia. Interestingly, despite the reforms in Russia in 1907 that granted individual peasants the option to leave the community, the settlers retained their communal form of organization. One reason for this may have been that they feared living in an unfamiliar and possibly hostile environment.

It was a paradoxical situation. One of the goals of Stolypin's reform was to create a social group of rural bourgeoisie from independent, individual farms in the countryside. However, the settlers in Asia chose to embrace a communal lifestyle over individual farm living. Consequently, the peasant community in Russia gained further support for its continued existence during the resettlement to new territories.

At the same time, the Russian authorities had a strong interest in resettlement itself. They needed to relieve the demographic pressure in central Russia and simultaneously settled new areas. Obviously, the communal structure was better suited to the latter task than conventional individual farmsteads, which would have required more protection. But at this crucial moment, the empire did not have enough forces for even the most basic defense.

When Russia entered World War I, conscription spread to the peasant settlers in Asia. After sustaining heavy defeats in the first year of the war and facing a shortage of small arms, the authorities collected them from all over the country, including from the peasant settlers. From December 1914 to 1 January 1916, 7,500 rifles were handed in. If the peasant communities had been seen as strongholds of Russian power on the periphery of the empire, they were seriously weakened by 1916.

The Russian authorities did not see any particular problems with the situation of the local Asian population and did not expect any backlash from them. Alexandra Bakhturina wrote that ‘the Russian administration in Turkestan showed itself not to be at its best, because, among other things, almost none of the military governors expected such an outbreak in the traditionally quiet outskirts. Shortcomings in the administration of Turkestan and the displacement of Kyrgyz nomads by Russian settlers were never considered pressing domestic problems. For many years, the issue was discussed, various projects were developed, meetings were held, and only the events of 1916 revealed the tragic consequences of disorganized administration and imprudent land policies.’

As a matter of fact, during the early phase of the 1916 uprising, the Russian population in the Semirechye province experienced significant losses. This was attributed to the absence of enough men in the Russian settlements and the shortage of weapons that had been gathered for the army. All in all, according to Kuropatkin, the governor general of Turkestan, 3 officers and 52 soldiers were killed, 75 were missing, while 1,905 Russian civilians were killed and 1,105 were missing during the uprising. The losses they suffered and the fear they experienced were largely responsible for the cruelty of the peasant settlers during the suppression of the revolt.

The assessment of the situation by the contemporary Russian historian Vladimir Buldakov in a monograph published by the Institute of Russian History in 2010 is quite illuminating: ‘But the most important result of what has happened is that the authority of the Russians in the region has disastrously declined. The clash of “civilized” peoples with those they consider “inferior” always reveals in the former a chasm of hidden savagery. The Russian nation, nurtured in a "paternal" manner by tsarism, was no exception. Moreover, events in Central Asia and Kazakhstan have shown that violent impulses emanating from the marginalized strata of the empire are particularly dangerous in their extreme brutality. It is doubtful whether the crisis of a stagnant empire of the obsolete religious type could take place in a civilized context at all.’ Thus, the events of 1916 were undoubtedly a prologue to the atrocities of the Civil War.

In the course of suppressing the revolt, the authorities handed over a large number of weapons to the peasant resettlement communities. ‘Since he [Kuropatkin] became governor, many weapons were distributed to the colonists. As we already know, most of them were given to the colonists of Semirechye.’ They also largely took over the lands previously inhabited by the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz populations.

As a result, by the beginning of 1917, the position of the peasant settlers in the Semirechye Oblast was noticeably strengthened. As a matter of fact, the Cossacks and peasant settlers in this region became the main beneficiaries of the 1916 revolt. In particular, after the suppression of the uprising in the Semirechye Oblast, they seized 2.5 million dessiatins (6.75 million acres) of land. In this context, the plans of the local Russian authorities to create separate residential areas for the Russian and Asian populations in the region were largely based on the situation on the ground.

Thus, by the time of the February Revolution of 1917, traditional Kazakh society found itself in a rather difficult situation as the 1916 revolt led to significant changes in both its external and internal conditions. On the external side, its position with the Russian authorities deteriorated significantly. Another consequence was the increased activity of settler peasants, who began to exert serious pressure on Kazakh communities.

The Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler estimated the losses of the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz populations in the Semirechye Oblast alone at 100,000 dead and 200,000 who fled to China. In the history of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, the number of Kazakh and Kyrgyz refugees to China was estimated at 300,000 people. From 1914 to 1917, the population of Kazakhs in the Semipalatinsk Oblast decreased by 58,000 people. According to the data of the Turkestan Committee of the Provisional Government, while crossing the border alone, 35,000 people had died.

What awaited the Kazakh steppe in the near future? Perhaps the expulsion of the Kazakhs to reservations on the model of the Native Americans. In this sense, there is no doubt that the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia led to a radical change in the situation because it significantly reduced the negative consequences of the 1916 revolt. At the same time, there was a glimmer of hope that the Kazakhs would have a chance to escape from the trap of history. However, not every hope is destined to come true.