Turkestan shattered

Starting in 1916 nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazaks of the Great Horde fought bitterly with Slavic settlers over land, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives (mostly among the Kyrgyz and Kazaks). In November 1917 a group of Central Asians based in the former Ferghana Valley khanate of Kokand proclaimed themselves the Government of Autonomous Turkestan, only to be crushed by Tashkent Soviet troops in three months. Emir Alim Khan of Bukhara attacked a small band of Russian troops in 1918, and then killed a party of Russian negotiators. He also brutally suppressed a liberal, Jadid-influenced revolutionary group that called itself the Young Bukharans, after the Young Turk movement in the late Ottoman Empire. Tashkent, which had been the administrative seat of tsarist Turkestan, was taken over by a soviet (elected council) made up mostly of  non-Bolshevik Russian socialists. Muslim Tashkenters were embroiled in their own factional arguments and could not remove the Russians [Khalid, 1996; Sahadeo, pp. 208–223]. The Khanate of Khiva was overrun by Yomut Turkmen under the leadership of Junaid Khan, who in 1918 had Khan Isfendiyar murdered and installed Sayyid Abdulla as puppet khan. Junaid Khan’s activities led to region-wide war and anarchy that was not really brought under control until 1924 [Keller, 2001, pp. 34–35; Keller, 2003]. Finally, Turkestan was devastated by a famine that may have killed one million people [Buttino].

Once Lenin's government had more-or-less achieved control over Central Asia, in 1920, he began the long process of turning the peoples there into European-style nations. He ordered that an ethnographic map be drawn up, with suggested subsections marked “Uzbekiia, Kirgiziia, and Turkmeniia,” which tells us that Bolshevik leaders intended to fit Central Asians into European ethnographic categories. Lenin also wanted a detailed analysis of the conditions that would permit the merger or division of these areas, but could make no further moves toward re-drawing the borders because anti-Bolshevik forces were still too strong.  The Bolsheviks found needed allies among the westernized Turkestani elite, who were drawn both to the Bolsheviks’ promises of freedom and their radical modernizing program. Two of these groups, the Young Bukharans and the similar Young Khivans, welcomed Bolshevik help in 1920 to drive out Emir Alim Khan and Khan Sayyid Abdulla, abolish the old dynastic kingdoms and replace them with “people’s soviet republics,” governed by uneasy coalitions of Jadids, socialists, Muslim clergy, and merchants of no particular political affiliation.  As of late 1923, Central Asia was divided into four major regions: the former Steppe Province and the Province of Turkestan were two “Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics” (ASSRs) within the larger Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), each governed by its own state apparatus and Communist Party. The former khanates of Bukhara and Khiva were technically independent socialist republics, although they survived only because of Moscow’s financial and military backing. As much as possible, all of these republics were governed by native Turkestanis, in keeping with the Soviet principle of rights to national freedom. The necessity of avoiding the taint of Russian imperialism by having Turkestanis govern themselves put the Soviet state in a bind, since the people who were educated enough to run a government tended to be non- or anti-communist in their political views. There were no acceptable alternatives, however. The need to create a cohort of educated and politically reliable Turkestanis was a key motive behind many Communist Party actions over the next several decades.

Soviet socialist republics

In 1924 the old geo-political lines of Central Asia were swept away, and the region was re-organized on a new basis: the nation as defined by Stalin. The Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were proclaimed in October 1924. Tajikistan was split off from Uzbekistan to become its own SSR in 1929, and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan became SSRs in 1936. The Kara-kalpaks remained at the level of Autonomous SSR, shifting several times between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. 

The creation of new states, each with its own government structure, Communist Party, patrolled borders and internal passport regime was just the beginning of a profound recreation of Central Asian identities. The borders were drawn by committees of Turkestani party members, working with ethnographers, with the goal of uniting speakers of a single language within a continuous territory [Hirsch, 160–165]. There were huge obstacles to achieving this goal: linguistic groups had always been mixed together, and many people were equally at home in Persian and Turkic. They did not define themselves by a single “native” language. Even the basic step of calling a language “Uzbek” or “Kyrgyz” meant defining the boundaries of languages that shaded off into many local dialects, a process that many Turkestanis found incomprehensible. Equally incomprehensible, especially to nomads, was the idea that territory was a definitive component of identity. Add to these difficulties the fact that different peoples did not live in neatly-demarcated parcels of land and that key economic structures, such as the irrigation systems of Khiva, spread across territory that was both Turkmen and Uzbek, and it is easy to see why final border decisions were often made on arbitrary bases. Borders may have stopped people from traveling freely from point A to point B (although frequently nomads could evade border guards), but borders alone could not create new individual or communal identities.