THE KAZAKH STEPPE: FROM EMPIRE TO UTOPIA

Unlike the Bashkirs, Kazakh politicians in both Semipalatinsk and Dzhambeity did not have much room for maneuver. It was clear that the Siberian and Ural Cossack armies possessed military power that the few poorly armed Kazakh formations in the east and west of the Kazakh steppe could do nothing about. In fact, they were operationally subordinate to the Cossacks. Therefore, the Alash-Orda people continued to hold on to Kolchak until the Red troops came very close to their territories. Meanwhile, Kolchak's government was gradually restoring pre-revolutionary practices in the administration of the national territories. Thus, in late 1918, the Semipalatinsk regional commissar Samoylov, appointed by the new authorities, issued an order to restore the pre-revolutionary rural administration and liquidate the zemstvos. On February 19, by order of the Omsk government in Semipalatinsk, the activity of the Oblast Council of Alash-Orda was terminated.

Alash-Orda had nothing to respond with. Protest against the white dictatorship was only individual. Thus, Mustafa Chokaev, the guru of the failed anti-Kolchak conspiracy in Orenburg, went into exile, and in March 1919, Akhmet Baitursynov, a prominent representative of Alash-Orda, defected to the Bolsheviks. He was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the Kazakh political movement. Together with Alikhan Bukeikhanov and Mirzhakyp Dulatov, Baitursynov was one of the founders of the newspaper Kazaq, which played a major role in activating political consciousness in Kazakh society. Among the few Kazakh supporters of the Bolsheviks in early 1919, there was no figure of this magnitude.

Of particular importance to the Bolsheviks was the fact that Baitursynov defected to Moscow without any conditions. In fact, this set an important precedent. Moscow could use the valuable individual qualities of individual representatives of Alash-Orda, but in no case was it planning to come to an agreement with the organization.

In early March 1919, Kolchak's army went on the offensive against the Reds along the entire front, and after a series of victories, the Whites reached the Volga River in April. On April 25 the Ural Cossacks besieged Uralsk. The siege of the city lasted until July 1919 and tied up the main forces of the Ural Cossack army. Accordingly, throughout this period, the Ural Cossacks virtually did not participate in Kolchak's general offensive. Therefore, the relatively few Alash-Orda detachments in the area were not involved in active fighting against the Reds.

Meanwhile, major peasant uprisings, caused by requisitions and mobilizations, began in the areas controlled by the Kolchak government. As a result, violent clashes between peasants and Cossacks broke out throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Kazakh steppe. "The response of the newly settled peasants to the actions of the government (the Omsk government of Admiral Kolchak - author's note) was sabotage, unrest, riots and uprisings. Hostility to the government was transferred to the entire Cossack community, which, by virtue of its class status, was actually an instrument of state policy toward the peasantry." Mutual ferocity led to numerous outbreaks. For example, in May 1919 there was an uprising of newly settled peasants near Atbasar, which was brutally suppressed by the Cossacks. Near the village of Mariyinovka alone, between 1,000 and 2,000 peasants were killed in fighting and shot after the uprising was suppressed.

One of the largest uprisings took place in early April 1919 in Kostanay Uyezd, Turgai Oblast. After the uprising was suppressed, some of the rebels went south to the city of Turgai. In this city the Bolsheviks were in power, the military commissar was one of the leaders of the 1916 revolt, Amangeldy Imanov. However, on April 20 the city was occupied by a detachment of the Turgai branch of Alash-Orda, which overthrew the Bolshevik authority there. On April 23, the Alash-Orda defeated a detachment of Kostanay rebels and captured their commander, Lavrenty Taran. During the offensive on Turgai, another detachment of Kostanay peasant rebels executed Imanov and Taran.

This incident was greatly hyped in later Soviet epic poetry due to the heroization of Amangeldy Imanov and the policy of discrediting Alash-Orda. However, against the background of the bloody Russian civil war, it was only one of its typical episodes.

In June 1919, the Red troops launched a counteroffensive against Kolchak's forces, defeating them and forcing them to retreat to the east. The key reason of the Whites' defeat was the weakness of their rear: the number of uprisings was increasing, and the unreliability of mobilized soldiers was increasing.This, in turn, was in many ways a direct consequence of the right-wing coup of November 18, 1918, the one that brought Admiral Kolchak to power. Not only could the Whites no longer rely on the broad masses of peasants and workers, as they had at the beginning of the anti-Bolshevik movement. On the contrary, they now faced their active resistance. On the whole, it was the break with the moderate socialists that played a fatal role in the outcome of the struggle against the Bolsheviks, although it did not appear so in November 1918. The right-wing activists in Siberia believed that they could counteract the rigid power of the amorphous governmental system of the moderate socialists, and as a result they lost any kind of public support.

