by Daniil Pelymov
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, on May 13, 1925, the III All-Union Congress of Soviets unanimously decided to include two new republics into the Soviet Union - the Uzbek SSR and the Turkmen SSR. But this was not an expansion of borders.
Later, in 1939-1940, the number of union republics and the size of two of them expanded along with the state's borders (the annexation of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, the Baltics and Bessarabia). But that was still a long way off.
And in 1925, there was talk of “redevelopment with the transfer of walls” within the recently established USSR. The Soviet government, on the orders of the ruling All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), redrew the borders in the sands and oases of Turkestan.
This was done in fulfillment of Lenin’s principles of national policy, which were based on the right of nations to self-determination, including secession, as well as “indigenization,” that is, the implantation of the languages of the titular peoples, and the creation (sometimes from scratch) of national elites.
Those who, against the backdrop of the war with the Basmachi, drew the administrative borders of the Central Asian republics, of course, did not predict that 65 years later the country would disintegrate along these borders. That the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century would be marked by new civil wars, uprisings (similar to the Andijan rebellion of 2005), the death and exodus of the “alien population” – the Russians.
And that “low-intensity conflicts” will regularly flare up on the borders of the former fraternal republics.
TO THE BORDERS OF THE 17TH CENTURY
At first glance, to understand the scale of national-territorial demarcation, it is enough to look at two maps of Soviet Central Asia.
Until 1925, the territory of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (as the abbreviation RSFSR was then deciphered) extended to the borders with Persia and Afghanistan. Within the RSFSR were the Kirghiz (Kazakh) ASSR with its center in Orenburg and the Turkestan ASSR with its center in Tashkent.
Two people's Soviet republics were included in the territory of the Russian Federation: the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic, created on the site of the Khiva Khanate occupied by the Bolsheviks, and the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic, organized, accordingly, on the territory of the former Bukhara Emirate.
After the territorial demarcation, Orenburg was "withdrawn" from the Kazakh ASSR, whose capital moved to the city of Perovsk (renamed then to Kzyl-Orda, or - translated from Kazakh - Krasnoarmeysk). To the south of the Kazakh Autonomous Republic, two autonomous regions were allocated - Karakalpak and Kara-Kyrgyz. For now, part of the RSFSR.
Eleven years later, in 1936, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan went from being autonomous regions to full-fledged union republics, and the Russian border acquired its current form, roughly corresponding to the borders of the Russian kingdom in the first half of the 17th century.
But in order to appreciate the significance of this shift in the administrative boundaries of the union republics, it is necessary to briefly recall how Russia moved to the southeast from the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century.
SEMEY AND PETROPAVL
In the last year of Ivan the Terrible's life, in 1584, several hundred Don and Lower Volga Cossacks marched east and occupied the lands of the Nogai Khans along the Yaik River. The history of the Yaik Cossack Host began from that moment. After the suppression of the Pugachev rebellion in 1775, the Yaik Host was renamed the Ural Host, and the military capital, Yaitsky Gorodok, founded in the same 1584, was named Uralsk. This city, which retained its historical name, is the oldest in the European part of independent Kazakhstan.
During the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, in 1640, the merchant Guriy Nazaryev built a fort at the mouth of the Yaik River into the Caspian Sea - the city of Guryev that arose here bore this name until 1991. Now it is the regional center of Atyrau.
Under Peter the Great, in 1718, a detachment of the voivode Vasily Cheredov built the Semipalatnaya fortress in the southern Siberian steppe near the Irtysh, around which the city of Semipalatinsk (now Semey in Kazakhstan) arose. In those same years, in the same place, in the Irtysh region, the Cossacks built the Koryakovsky outpost, where a village of the same name would later arise, which in the 19th century became a city named Pavlodar.
In 1720, by decree of Peter I, the "capital" of Rudny Altai, the fortress of Ust-Kamenogorsk, was founded to strengthen the borders of the Russian state and explore gold veins in the upper reaches of the Irtysh. It is still known as the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk (now the center of the East Kazakhstan region).
Simultaneously with the advancement of the Russian Tsardom, and then the Russian Empire, into the steppe, there was also a counter movement.
In 1731, the Chingizid Abulkhair, khan of the Younger Zhuz (a Kazakh tribal union that roamed from the Southern Urals to the Syr Darya), asked for Russian citizenship, counting on help in the fight against the Dzungar Khanate. Abulkhair and the heads of 27 clans swore allegiance to Empress Anna Ioannovna on the Koran.
But even after this, the southeastern steppes remained permeable to raids on the Russian frontier by slave traders from three Central Asian states, fragments of Tamerlane’s empire – from Bukhara, Khiva and the Kokand Khanate.
Under Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine the Great, fortified lines were built to protect against the nomadic Dzungars and Kyrgyz-Kaisaks of the Middle Zhuz: the Tobolsk-Ishim and Irtysh lines, from Tomsk and Omsk through Ust-Kamenogorsk to Semipalatinsk. A logical continuation were the defensive lines in the steppes near Orenburg, founded in 1730.
