If this serves as a useful and commendably concise analysis of the February Revolution of 1917, however, it fails to explain why that revolution, which seemed almost universally popular and was virtually bloodless, should descend into full-scale and incomparably sanguinary civil war before the end of that year. To understand that, it is necessary to appreciate that one of the key facets of the “Russian” Civil Wars—clashes between Muslim and either Orthodox or (later) secular forces in Central Asia—was already under way, long before Nicholas II signed the abdication document in a sidetracked train near Pskov on 2 March 1917 (and would continue long afterward). It too had been generated by the world war’s exacerbation of existing tensions.
The origins of the Central Asian revolt of 1916 can be traced to Russian colonial penetration of the region in the late 19th century. The empire had been pressing into what was to become the Turkestan Region (krai) since Peter the Great had sent a force toward Khiva in 1717, but it had only been fully integrated into the tsars’ realm following a series of annexations from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s that had incorporated lands as far south as Ferghana. The first motor of these expansions was the securing of cotton-rich valleys of the irrigated regions of southern Turkestan, in order to feed Russia’s booming textile industry. The second was that Petersburg’s military and economic presence in these regions placed pressure on the possessions and protectorates in southern Asia of its chief imperial rival, Great Britain. However, as Russian settlers followed the imperial flag into Turkestan, various complex economic and political problems ensued: clashes over land rights and water rights between the natives and incoming settlers, for example, and especially, conflicts between nomads and Russian farmers, as well as resentment of the semi-military, colonial rule imposed on the region by St. Petersburg. No other region of the Russian Empire had, over such a lengthy period of time, endured such discriminatory rule as that of the Turkestan governor-generalship, and for the historian Daniel Brower, the 1916 revolt was nothing less than “a judgement on the empire’s half century of colonial rule” in Central Asia.12 The region’s problems were compounded by the First World War, with cotton prices falling and the price of consumer goods spiraling, while the forced mobilization of horses by the military authorities was also greatly resented. The trigger for the revolt, however, was the decision of the Russian stavka, authorized by Nicholas II on 25 June 1916, that dire shortages of manpower in industry and military support services in European Russia necessitated the mobilization of 390,000 men of military age from the hitherto exempt inorodtsy (native peoples, literally “foreigners”) of Central Asia. They would formally be members of the armed forces but would be assigned work in “the construction of defensive fortifications and military communications in frontline areas and also for any other work necessary for national defence.”13 Publication of the order in June–July 1916, at the height of the cotton harvest, caused confusion and panic, with fears expressed that the men would be put into fighting units—possibly against Muslim Turkey. Within a few days much of the region had risen in protest and revolt; telegraph lines and railways were destroyed and government buildings were ransacked. In response, on 17 July 1916, the entire Turkestan region was declared to be under martial law. However, although the revolt of the Sarts (the settled native population) was quickly contained, disorder spread rapidly to the nomads of the Kazakh and Turkoman steppe; with 15,000-strong bands of rebels sweeping across the region, “to some extent, the insurrection acquired the character of a ‘Holy War’ against the Russian infidels, and of an anti-colonial struggle for independence,” especially in Semirech′e, where many Russian incomers had settled.14 Commander of all forces deployed in the suppression of the uprising (and governor-general of Vernyi) was Colonel P. P. Ivanov—later, in 1918, as General Ivanov-Rinov, the ataman of the Siberian Cossack Host and commander in chief of the anti-Bolshevik Siberian Army. It was in this campaign that he learned his craft (or, rather, lack of it) in the “pacification” of rebel forces. One survivor of Ivanov’s pacification of a rebel area recalled how
Ivanov gave the order to shoot, to set fires and to confiscate household goods and agricultural tools. The units entered the villages, burned goods and shot anyone they encountered. Women were raped and other bestial events took place. In the villages they burned the crops in the fields and harvested grain was confiscated. The people fled to the city and into the steppe, abandoning their homes. Famine ensued. Women fled, leaving their children behind. Refugees starved in the distant steppe lands and in the towns.15
The natives’ crops were ruined, and their possessions and animals confiscated, by rampaging government forces. Moreover, Soviet figures indicate that across the entire region 88,000 “rebels” were killed and a further 250,000 fled into China, together amounting to 20 percent of the native Central Asian population. In contrast, just over 3,000 Russian settlers and soldiers were killed.16 Thus, the scene was being set for the clashes between natives and Russian forces (White and Red) that would characterize the next decade of the civil wars in Central Asia.
