Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

At Tashkent, the Turkestan Soviet Republic, despite its isolation from Bolshevik Russia until September 1919, had for two years prior to that constituted a remarkably resilient citadel of Soviet power. Based on the concentrated Russian populations of the Central Asian towns and railway centers, but also drawing support from modernizing elements among the broader Muslim population (the Young Bukharan Party, the Young Khivan Party, etc.), the local soviet had immediately declared in favor of the October Revolution in 1917; had pronounced the existence of the first manifestation of the Turkestan ASSR on 30 April 1918; and had thereafter, amid the sparsely populated and starkly contrasting reaches of steppe and mountains that surrounded it, gathered a small and irregular army (the Turkestan Red Army) to defend itself against a variety of anti-Bolshevik forces that were only marginally weaker than it was itself.180 (No single force in the region numbered more than a few thousand fighters at any point during the civil wars.) Cut off from Moscow by the uprising of the Orenburg Cossacks in late 1917, the Tashkent regime first sought to build a Soviet alternative to the Moslem-led Kokand Autonomy (headed by Mustafa Chokaev) to its east and to the Kazakh’s Alash Orda regime at Semey (Semipalatinsk), both of which had been founded in November–December 1917. It had also, from the summer of 1918, sought to maintain a Semirech′e Front in the northeast, against Ataman B. V. Annenkov’s Semirech′e Cossacks, although the latter seem to have been too preoccupied with relentless rapine in their home territory to pose a serious threat to Red Tashkent.

The Tashkent Soviet also faced internal subversion, notably from the nebulous Turkestan Military Organization, which counted among its membership Colonel P. G. Kornilov (brother of the now deceased White icon General L. G. Kornilov) and its own treacherous commissar for military affairs, K. P. Osipov, and which staged a series of uprisings. The most serious of these (the “Osipov Rebellion”) was launched on 19 January 1919, by Osipov and other members of the Turkestan Military Organization, with the support of a sizable portion of the local garrison (2,000 men, by some counts, of that 5,000-strong force) and Allied agents in the region, such as Colonel F. M. Bailey.181 By 20 January 1919, the rebels had control of most of the city and had captured and executed a number of Bolshevik members of the government of the Turkestan ASSR (the “Fourteen Turkestan Commissars”), but had failed to gain control of several key strategic points (notably the railway station) or any of the local arsenals, allowing Red forces to regroup and drive the Osipovites from Tashkent on 21 January 1919. The anti-Bolshevik Kokand regime, meanwhile, was effectively dispersed by Red Guards in February 1918, but thereafter resistance in the Ferghana valley experienced a renaissance under the rebel leader Igrash-bey, whose forces mushroomed from around 4,000 in 1918 to 20,000 (or, by some estimates, 30,000) by the summer of 1919, while pro-Soviet forces of the Young Bukharan Party were expelled from Bukhara by the khan, and their fellow Young Khivans were denied control of their own putative capital by the support offered to the khan of Khiva (Sayid Abdullah) by the powerful Muslim warlord Junaïd-khan.