Central Asia Between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds (Essay)

On 1 September 1920, the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, accompanied by local militias, undertook what tsarist armies had consistently chosen to avoid. It stormed the gates of the city of Bukhara and overthrew the emir, Sayyid Alim Khan. The need to assuage British fears about Russian expansion had meant that when Russian armies conquered Transoxiana in the last third of the 19th century, they had left the rulers of Bukhara and Khiva on their thrones, ruling over much diminished territories and with their foreign relations under a Russian protectorate) Russian armies had occupied Bukhara in 1910, but only temporarily at the request of the emir in the aftermath of murderous sectarian clashes between the city's Sunni and Shi'i populations. The existence of the protectorate meant that Bukhara and Khiva remained beyond the reach of the Russian Revolution. While the rule of the khan of Khiva crumbled in the face of domestic insurgency, Alim Khan, ruling over the much larger realm of Bukhara, sought to maximize his independence from Russia. The fact that Turkestan was cut off by civil war from inner Russia until late 1919 helped him. By the summer of 1920, however, the Red Army had connected Turkestan back to Russia; and Mikhail Frunze, commanding the troops, grew increasingly impatient with the continued existence of the emirate. Against political opinion in Moscow, he prepared the invasion over the summer and carried it out in September. Largely for geopolitical reasons, Moscow chose not to incorporate Bukhara into Soviet Turkestan after the conquest. Rather, the Red Army installed a "people's soviet republic"--a designation first dreamed up earlier that year when Khiva was similarly stormed--with the Bukharan Communist Party (BCP) as its vanguard. The BCP had been re-formed for the occasion with the forced merger of an older BCP, founded in 1918 and consisting mostly of Turkestanis and Tatars with only tenuous connections to Bukhara, and the more numerous party of the Young Bukharans, a local opposition group increasingly radicalized after 1917 and organized in Soviet Turkestan. The Young Bukharans were notable for the fact that their traditions of Muslim reform tied them in meaningful ways to late Ottoman debates. Thus it came about that an offshoot of the Ottoman political world took root in the maelstrom of the Russian Revolution.