Note that in the first half of the 18th century, with a difference of 12 years, the empire founded two outposts with the same name - Petropavlovsk: on Kamchatka and on the bank of the Irtysh tributary, the Ishim River. In modern Kazakhstani documentation, this city is called Petropavl.
At the beginning of the 19th century, on the frontier from the lower reaches of the Yaik-Ural to Altai, on the lands of the Orenburg and Siberian Cossack troops, there were 46 fortresses and 96 redoubts. But the logic of history prompted the empire to move further south.
OUTRUN THE LION
In the early 1820s, the Kokand Khan carried out a devastating raid on the Kazakh nomad camps. At the same time, the ruler of the Middle Zhuz, Vali Khan, transferred his subjects under the protection of Russia. According to the "Charter on the Siberian Kirghiz" developed under Alexander I, the Kazakhs were introduced to Russian-style governance and legal proceedings. A little later, in 1830, the Cossack outpost of Akmolinsk appeared on the Ishim River, which, after changing many names, became the capital of Kazakhstan - Astana.
In 1839–1840, Russia organized its first campaign against Khiva, the center of the slave trade in Central Asia. Vasily Perovsky’s expedition was unsuccessful, but it was only the beginning of counterattacks in response to the raids.
It was no longer just a matter of protecting villages, peasant settlers and "peaceful foreigners" who had sworn allegiance to Russia, but also of the great game that had begun between two empires, the Russian and the British. The Chinese Qing Empire also laid claim to Central Asia, but its forces were incomparable with the might of the "bear" and the "lion".
The empire was forced to move further, relying on new southern outposts such as Lepsinsk (founded in 1846), the Perovsk fort (Kzyl-Orda) built in 1853, the Vernoye fortification built a year later (also known as the Cossack village of Vernaya, the city of Verny), and, finally, the southern capital of Kazakhstan, Alma-Ata.
In 1865, General Mikhail Chernyaev took Tashkent by storm, which became the main stronghold in the region. Cossacks of the new Semirechye army (with its center in Verny) and settlers from Central Russia rushed here. Thus, in 1868, peasants from the Penza, Samara, Voronezh and Tambov provinces founded the settlement of Pishpek (now the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek) near the Verny tract. Only later did the Sarts join the Great Russians - sedentary Turks from Tashkent and the centers of the Fergana Valley: Namangan, Kokand and others.
The imperial government abolished the remainder of the Kokand Khanate in 1876. In response to a series of uprisings, troops under the command of the "white general", the future hero of the Russo-Turkish War Mikhail Skobelev, entered the Khan's headquarters. The Russians began to develop the former Kokand lands much earlier. So much so that already in 1869 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin could satirically describe the " Tashkent gentlemen " - officials in the newly annexed territories.
"WHO BUILDS SCHOOLS, BUILDS THE FUTURE"
Events in the Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara developed somewhat differently. In 1866, in the battles of Irdjai and Chapan-Ata, the troops of Adjutant General Konstantin Kaufman routed the army of the Emir of Bukhara, Muzaffar. Two years later, Samarkand was captured. In all cases, Russian soldiers released slaves. In 1868, the Emir of Bukhara concluded an agreement with Russia: the ruler of the faithful retained the throne, but Russia received the right to station garrisons and determine foreign policy. The territories from the Pamirs to the middle reaches of the Amu Darya were no longer in danger of becoming another pearl of the British crown.
A similar fate awaited the Khiva Khanate. After a quick campaign in 1873, Kaufman signed a treaty with Khan Seid Muhammad Rahim II : Khiva freed the slaves and transferred most of its possessions to Russian Turkestan.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, it was time to "pacify" the warlike Turkmens (some of whom were vassals of Khiva). The port of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea, now called Turkmenbashi, was founded in 1869 by the expedition of General and scientist-geographer Nikolai Stoletov. And since the 1880s, the border village of Askhabad has turned into a fast-growing city, the center of the Trans-Caspian region.
At the same time, "soft power" was taking root in the vassal states. "Whoever builds schools in Bukhara, builds the future" - so said the participant of the Central Asian campaigns, artist Vasily Vereshchagin.
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By 1913, the settlers were cultivating the fields of Semirechye and Fergana, working in the mines of Rudny Altai and in the oil fields of the Ural-Embinsky region, and working on the Trans-Caspian, Semirechye, and Altai railways (the last two lines would serve as the basis for the Soviet Turksib). One of the elements of Pyotr Stolypin's agrarian reform was the project to resettle 100,000 peasants from the central provinces to Turkestan.
ANOTHER "BALKANS"
As for the indigenous population, the situation was almost as confusing as the infamous ethnic patchwork in the Balkans.
