Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Yet apart from the front against the Orenburg Cossacks, Tashkent faced its most serious and active civil-war opposition from Ashkhabad (Aşgabat), to the west, which sat astride the second chief route out of the region—the railway line to Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea—and against which the Tashkent Bolsheviks directed their Transcaspian Front. Following the successful anti-Bolshevik Ashkhabad uprising of 11–12 July 1918, a Menshevik–SR Transcaspian Provisional Government had been established at Ashkhabad and had spread its authority all across the former Transcaspian oblast′ by the end of that month. The regime enjoyed moral, financial, and (limited) military support and guidance from a British military mission (Norperforce), commanded by General Wilfred Malleson at Meshed, across the border in Northern Persia.182 Nevertheless, the Transcaspian government was far from being the counterrevolutionary puppet of the Allies it was painted as in Soviet propaganda and seems to have been initially popular with Russian and Ukrainian railways workers along the Ashkhabad–Krasnovodsk line. It became distinctly less popular, however, as it was forced to accept the authority of emissaries of Denikin’s AFSR, claiming command over the region and its existing and future military formations (loosely reconfigured as a White Turkestan Army) in early 1919. Consequently, with local partisan assistance, on 9 July 1919 Tashkent’s Red troops reentered Ashkhabad. With the rail route to Tashkent from Orenburg opened in September 1919, following the final defeat of Dutov’s Cossacks, Red reinforcements then flooded the region and soon pushed the AFSR’s makeshift defenses back along the line to Krasnovodsk and thence across the Caspian in February 1920—just in time for them to unite with White forces retreating into the North Caucasus and to compete for a berth on the ships gathering for the chaotic evacuation at Novorossiisk.

With the forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution and the Whites dealt with in turn, and with stocks of arms, men, and food flowing in along the Orenburg railway from Soviet Russia in 1920, Tashkent was then able to concentrate its fire on two other centers of anti-Soviet power in western Turkestan: the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara. The respective heads of these former Russian protectorates (Khan Said-Abdulla and Emir Said-mir Mohammed Alim-Khan, respectively) were ejected in February and September 1920, in turn, to be replaced by the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic (26 April 1920) and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (8 October 1920). In nurturing these experimental administrations, however, Moscow had constantly to struggle against the anti-Moslem and centralizing proclivities of local Russians, who had allied themselves with the Soviet cause for ethnic as much as political reasons, as well as the pronounced chauvinism of local Bolsheviks. To ensure that non-Russians—specifically, progressive Muslim proponents of Jadidism—were both represented and heard, a Turkestan Commission of VTsIK was established on 8 October 1919, as well as, subsequently, a Turkestan Bureau (Turkbiuro) of the RKP(b). However, from 1921 onward, Moscow came to regard the Jadids with suspicion, and they were removed from the local administrations.