In July 1919 the Red troops lifted the blockade of Uralsk. At the end of August the Orenburg group of the Reds took Orsk, on September 2 they took Aktobe, and on September 13 they joined the troops of the Turkestan Republic. After the occupation of Aktobe, the link between the central regions of Russia and Soviet Turkestan was established. The main White troops began to retreat to the east, while the army of the Ural Cossacks was cut off from them. Along with them, the formations of the western government of Alash-Orda were stranded there.

The situation of the Ural Cossacks became extremely difficult. However, at the very moment when the Reds were victorious on their eastern front, on the southern front they began to suffer defeats at the hands of Anton Denikin's white army. On June 30, 1919, the Caucasian army of the Whites stormed the city of Tsaritsyn on the Volga. Thus, the Ural Cossacks came into contact with Denikin's troops. From the middle of July 1919 they came under Denikin's operational command. At the same time, the Reds kept Astrakhan, so direct contacts between the White troops on the Volga and in the Urals were limited. In Tsaritsyn on July 4, 1919 Denikin announced a campaign to Moscow.

Thus, in the summer of 1919, the strategic situation on the civil war fronts was still uncertain. From a tactical point of view, as a result of Denikin's offensive on Moscow, the Ural Cossacks maintained their positions in the lower reaches of the Ural River, even though Kolchak's army was retreating. Accordingly, the western branch of Alash-Orda had no choice but to maintain its alliance with the Cossacks. All the more so since Dzhambeity, the capital of the Western branch of Alash-Orda, was still in the immediate rear of the Ural Cossack army.

On September 5, 1919, the Ural Cossacks defeated the headquarters of the 25th division in the village of Lbishchenskaya in what is today western Kazakhstan, where the commander of this division, Vasily Chapayev, was killed. Given the fact that Chapayev was one of the leaders of the peasants of the Samara Governorate and had been fighting against the Ural Cossacks since the spring of 1918, his death became one of the factors that aggravated the mutual bitterness between the peasants and the Cossacks. This, of course, had its consequences. In any case, in August-October 1919 the Ural Cossacks held the front. The battles on the southern front against Denikin, as well as on the eastern front against Kolchak did not give the Reds an opportunity to eliminate this rather isolated front of the civil war for a long time. On November 16, 1919, Omsk fell to the Red troops. On November 18, 1919, Denikin's army was defeated in the Orel-Kursk operation (known as Orel-Kromy in Soviet historiography), after which it began its retreat to the south.

As a direct result of the defeat of the Whites, a large number of refugees appeared, which was not surprising given the ferocity of the clashes that took place during the civil war. Among them were natives of all three Cossack armies - the Orenburg, the Siberian, and the Ural, historically located along the northern borders of the Kazakh steppe. The scale and severity of the conflict between the Cossacks and the peasant population under white rule forced the peasants to flee.

In November-December 1919, the Orenburg Cossacks together with many civilian refugees retreated across the central part of the Kazakh steppe, through Karkaraly (Karkaralinsk) to Semirechye. A significant part of the retreating Cossacks and refugees perished on this 700-kilometer route. "On the way to Semirechye the army ceased to exist and turned into a mass of foot soldiers and horsemen. Typhus was rampant. Partisans made trouble. People died en masse from hunger, frost and disease. It was one of the most terrible retreats of the entire civil war."

At the same time, some Siberian Cossacks left with the rest of the White army in December, heading east along the Trans-Siberian Railway, while others retreated through the Altai Mountains into Mongolia. Many died there from frost and epidemics. The situation for the Siberian Cossacks was complicated by the actions of a large number of partisan detachments from among the local peasants. "The old partisans came to take revenge on the Cossacks and did not hide their feelings. The rumor that the Reds were going to 'massacre' the villagers forced the Cossack masses to move."

