THE KAZAKH STEPPE: FROM EMPIRE TO UTOPIA

We should once again pay attention to the peculiarities of Russian society that distinguished it from the democracies of Western Europe. Russian liberals, especially the Kadets, who were one of the leading government parties after the February Revolution, tried throughout 1917 to create a system of local self-government in Russia. They were well aware that democracy begins from below, with self-governing communities. But in the end, the Kadets won only 4.8% of the vote in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.

In 1917, the zemstvo form of organization, which was seen as more or less analogous to the European system of self-government, was really established only in the cities, while the peasant majority of Russia not only retained the communal system of organization but strengthened it, forcing many of Stolypin's "farmers" to return to the commune. The communal system of organization could be accepted and understood by the city workers and the majority of the soldiers. All of them had recently come from a peasant background.

For a number of reasons, the Russian peasant community could not become the basis for the organization of self-government of the Western European type. In Western Europe, the entire system of self-government was based on private property, while Russian communities supported collective property. In Western European democracy individual values played an important role, while in Russian communities collective consciousness prevailed. In Western Europe, democratic elections are usually a competition of ideas, with individuals voting for a concept that is close to them, regardless of where they live or whether they belong to a corporation. In Russia, according to Vladimir Buldakov, "the peasants voted according to their communal custom - as a group, without exception, and 'like everyone else.' The Constituent Assembly seemed to them something like a large village meeting." Therefore, the liberal-minded urbanites in Russia, whose values were closest to European democracy, objectively had no chance against the overwhelming majority of the rural population and the urban workers and soldiers closely associated with them.

In contrast to the urban liberal population, the peasant communities, along with the workers and soldiers, mostly acquiesced to the Bolsheviks' rule or accepted their arrival quite calmly. First, the Bolsheviks promised to meet all their current needs, such as ending the war. Second, the Bolsheviks took central power into their own hands. For the peasants, central power was important because it traditionally set the rules within which the community could continue to exist autonomously, using its own mind. Paradoxically, the chaos that often ensued in Russia during peasant revolts and the strict order of central authority were actually closely interdependent.

We can draw a parallel with the history of another agrarian empire - China. There, peasant revolts often led to dynastic change. Each time, however, the central power was restored in its former despotic form. In this sense, Oriental societies differ from Western European societies in that the communal character of peasant life is one of the reasons for the preservation and restoration of despotic power even after recurring crises.

This is an important detail, which to some extent helps to explain the political processes in Russia in 1917-1920. The social structure of society directly influenced the political process. Even when certain communities sought liberalization, they still pursued purely communal interests. The most typical example was the Russian Cossacks. They supported the idea of convening a Constituent Assembly, i.e. liberalization throughout Russia, but they did so in order to protect their communal interests. Their interest was to retain exclusive rights to the land they had received from the imperial power in exchange for military service. However, the Cossacks' desire to keep all the land in their communal ownership led to the opposition of the settler peasant communities living nearby.

Cossack troops were stationed mainly on the fringes of the Russian Empire. There, the settler peasants were direct competitors with the Cossacks for land ownership. In an effort to redistribute the land in their favor, the peasants supported the Bolsheviks and Soviet power, while the Cossacks, due to their privileged position in the imperial hierarchy, were deeply connected to the whole structure of the old life. As a matter of fact, during the Civil War this determined the fierce nature of the confrontation in all those areas where Cossacks lived side by side with the peasant settlers.

In 1917, representatives of the Kazakh political movement opted for an alliance with the Cossacks. The Cossacks were actually less of a problem for Kazakh society than the settler peasants. Although the Cossack troops owned large tracts of land in the Kazakh steppe, their numbers remained virtually unchanged because Emperor Alexander I had banned the enlistment of Cossacks as early as 1811. At the same time, the influx of peasant settlers from central Russia was constantly increasing, which led to a steady increase in land seizures in their favor.

In early 1918, the Soviet regime had not yet come into conflict with the Cossacks. Thus, on January 31, 1918, the Bolsheviks seized Orenburg, the capital of the Orenburg Cossack Army. The formations loyal to the Bolsheviks were mostly composed of peasants. Nevertheless, most of the local Cossacks refused to fight against the new authorities. Only a few dissenters, led by General Alexander Dutov, retreated to the Turgai steppes.

