Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Reinforcing the recentralizing tendencies that came to the fore within and around Josef Stalin’s Commissariat of Nationalities at this point was the fact that although Soviet power now seemed to have been firmly established in the cities of Khiva, Bukhara, and Tashkent, across the vast subcontinental expanse of Central Asia—from the mountainous east, around Ferghana, to the Turkmen steppes of the west—it was very far from secure. Hiding out across the region (and sometimes over the borders in Persia and Afghanistan) were relatively small but seemingly inexterminable groups of guerrilla fighters, whom the Soviet government termed Basmachi. The Reds’ battle with these Muslim rebels, although hitherto much neglected, came under renewed scholarly attention in the West after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provoked new generations of anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas into action, but it awaits its definitive history. What is clear, however, is that although they evolved through a series of relatively distinct chronological phases, although they played out in one of the most remote of all reaches of the former imperial space, and although the Muslim rebels were rarely united in purpose and were prone to murderous internecine vendettas, the Reds’ struggles against the Basmachi were an integral part of the “Russian” Civil Wars.183 As one pioneering study of the phenomenon concluded, “In the history of the Turkestan’s war of liberation, the Basmachi must be seen not only as a mere uprising but as an armed civil war against Soviet supremacy.”184 Indeed, just as we have seen that the 1916 revolt in Central Asia can be regarded as the opening stage of the “Russian” Civil Wars, the Red Army’s battles against the Basmachi can be regarded as their conclusion. It is thought that during these final battles of the “Russian” Civil Wars, which ranged long after the usual dates suggested as an endpoint in 1921 or 1922, 574,000 Red soldiers were killed, compared to around 50,000 among the rebels, while famine and disease accounted for several hundred thousand further deaths.185 The struggle only came to an unquiet end in June 1931, with the Reds’ capture and execution of the Basmachi leader Ibrahim-bek, although further small pockets of resistance held out until at least 1934, and possibly, according to unconfirmed reports, until 1938. However, from the mid-1920s, Soviet forces had been engaged in only relatively minor security operations. These were skirmishes, police actions, and border-control events, not warfare. Significantly, the last active front of the Red Army to be closed in the wars that are the focus of this work was the Turkestan Front: on 4 June 1926 it was replaced by the peacetime operation and administration of the Central Asian Military District. This can best serve as the terminal date of the “Russian” Civil Wars—albeit in a region that (belying once again the traditional nomenclature) is considerably closer to Mumbai than it is to Moscow.

Conclusion: Who Won the “Russian” Civil Wars?

On the face of things, the Bolsheviks were the clear victors of the “Russian” Civil Wars. Utilizing their relatively prosperous, well-stocked, populous, and ethnically homogeneous stronghold in the heartland of European Russia, which was well-served by railways, rivers, and canals for transportation purposes, they had been able to see off, one by one, their White enemies in Siberia and South, North-West, and North Russia (who had, in part, done the Bolsheviks’ job for them by stifling the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918); they had been able to convince the Allies that armed intervention in Soviet Russia was a lost cause; they had successfully quelled the series of uprisings against Soviet power that were a feature of the years 1920–1922 and, through the introduction of the NEP had brought—or bought—an end to peasant resistance; and they had—piecemeal, and when the time was ripe—reconquered Ukraine, Transcaucasia, the Far East, and Central Asia. The USSR had become an established state, which from 1924 was recognized by other world powers and which would have a profound influence on international affairs for decades to come, not least during the Second World War.