Conflict would next be ignited by the Muslim intelligentsia’s establishment of an anti-Soviet government at Kokand (the “Kokand Autonomy”) on 29 November 1917 (crushed by Red Guards, with the slaughter of thousands of inorodtsy, on 18–22 February 1918). It would then develop into a region-wide guerrilla resistance, the Basmachi movement (basmachestvo), strongly influenced by the Muslim clergy, which the Red Army, as we shall see, would only be able (at great cost) to tame, but never entirely extinguish, by 1926. Prominent and numerous among the Basmachi, unsurprisingly, were those who had fought the Russians in 1916—Junaïd-khan, for example—and who had lost their livelihoods and their families to the “pacifications” of Ivanov-Rinov and his ilk. Whether this would have happened without the February Revolution is unknowable, but the breakdown of authority across the Russian Empire that accompanied the collapse of tsarism in early 1917 greatly facilitated the rise of the basmachestvo, and the 1916 uprising in Central Asia can therefore be considered the outbreak of the “Russian” Civil Wars.17
Further germs of the civil wars can be identified in the outcome of the February Revolution of 1917 and the period prior to the seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in October of that year. The toppling of the tsar generated a honeymoon period, during which all but the most died-in-the-wool anarchists and monarchists pledged mutual support in building a democratic Russia. Liberal and nonparty progressive politicians from the State Duma formed a Provisional Government (to lead the country to a Constituent Assembly that would frame a new constitution), while workers’ organizations and parties (chiefly the peasant-based Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and the two wings of the social-democratic movement, the moderate Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks) re-created the Petrograd Soviet and promised the government its conditional support.18 This collaboration, however, had shallow roots and soon foundered over two key issues that would reverberate beyond 1917 into the depths of the civil wars: Russia’s role in the world war and the nationalities question. Regarding the war, the socialists were willing to continue fighting to prevent the Central Powers from stifling the revolution and winning the war (“revolutionary defensism”), but at the same time they insisted on an active peace policy to bring a negotiated and mutually acceptable end to the carnage (a peace “without annexations and indemnities”). This somewhat contradictory formula clashed fundamentally with the belief of the first Provisional Government’s foreign minister that only a postwar settlement in which Russia gained control of the Turkish Straits would prove viable or lasting.19 When Pavel Miliukov, leader of Russia’s main liberal party (the Kadets), hinted at this in a note to the Allies on 18 April 1917, he was forced to resign as foreign minister, and SR and Menshevik leaders then joined the first of a series of coalition provisional governments. They did so in order to police government policy, but as the regime failed to deliver on any of its promised steps toward political and social reform, they found themselves tarnished by association. Of the main socialist parties, only the Bolsheviks, newly radicalized by the return to Russia in early April of their uncompromising leader, V. I. Lenin, remained outside the coalition, incorrigibly opposed to the government and in favor of an immediate end to the war. Their support waxed correspondingly, as was witnessed in early July 1917, when tens of thousands of Bolshevik supporters took to the streets of the capital demanding the replacement of the Provisional Government by an all-socialist cabinet and clashed, with bloody outcome, with Cossacks, police, and other government forces. These “July Days” witnessed the boiling over of a pot of political strife that had been simmering since February and foreshadowed the coming clashes between Bolsheviks and other socialists during the civil wars. It is worth noting, however, that the immediate spark for the conflagration had been set on 2 July, when all the Kadet ministers of the Provisional Government had resigned in protest against the socialist ministers’ offer of broad autonomy to Ukraine; again, the “nationalities question” was at the heart of matters.20