Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Wrangel died in Brussels in April 1928, just as he and his associates were planning the creation of terrorist organizations to be sent into the USSR. His children believed he had been poisoned by an agent of the Soviet secret police. He was initially buried in the cemetery of Uccle-Calevoet in Brussels, but on 6 October 1929, following a procession by carriage and train across Europe, his remains were reinterred at the Russian Cathedral (the Church of the Holy Trinity) in Belgrade, amid a funeral parade and requiem attended by thousands of Russian émigrés and King Alexander of Yugoslavia. A monument to Wrangel still stands in the town of Sremski Karlovci, which had served as his headquarters during his time in Serbia. Understandably, his descendants have refused requests from various groups that his remains be reinterred in the Donskoi Cathedral in Moscow, alongside those of General Denikin.

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XINJIANG. Referred to by European contemporaries as Chinese Turkestan, Xinjiang (Sinkiang) is the huge (500,000 square miles) region of northwest China, consisting chiefly of deserts and mountains, that borders the lands of what was known as Russian Turkestan in the imperial and revolutionary periods. Its population, which was estimated at 2,800,000 in 1917, was overwhelmingly Moslem by religion and culture and included Uyghurs, Kazakhs (some of them very recent immigrants from Russian Turkestan, who had fled from the tsarist regime’s suppression of the 1916 uprising in that region), Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Hui and Han Chinese, as well as at least 30,000 ethnic Russians (60,000 by 1921). The region suffered major political disturbances and civil wars of its own in the 1930s, but was also affected, in the era of the “Russian” Civil Wars, by events just across the border in Russian Turkestan, with which it had economic and cultural links that stretched back to the era of the Silk Road. These links had been revivified by imperial Russian incursions into the region since the 1860s and were far stronger than Xinjiang’s ties with the distant cities of coastal China.

Throughout the Russian revolutionary era, Xinjiang was governed by a brutal but efficient Mandarin judge, Yang Zengxin (Yang Tseng-hsin), who personally favored the Whites but at the same time sought to prevent Russian incursions into and domination of his region. Thus, although the Russian consulate at Kashgar and Russian missions in other towns were centers of anti-Bolshevik organization (and sent thousands of volunteers to join the Whites in Semirech′e), they had to act cautiously in their relations with the Chinese, who feared that Red forces might break into Xinjiang to cleanse it of their White opponents. Moreover, the Chinese authorities became less accommodating to the anti-Bolsheviks as it became clear the Reds were winning the civil wars in 1919–1920, and as Red Army forces actually did launch incursions into the Ili and Chughuchaq regions in pursuit of the Whites. Consequently, when the Semirech′e Army of the defeated atamans A. I. Dutov and B. V. Annenkov retreated across the border into Xinjiang in April–May 1920, the Chinese took steps (not always successful) to disarm them. Subsequently, in late 1920, a trade agreement was signed between the Xinjiang governor and the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and, on 23 September 1920, the central government of Republican China ordered the closure of all Russian imperial consulates, including that in Kashgar. Thereafter, White influence in the region waned.

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YOUNG BUKHARAN PARTY. This (initially secret) society of the proponents of Jadidism was founded in Bukhara in 1909 and drew its name (Yangi bukharalilar) from the reformist Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire. (Many of the Young Bukharans had, in fact, been educated in Turkey.) The left wing of the party, under Faizullah Khojaev, favored a political revolution; the center and right, under Mirza Abdul-kadir Mukhitdinov, were more interested in cultural reform.

In March 1918, the party tried, with the assistance of (chiefly Russian) Red Guards sent from Tashkent, to seize power in Bukhara, but they were driven from the city by forces loyal to the emir, Said-mir Mohammed Alim-khan. They took refuge in Tashkent, protected by local Bolsheviks, and only returned to Bukhara in May 1920, when the Red Army forced the emir to flee. Young Bukharans, sponsored by Moscow’s Turkestan Commission and the Bolsheviks’ Turkbiuro, then formed the first government of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. Most members of the party subsequently joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but this did not save them from extensive persecution, as “bourgeois nationalists,” during the purges of the 1930s.

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