Representatives of the People's Council of Alash-Orda, headed by Alikhan Bukeikhanov, also left Orenburg for Semipalatinsk. At the All-Kazakh Congress in December, the city was declared the capital of the new Kazakh autonomy. However, on February 16, 1918, the Soviets seized power there as well, and the local Siberian Cossacks did not resist. In general, a similar picture was observed in other regions of the former empire, including the city of Verny.

Thus, in January-March 1918, real power in the Kazakh steppe passed almost entirely into the hands of the Soviets, which were controlled by the peasant settlers. In fact, of the three communities competing in the Kazakh steppe in 1917-1918 - Kazakhs, peasant settlers, and Cossacks - power passed into the hands of representatives of only one of them. The peasant settlers were oriented toward continuing the pre-revolutionary practice of forcibly seizing land from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz populations, and they saw the Cossack corporations as their competitors.

The opinion of Zeki Velidi Togan, the leader of the Bashkir national liberation movement, expressed in 1918, is logical in this sense: "In the long run, we have realized that the policy of the Soviets is deceitful and treacherous. There may be good people in the center, but those Russians with whom we have to work in the field are perfidious people, monstrous chauvinists. It's them who are going to dictate their terms to us." This was typical not only of the Bashkirs and Kazakhs, but also of other peoples in Russian Asia. For example, one of the leaders of the White Movement in Siberia, George Guins, cited the decision of a peasant assembly in Transbaikal: "The land belongs to no one, it is the people's land, so it should belong to the people, not to the Buryats."

Mukhamedjan Tynyshpayev, a member of the Alash-Orda government, wrote: "The Bolsheviks of Semirechye are not newcomers; their crowd consists entirely of newly settled peasants, city bourgeois, and rabble, criminals. The new settlers, settled on the best lands selected from the Kyrgyz, are more than 150 thousand souls in the region, which gives 10-15 thousand 'Reds'." Paradoxically, Tynyshpayev of Alash-Orda is echoed by the communist Georgy Safarov: "...Having become the ruling class, the peasant kulaks finally subjugated the nomadic population and, under the guise of requisitions and confiscations, took away all the best lands."

In essence, Soviet power in the hands of the peasant settlers on Russia's Asian periphery represented a new form of the former colonial administration, only instead of a centralized bureaucratic state acting in the interests of the peasant settlers, power now passed directly to them. The essence of the policy toward the local population, however, did not change much.

The Alash-Orda's alliance with the Cossacks and its attempts to defend the interests of the local population led to the exclusion of Alash-Orda members from local government in all the areas of importance to the Kazakh political movement, from Orenburg in the west to Semipalatinsk in the east and Verny in the south. The government itself was forced into hiding in Kazakh auls. Compared to 1917, when Kazakhs were widely represented in local government, this was a serious setback.

The Bolsheviks themselves, however, had a somewhat different view of Russia's future than the peasant settlers who had seized power in the local soviets. In late 1917 and early 1918, the Bolsheviks made a number of statements of an ideological nature. They raised the question of the rights of national minorities and speculated about the federal organization of the future Russia. Characteristically, their statements were already backed up by practice. At the very end of 1917, the Bolshevik government granted independence to Finland. Undoubtedly, this must have impressed the national minorities in Russia with regard to the possible realization of their interests.

In this context, it is understandable why Kazakh political circles tried to negotiate with the Bolshevik leadership. On March 20, 1918, Khalel Gabbasov, deputy to the leader of the Alash-Orda People's Council (government), Alikhan Bukeikhanov, negotiated by telegraph from Semipalatinsk with one of the Bolshevik leaders, Joseph Stalin, who held the position of People's Commissar for Nationalities. Stalin suggested that the Alash-Orda government send representatives to Moscow. On April 1 and 2, 1918, Alash emissaries Zhakhansha and Khalel Dosmukhamedovs (the namesakes) met in Moscow with Joseph Stalin and then with Vladimir Lenin. The subject of the meeting was the terms of Alash-Orda's recognition of Bolshevik power. It is not known exactly what the Dosmukhamedovs discussed with the Bolshevik leaders, but the parties had very different ideas about the results of these meetings.