In turn, the Ural Cossacks moved to the Mangyshlak Peninsula for subsequent evacuation by sea. The winter passage of 1,000 kilometers from Guryev (today's Atyrau) to the settlement of Fort Alexandrovsky (today's Fort Shevchenko) resulted in the death of most of the refugees. "Another "Ice Campaign" of the White Army units was one of the most difficult and dramatic. Human losses from cold and hunger, disease and loss of strength were enormous." Many Cossacks died in the winter of 1919-1920. In fact, at that moment the troops of the Orenburg, Siberian and Ural Cossack armies ceased to exist as a historical and social phenomenon that played an important role in the history of the Russian Empire. The amount of losses of the Ural Cossack troops, especially in the years of the civil war, can be partially estimated from statistics. "In 1917 there were 336.3 thousand Russians in the Urals. In 1920 - 173.3 thousand. The Russians, among whom we include the majority of Cossacks and settlers, suffered significant losses, and their share in the region decreased". For comparison, during the whole period of the First World War the Ural Cossack Army lost 335 Cossacks killed and 92 missing. In this context, participation in the civil war was a devastating blow for the Cossacks.

Meanwhile, as early as mid-1919, the Bolsheviks began more active preparations for future relations with the Asian peoples of Russia, including the Kazakhs. Their interest was linked both to questions of internal organization and to the tasks of the world revolution. The commander of the Turkestan front, Mikhail Frunze, issued an order on October 23, 1919: "The Red Army has entered the strip occupied by weak peoples: Sarts, Kyrgyz, and others, who until now had been languishing under the heavy heel of Russian imperialism and autocracy. The Red Army, fulfilling the mission entrusted to it by the world revolution and the immediate interests of the Russian revolution, is the liberator of all the small peoples of Asia from the centuries of oppression in which they have lived until now." The fate of the Bashkirs and Kazakhs was to serve as a kind of model for the other peoples of Asia for the implementation of Bolshevik policy and to become the starting point of the world revolution in Asia.

On July 10, 1919, a Revolutionary Committee for the Administration of the Kyrgyz Krai (Kirrevkom) was formed with its seat in Orenburg. The Kirrevkom was to control only the Steppe Krai and some adjacent territories, such as the Bukey Horde. Semirechye and Turkestan, where local soviets supporting the Bolsheviks remained in power, were left outside the new administrative unit.

The first head of the Kirrevkom was Stanisław Pestkowski (1882-1937), a Pole and Stalin's deputy in the People's Commissariat for Nationalities. Members of the Revolutionary Committee included Mukhamedyar Tunganchin, to whom Lenin entrusted the preparation of the 1918 Congress of Soviets in Kazakhstan; Alibi Dzhangildin, a participant in the 1916 revolt and Bolshevik commissar for the steppe; Akhmet Baitursynov, a former member of the Alash-Orda; Bakhytzhan Karatayev, a Chingisid and former Kadet who joined the Bolshevik Party; Seytkali Mendeshev, a Bolshevik teacher from Orenburg; and Vadim Lukashev, a professional revolutionary from Semirechye. It must be said that from the very beginning this body was not very effective because of acute contradictions among its members. This probably explains why the first leader of Soviet Kazakhstan was neither a Kazakh nor a Russian, but a Pole.

From then on, the lack of personnel became one of the main problems of the new authorities. In the Kazakh steppe, almost all the more or less educated people belonged to the ranks of Alash-Orda. Consequently, it was very difficult to organize the work of the administrative apparatus without them, at least until new loyal cadres could be trained from among the Kazakh population. The best the Bolsheviks could do was to grant amnesty to those who opposed Soviet power. On November 4, 1919, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Turkestan Front issued a decree granting amnesty to Alash-Orda members.

Even then, some members of Alash-Orda did not give up their attempts to negotiate at least some terms with the Bolsheviks. The leaders of the western branch of Alash-Orda with its center in Dzhambeity, Zhakhansha and Khalel Dosmukhamedovs since the late fall of 1919 conducted active negotiations with the military representatives of the Red Army and even started fighting against the Ural Cossacks, defeating them on December 27, 1919 in the village of Kzyl-Kuga. However, the commander of the Turkestan Front, Mikhail Frunze, declared that "we do not know and do not recognize any government of Alash-Orda, and as such we cannot enter into contractual agreements with it." In a telegram to Lenin, Frunze clarified: "The military importance of the Alash-Orda is negligible, but politically and economically their capitulation is important, since it secures for us the entire steppe region up to the shores of the Caspian Sea."

For the central Bolshevik leadership, the surrender of Alash-Orda was politically important. Without it, it would have been extremely difficult to ensure the legitimacy of the Kirrevkom and future state structures in Kazakh society. Eventually, by the end of 1919, the Alash-Orda branches in both Semipalatinsk and Dzhambeity accepted the authority of the Bolsheviks. In early 1920, the Kirrevkom made a decision to dissolve and disarm Alash-Orda. This time, after repeated attempts by Stalin, the Omsk Directory, and Kolchak, the decision proved final.