Under the rule of the rulers of Bukhara and Khiva and in Russian Turkestan lived the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks and "Kipchaks" (as the ruling class called themselves), Turkmens and Karakalpaks close to the Kazakhs. But in the same Bukhara and Samarkand lived many who spoke Persian and called themselves Tajiks. Often people who spoke different languages settled in different quarters of the same city. This was the case, for example, in the settlement of Dushanbe-Kurgan, the current capital of Tajikistan.
The ethnonyms were not established either - the Kazakh zhuzes were called Kyrgyz and Kyrgyz-Kaisaks for a long time, and the modern Kyrgyz ethnic group was called Kara-Kirghiz. It was quite complicated with the above-mentioned Sarts, who simply spoke "Turkic", but often had Persian roots.
And this ethnic diversity, after the upheavals of the civil war and the “march of Soviet power,” had to be territorially demarcated.
According to a number of authors, the civil strife in Central Asia lasted not from 1918 to 1922, but from 1916 (a series of uprisings of the local population against mobilization for rear work, the Russian administration and settlers) until the suppression of organized Basmachi by the end of the 1930s.
The history of the civil war in Turkestan requires a detailed description. Let us just note that, for example, the Fergana Peasant Army under the command of Konstantin Monstrov, a migrant from Syzran, managed to fight for both the Reds and Kolchak's forces. Both times against the Basmachi, who were slaughtering settlers.
And the former leader of the Young Turks, Enver Pasha, who had moved to Turkestan, first acted on the side of the Red Army as an emissary of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR to combat the Basmachi, and soon as a kurbashi (general) of the Basmachi with the blessing of the Emir of Bukhara. But in all cases, this nationalist pan-Turkist acted against the settlers. "Things are going the way I wanted... Many Russians were killed," Enver reported in 1921.
"THERE WAS A FIERCE STRUGGLE"
Despite all the confusion “on the ground,” the Soviet government steadfastly followed the general line formulated in Vladimir Lenin’s letter to the communists of Turkestan in November 1919: “Make every effort to prove… the sincerity of our desire to eradicate all traces of Great Russian imperialism.”
As in other outskirts of the former empire, the party in the 1920s relied on the nationally minded intelligentsia. In the case of Bukhara and Khiva, this was the left wing of the Jadids (“enlighteners,” nationalists, and Islamic modernists), who, in particular, proposed using the original Turkic ethnonym “Uzbek” instead of the word of unclear origin “Sart.”
In 1920, under the supervision of Mikhail Frunze and his troops, "revolutions" took place in the multi-ethnic Bukhara and Khiva. But the overthrow of the emir and khan and the creation of republics under flags with a crescent, star, sickle and hammer were only an interim solution. Then it was time for "national building".
As Vyacheslav Molotov recalled at the end of his life, the implementation of Lenin’s national policy in Central Asia was entirely the merit of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Joseph Stalin, as a great specialist in nationality affairs (and the People’s Commissar for the field in 1917–1923).
"The creation of the Central Asian republics and the border was entirely Stalin's work. There was a fierce struggle. The Kazakhs, for example, their top brass, fought for Tashkent, wanted it to be their capital... Stalin gathered them... looked at the borders and said: Tashkent to the Uzbeks, and Verny, Alma-Ata to the Kazakhs," Molotov said. An equally difficult task was how to divide the Khorezm oasis between the new national states, the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs. Or how to divide the Fergana Valley between Uzbekistan and the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Region, still part of the Russian Federal Republic.
However, as recent history has shown, the “filigree” of national borders with enclaves and semi-enclaves did not protect against ethnic cleansing (for example, the massacre in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, in 1990) or border conflicts in the 2020s.
The fact that the city of Skobelev (Fergana) should go to Uzbekistan, Krasnovodsk to Turkmenistan, and Przhevalsk (modern name Karakol) to Kyrgyzstan, did not raise any questions in 1925. It is also not surprising that, in fulfillment of the “desire to eradicate traces of Great Russian chauvinism,” the Kazakh ASSR with its capital in Orenburg included cities of the former Ural, Omsk and Semipalatinsk regions of the Russian Empire.
As is known, in the discussions of 1922 on the principles of creating the Soviet state, "People's Commissariat of Nationalities" Stalin defended the plan of autonomization. National formations were to become a garland of autonomies around the Russian SFSR without the right to secede.
But - again, as is well known - in Moscow in 1922, the Leninist approach of creating equal Soviet states (as the core of the communist " United States of the World ") with the right of each national republic to secession prevailed. Stalin accepted this principle and continued to adhere to it in the 1930s and 1940s, when creating new SSRs - Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tajik and others.
The Central Asian countries that emerged in 1991 within the administrative borders drawn in 1925 have emerged as national states with which modern Russia maintains friendly and, in some cases, allied relations. But for the fact that in the 1990s Russians and other “non-titular peoples” who had lived here for generations found themselves in the position of unwanted migrants, one cannot help but say “thank you” to the creators of Lenin’s national policy.