On April 3, 1918, Alash-Orda sent a telegram to Moscow, signed by Gabbasov, recognizing Soviet power. Moscow did not reply to this telegram. This was because Gabbasov's telegram contained a number of conditions that were obviously unacceptable to the Bolsheviks. In particular, it repeated the theses of the Second All-Kazakh Congress on the creation of territorial-national autonomy, as well as the fact that until the Constituent Congress was convened, power in this autonomy belonged to the government of Alash-Orda. Accordingly, representatives of the Russian population were supposed to be included in its 25-member composition for the remaining 10 vacant seats. That is, it was assumed that the local soviets, which de facto represented the interests of the Russian settlers, would actually have to recognize the authority of the Alash-Orda government.

In addition, prior to the election of new Soviets, local power was to be transferred to the already formed bodies of city and zemstvo self-government. These bodies were to hold new local elections, after which the authorities were to be formed, this time in the form of soviets for the territories inhabited by Kazakhs (there were none). Gabbasov's telegram explicitly stated that the elections would be held according to democratic principles. In effect, the Bolsheviks were being offered to organize power in the Kazakh steppe according to the same liberal principles that they had just abolished in central Russia at the moment the Constituent Assembly was dissolved.

In addition, the Alash-Orda members wanted the Bolsheviks to force the local soviets, which were composed of the Russian population, to cede power to the Kazakhs, or at least to share it, whereas in 1918 the Bolsheviks' power in the regions depended largely on local support. The Soviets, because of their disagreements with the Cossacks, were a very reliable support for Bolshevik power, including armed support.

Nevertheless, on April 21, Khalel Gabbasov sent another telegram to the Sovnarkom, addressed to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, asking them to speed up the implementation of the agreements he believed had been reached. Gabbasov writes that "the disregard of the natural right of the people on the part of the local Soviets does not stop, the persecution of the members of the Kyrgyz organization, the arrests of its members inflame the Kyrgyz masses, deepen the national antagonism." He concluded by asking for an urgent reply to the previous telegram of April 3. But the Bolsheviks remained silent.

In fact, as a result of the Moscow negotiations, they formed a very critical attitude toward Alash-Orda. Thus, only a few days after the meeting with the Alash-Orda members, on April 7, 1918, Stalin sent a telegram to the Soviets of Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, and Tashkent, in which he wrote that such bourgeois-nationalist movements as the Alash-Orda "are gradually being exposed by the course of the revolution." On April 9, this telegram was published in the central newspaper Pravda. It also stated that the People's Commissariat for Nationalities was opposed to proportional representation of nationalities and that elections could only be held on the basis of the class principle. At the same time, Stalin sent a dispatch to the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Semipalatinsk Soviet with instructions to "dissolve the Alash-Orda and replace it with the dictatorship of the Kyrgyz proletariat."

Moreover, immediately after the negotiations with the Alash-Orda members, Moscow began to define the contours of its governmental infrastructure in the Kazakh steppe. As early as April 5, 1918, the People's Commissariat for Nationalities formed an initiative group to convene the All-Kazakh Congress of Soviets, headed by Mukhamedyar Tunganchin, who had begun his career as an interpreter under the Governor-General of Turgai. In the spring of 1918, Tunganchin was one of the few Kazakhs who remained loyal to the Bolsheviks, who was not associated with "Alash," and who lived in Moscow. Thus, the Bolsheviks intended to organize and lead the process of creating Kazakh autonomy using their own efforts. They did not need influential and organized intermediaries like the Alash movement to interact with Kazakh society.

Exactly how the Bolsheviks envisioned the future of nomadic autonomies is revealed in the statement made by People's Commissar for Nationalities Stalin at the consultation to convene the Constituent Congress of the Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic on May 10, 1918: "Autonomy is a form. The question is what class content will be put into this form. The Soviet power is not at all against autonomy, it is in favor of autonomy, but such an autonomy in which all power would be in the hands of the workers and peasants, in which the bourgeoisie of all nationalities would be excluded not only from power but also from participation in the election of government bodies. There are two types of autonomies. The first is purely nationalist. This autonomy is built on extraterritorial principles, on the principles of nationalism. 'National councils,' national regiments around these councils, the division of the population into national curiae, the inevitable national disputes – these are the results of this type of autonomy. This type of autonomy leads to the inevitable death of the soviets of workers' and peasants' deputies."

It is symbolic that just one day after Stalin's speech, on May 11, 1918, a Kazakh department was established within the People's Commissariat for Nationalities. Its main task was to prepare the establishment of Kazakh autonomy, of course, according to Soviet principles and under the direct guidance of the center.

Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin's brief personal communication with Zhakhansha and Khalel Dosmukhamedovs in early April 1918 was the Bolshevik leaders' first acquaintance with Kazakh affairs. To them, the Kazakhs were quite a numerous people, inhabiting vast territories from the Volga to the Altai, from Siberia to Central Asia. Therefore, the Bolsheviks could not but pay the most serious attention to the Kazakhs. This was due both to the interests of state administration — after all, it was a large territory and a large population — and to the goals they were pursuing in the colonial East.

The Bolsheviks viewed Asia, as well as the rest of the world, in the context of world revolution on an extremely large scale. In this sense, Vladimir Lenin's telegram to Lev Sosnovsky and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, sent after November 8, 1919, is quite telling: "If we only take things away from the Eastern peoples and give them nothing, then our whole international policy, our whole struggle 'for Asia' goes to hell. It is better to leave the Bashkirs and Kyrgyzes completely alone and thus facilitate our policy of struggle for Asia. Otherwise, we will do nothing in Asia against British imperialism. A serious struggle is to be waged for Persia, India, China, and for the sake of this struggle [it makes sense] to take nothing, or as little as possible, strictly agreed upon in advance, from the small peoples of the East." Thus, according to Lenin, Russian Central Asia was to become nothing less than a springboard for the spread of world revolution to Persia, India, and China.

As a result of the first contact with the Bolsheviks, the overall situation for the Alash-Orda government deteriorated sharply. Already on May 18, 1918, the Kazakh regional congress in Semipalatinsk was broken up, and the representatives of the Alash-Orda government were forced to return to the steppe. On the same day, the Fourth Extraordinary Oblast Congress was held in the village of Dzhambeity in the Urals under the chairmanship of Zhakhanshi Dosmukhamedov. At that time, Kazakh autonomy had not been proclaimed, although this goal had been set by the Second All-Kazakh Congress in December 1917. The resolution of the congress in Dzhambeity stated that "under the present political conditions, this autonomy should be implemented by way of accomplished fact, starting from one aul and ending with the entire territory occupied by the Kyrgyz population, which almost completely covers seven provinces and a part of one governorate." Thus, in the Ural Oblast it was decided to establish self-government at the oblast level, since it was not possible to announce the creation of a general Kazakh autonomy.

Thus was born the Oyil Wilayah, which immediately declared its struggle against the Soviet power and its alliance with the Cossacks of the Ural Army. Such a sharp position obviously reflected Dosmukhamedov's disappointment with the Bolshevik leaders. The realization that the Cossacks were the natural allies of the Kazakhs had only grown stronger by this time.

The fact is that already in early April 1918, while the Dosmukhamedovs were meeting with Stalin and Lenin in Moscow, an uprising of five stanitsas (Cossack villages) began near Verny. This was a reaction by the Semirechye Cossacks to an attempt of the Verny Soviet to disarm them. The rebels besieged the town. In response, the local Soviet executed 17 political prisoners, including Orest Shkapsky, a former commissar of the Provisional Government for Semirechye. Soon the Tashkent Soviet sent a detachment to assist the Verny Soviet, which helped the local peasants defeat the Cossacks in a battle near the stanitsa of Kaskelenskaya.

After the victory, the Semirechye Oblast Executive Committee deprived the Cossacks of their right to vote and soon announced that the Cossack lands were now public property. On June 3, a decree was issued to liquidate the Semirechye Cossack army and the Cossack community as a whole. Typically, all the property of this army, as well as most of the lands, were transferred to the peasant settlers -- from one community, the Cossack community, to another, the peasant community. It is not surprising that in the future the Semirechye Cossacks supported the White Siberian government. The military formations of Alash-Orda also joined their alliance.

The uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion in late May 1918 created opportunities for a return to the liberal agenda of 1917. This uprising was supported by virtually all political forces in Russia dissatisfied with Bolshevik rule, from far-right officers' organizations to some workers' unions and representatives of liberal and socialist parties. As a result, Bolshevik power was overthrown in vast areas of the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.

The Czechoslovak Legion was formed in the fall of 1917 as part of the Russian Army, consisting mostly of Czechs and Slovaks, volunteers, prisoners, and defectors from Austria-Hungary and Germany who expressed a desire to participate in the war on the Russian side. At the end of May 1918, People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Leon Trotsky ordered the disarmament of the Czechoslovak Legion, which was traveling along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok to be sent to the front in Europe. Echelons of this corps stretched along the railroad from Penza to Vladivostok. The disarmament order provoked the Czechoslovaks to revolt.

