Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Conflict would next be ignited by the Muslim intelligentsia’s establishment of an anti-Soviet government at Kokand (the “Kokand Autonomy”) on 29 November 1917 (crushed by Red Guards, with the slaughter of thousands of inorodtsy, on 18–22 February 1918). It would then develop into a region-wide guerrilla resistance, the Basmachi movement (basmachestvo), strongly influenced by the Muslim clergy, which the Red Army, as we shall see, would only be able (at great cost) to tame, but never entirely extinguish, by 1926. Prominent and numerous among the Basmachi, unsurprisingly, were those who had fought the Russians in 1916—Junaïd-khan, for example—and who had lost their livelihoods and their families to the “pacifications” of Ivanov-Rinov and his ilk. Whether this would have happened without the February Revolution is unknowable, but the breakdown of authority across the Russian Empire that accompanied the collapse of tsarism in early 1917 greatly facilitated the rise of the basmachestvo, and the 1916 uprising in Central Asia can therefore be considered the outbreak of the “Russian” Civil Wars.17

Further germs of the civil wars can be identified in the outcome of the February Revolution of 1917 and the period prior to the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in October of that year. The toppling of the tsar generated a honeymoon period, during which all but the most died-in-the-wool anarchists and monarchists pledged mutual support in building a democratic Russia. Liberal and nonparty progressive politicians from the State Duma formed a Provisional Government (to lead the country to a Constituent Assembly that would frame a new constitution), while workers’ organizations and parties (chiefly the peasant-based Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and the two wings of the social-democratic movement, the moderate Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks) re-created the Petrograd Soviet and promised the government its conditional support.18 This collaboration, however, had shallow roots and soon foundered over two key issues that would reverberate beyond 1917 into the depths of the civil wars: Russia’s role in the world war and the nationalities question. Regarding the war, the socialists were willing to continue fighting to prevent the Central Powers from stifling the revolution and winning the war (“revolutionary defensism”), but at the same time they insisted on an active peace policy to bring a negotiated and mutually acceptable end to the carnage (a peace “without annexations and indemnities”). This somewhat contradictory formula clashed fundamentally with the belief of the first Provisional Government’s foreign minister that only a postwar settlement in which Russia gained control of the Turkish Straits would prove viable or lasting.19 When Pavel Miliukov, leader of Russia’s main liberal party (the Kadets), hinted at this in a note to the Allies on 18 April 1917, he was forced to resign as foreign minister, and SR and Menshevik leaders then joined the first of a series of coalition provisional governments. They did so in order to police government policy, but as the regime failed to deliver on any of its promised steps toward political and social reform, they found themselves tarnished by association. Of the main socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks, newly radicalized by the return to Russia in early April of their uncompromising leader, V. I. Lenin, remained outside the coalition, incorrigibly opposed to the government and in favor of an immediate end to the war. Their support waxed correspondingly, as was witnessed in early July 1917, when tens of thousands of Bolshevik supporters took to the streets of the capital demanding the replacement of the Provisional Government by an all-socialist cabinet and clashed, with bloody outcome, with Cossacks, police, and other government forces. These “July Days” witnessed the boiling over of a pot of political strife that had been simmering since February and foreshadowed the coming clashes between Bolsheviks and other socialists during the civil wars. It is worth noting, however, that the immediate spark for the conflagration had been set on 2 July, when all the Kadet ministers of the Provisional Government had resigned in protest against the socialist ministers’ offer of broad autonomy to Ukraine; again, the “nationalities question” was at the heart of matters.20