Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The origins of the Central Asian revolt of 1916 can be traced to Russian colonial penetration of the region in the late 19th century. The empire had been pressing into what was to become the Turkestan Region (krai) since Peter the Great had sent a force toward Khiva in 1717, but it had only been fully integrated into the tsars’ realm following a series of annexations from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s that had incorporated lands as far south as Ferghana. The first motor of these expansions was the securing of cotton-rich valleys of the irrigated regions of southern Turkestan, in order to feed Russia’s booming textile industry. The second was that Petersburg’s military and economic presence in these regions placed pressure on the possessions and protectorates in southern Asia of its chief imperial rival, Great Britain. However, as Russian settlers followed the imperial flag into Turkestan, various complex economic and political problems ensued: clashes over land rights and water rights between the natives and incoming settlers, for example, and especially, conflicts between nomads and Russian farmers, as well as resentment of the semi-military, colonial rule imposed on the region by St. Petersburg. No other region of the Russian Empire had, over such a lengthy period of time, endured such discriminatory rule as that of the Turkestan governor-generalship, and for the historian Daniel Brower, the 1916 revolt was nothing less than “a judgement on the empire’s half century of colonial rule” in Central Asia.12 The region’s problems were compounded by the First World War, with cotton prices falling and the price of consumer goods spiraling, while the forced mobilization of horses by the military authorities was also greatly resented. The trigger for the revolt, however, was the decision of the Russian stavka, authorized by Nicholas II on 25 June 1916, that dire shortages of manpower in industry and military support services in European Russia necessitated the mobilization of 390,000 men of military age from the hitherto exempt inorodtsy (native peoples, literally “foreigners”) of Central Asia. They would formally be members of the armed forces but would be assigned work in “the construction of defensive fortifications and military communications in frontline areas and also for any other work necessary for national defence.”13 Publication of the order in June–July 1916, at the height of the cotton harvest, caused confusion and panic, with fears expressed that the men would be put into fighting units—possibly against Muslim Turkey. Within a few days much of the region had risen in protest and revolt; telegraph lines and railways were destroyed and government buildings were ransacked. In response, on 17 July 1916, the entire Turkestan region was declared to be under martial law. However, although the revolt of the Sarts (the settled native population) was quickly contained, disorder spread rapidly to the nomads of the Kazakh and Turkoman steppe; with 15,000-strong bands of rebels sweeping across the region, “to some extent, the insurrection acquired the character of a ‘Holy War’ against the Russian infidels, and of an anti-colonial struggle for independence,” especially in Semirech′e, where many Russian incomers had settled.14 Commander of all forces deployed in the suppression of the uprising (and governor-general of Vernyi) was Colonel P. P. Ivanov—later, in 1918, as General Ivanov-Rinov, the ataman of the Siberian Cossack Host and commander in chief of the anti-Bolshevik Siberian Army. It was in this campaign that he learned his craft (or, rather, lack of it) in the “pacification” of rebel forces. One survivor of Ivanov’s pacification of a rebel area recalled how

Ivanov gave the order to shoot, to set fires and to confiscate household goods and agricultural tools. The units entered the villages, burned goods and shot anyone they encountered. Women were raped and other bestial events took place. In the villages they burned the crops in the fields and harvested grain was confiscated. The people fled to the city and into the steppe, abandoning their homes. Famine ensued. Women fled, leaving their children behind. Refugees starved in the distant steppe lands and in the towns.15

The natives’ crops were ruined, and their possessions and animals confiscated, by rampaging government forces. Moreover, Soviet figures indicate that across the entire region 88,000 “rebels” were killed and a further 250,000 fled into China, together amounting to 20 percent of the native Central Asian population. In contrast, just over 3,000 Russian settlers and soldiers were killed.16 Thus, the scene was being set for the clashes between natives and Russian forces (White and Red) that would characterize the next decade of the civil wars in Central Asia.