In June 1918, the first anti-Bolshevik government centered in Samara and headed by the SRs was formed. It was called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly and went down in history as the Komuch. At about the same time, the Provisional Siberian Government was formed in Omsk, where the SRs shared power with right-wing conservative politicians. Many of its leaders believed that "non-Russians" such as Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Tatars lacked public spirit, were hostile to the Russian state, and therefore could not participate in state power. "The non-Russians should be kept in a tight grip," as one orator of the time exclaimed. In September 1918, against the background of military defeats in the Volga region, the Komuch and Omsk governments formed a single government, the Directorate, which gradually drifted to the right until Vice-Admiral Kolchak seized power in Omsk in a coup on November 18, 1918.

Since the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion, Alash-Orda supported the anti-Bolshevik movement and declared its adherence to the slogans about the convocation of the Constituent Assembly and democratic reforms. However, it was very difficult for Kazakh politicians to implement these ideas for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. The power of Alash-Orda remained elusive. Many internal Kazakh regions did not want any power at all and tried to stay out of the Russian civil war.

Alash-Orda's partners in the anti-Bolshevik coalition, both in the Komuch and in the Provisional Siberian Government, had no illusions about the real capabilities of the Kazakh government. In July 1918, one of the lawyers working on the agreement between Alash-Orda and the Provisional Siberian Government remarked: "Alash-Orda now has only great claims, but no real grounds." One need not think that the situation with Alash-Orda was unique. In the confusion of the civil war, many forces claimed power rather than actually having it. To some extent this was true of the Bolsheviks, at least in the early stages. By September 1918, Alash-Orda had agreed to transform the Oyil Wilayah into the western branch of Alash-Orda, thus achieving a symbolic restoration of unity. In addition, Alash-Orda controlled a certain territory, which represented a significant part of the vast lands of the Kazakh steppe, had a small but real army, and had contractual relations with the main subjects of the anti-Bolshevik movement both inside and outside the steppe.

Nevertheless, in November 1918, the Directorate issued a special decree dissolving Alash-Orda. The first such decree, as we recall, had been signed by Stalin in April 1918. After Kolchak came to power, one of his first decisions was again an order to liquidate both Alash-Orda and the Bashkir autonomy simultaneously and to disband their armies. The idea of the rightists was to concentrate all power in the hands of a government in Omsk. The situation became extremely unfavorable for the political movements of the national minorities. The Bashkir leader Zeki Velidi Togan vividly expressed the general mood of the Bashkirs and Kazakhs at the end of November 1918: "We were facing four hostile forces: the Reds in Samara and Aktobe, and Dutov and Kolchak."

In this situation, the opponents of the White dictatorship came up with the idea of organizing a protest against Kolchak. At the end of November, contacts began between the SRs in the military, the Bashkir leader Zeki Velidi Togan, and the Kazakh Mustafa Chokayev, the former head of the Kokand Autonomy. In early December 1918, the conspirators met in Orenburg. They planned to create a new government for three countries at once: Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan, and the Cossack state. But this "most determined" attempt by democratic circles to resist Kolchak's coup was more symbolic than effective; of course, nothing came of it.

Liberal and moderate socialist politicians had been trying since February 1917 to establish a system of democratic self-government and the necessary institutions, including an electoral mechanism, but they ultimately suffered a tactical defeat. In the context of the civil war, liberal policies were clearly not conducive to success against well-organized opponents from different sides of the political spectrum. Thus, the liberals lost to right-wing radicals like Kolchak, and the moderate socialists eventually lost to left-wing radicals, the Bolsheviks. “While until November 1918 there was a war in eastern Russia between two variants of the revolution, one of which advocated the democratic path, this alternative later disappeared. Now there was dictatorship on both sides of the front.”

Strategically, however, Kolchak's coup was the cause of the final defeat of the right-wing radicals in the Russian civil war. By abandoning their agreements with the moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks), they effectively eliminated any ideological competition with the Bolsheviks. Now the Bolsheviks were the only political force that could use socialist rhetoric. If we take into account the fact that the Russian right-wingers in the White Movement began to pursue a very harsh policy toward national minorities, then the national domain turned out to be entirely at the disposal of the Bolsheviks.