As for the 16 million Muslims inhabiting the Russian empire, their First All-Russia Congress began in Moscow on May 1, 1917, attended by about a thousand delegates. The congress passed a resolution granting equal rights to women, in a break from longstanding Islamic tradition. It also assumed the right of religious self-determination, the right to select the religious leader of Russia's Muslims, the mufti, who was previously appointed by the tsar. The national question provoked a heated debate. A group of delegates, headed by Volga Tatars, advocated the preservation of a unitary Russian state with national-cultural autonomy. The Azerbaijani delegation, supported by the Bashkirs and Crimean Tatars, demanded a federation and territorial self-rule for all peoples. By a majority vote, the congress passed a federalist resolution. On July 21 a second congress met in Kazan and decided, in view of the weakening of the central government, to begin organizing autonomous Muslin cultural institutions without delay. On November 20 a national assembly met in Ufa and elected three ministers—for religion, education, and finance. Their task was to take concrete steps to assert the cultural and national autonomy of all Muslims in Russia.
By October 1917, then, the Muslims of Russia had laid the foundations for their own religious and cultural administration. Events during the next few months, however, broke all links between the various Muslim regions, and each group went its own way in trying to cope with the problem of incipient civil war.
A political party of the Kazakhs and Kirghiz, the so-called Alash-Orda, was founded in the summer of 1917 at a congress in Orenburg. Its goal was the unification of all the nomadic tribes of the steppes into an autonomous "Kirghiz state." The Bashkir delegates in the First All-Russia Muslim Congress had also demanded autonomy. But after the congress rejected their demand for a Greater Bashkiria, which would have united all the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Ural and Volga regions, as well as their demand for a Lesser Bashkiria, which would have included only the territories inhabited by Bashkirs, they walked out of the congress. They then attended the Orenburg meeting, opting for territorial autonomy together with the Turkic tribes of the steppe lands and Turkestan. During the spring and fall of 1917 there were frequent clashes between Muslins and Russian settlers. In September the Provisional Government declared martial law in the entire Semirechie region in Central Asia, to stop interracial strife.
In December, the Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Kirghiz declared their autonomy in Orenburg and established relations with the Cossacks of that region. Thus an anti-Bolshevik movement was created, led by Dutov, the ataman of the Orenburg Cossacks, and supported by Muslim political leaders.
The Bolshevik forces in the steppes of Kirghizia and Kazakhstan were insignificant. "In October 1917 there were fewer than thirty Bolsheviks in Ashkhabad, and in Kazakhstan there were about a hundred. In Verny, there was no Bolshevik organization at all before the October revolution. Until mid-1918 only a few isolated groups of pro-Bolshevik soldiers and workers functioned in certain towns of Kirghizia."81 Bolshevik slogans found support among the soldiers, the railworkers, and the settlers. These elements saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a Russian dictatorship. Since the Bolsheviks proclaimed a power of the soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants, and since there were no workers, soldiers, or peasants among the Kazakhs and Kirghiz, the Muslim tribesmen also perceived Bolshevik power as Russian power.
The political movement in Turkestan was composed of a conservative religious current and a liberal, pro-Western one. Initially enemies, they drew closer toward the end of 1917 because they both called for autonomy, which the Russian government refused to grant. The Muslim socialist movement, close to the Left SRs, was much less influential, but it played a decisive role in the October events. In Turkestan, as in the rest of Central Asia, the Bolsheviks could be counted on one hand. On October 25 rail- workers opened fire on a Cossack club in Tashkent. Within two days the soviet, controlled by the Bolsheviks and supported by the Left SRs, had taken over the city. On November 15 the Third Regional Congress of Soviets met and proclaimed the victory of Soviet power throughout Turkestan. The congress rejected Muslim demands for autonomy, since it might weaken Russia's authority, and declared itself against Muslim participation in the Soviet government in Central Asia. According to the resolution, this was because of the "uncertain" attitude of the local population toward the soviet and because the native population had no proletarian organizations, which the Bolsheviks would have welcomed into the government.82
The Crimean Tatar National party, founded in July 1917, came into conflict almost immediately with the Provisional Government because the government refused to place Muslim schools under Tatar control or to allow the formation of an exclusively Tatar military unit. The main strength of the Bolshevik organization in the Crimea, established in June 1917, was in Sevastopol. The Left SRs and Mensheviks held a majority in the Sevastopol Soviet, which condemned the October seizure of power. The first conference of Crimean Bolsheviks did likewise. A delegation of Baltic sailors sent to Sevastopol by the Bolshevik Central Committee soon straightened out the situation. The Bolsheviks loyal to Lenin walked out of the soviet and created a revolutionary committee (revkom), which organized a massacre of Black Sea naval officers, dispersed the soviet, and had its Menshevik and Left SR leaders shot. Tatar nationalists convened a constituent assembly, the Kurultai, in Bakhchisarai, which proclaimed itself the sole legal authority in matters concerning Crimean Tatars. The Kurultai adopted a constitution based on Western democratic models and installed a national directory, which functioned as a de facto Tatar government of the Crimea and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Bolshevik power.
In 1916 the population of the Caucasus region was approximately 12 million, including 4 million Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, nearly 2.5 million Azerbaijanis, less than 2 million Armenians and about the same number of Georgians, and 1.5 million "mountain peoples," as the ethnically variegated native inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountains were called.83
The three main political parties in Transcaucasia—the Azerbaijani Muslim Democratic party (Mussavat), the Armenian Federation (Dashnaktsutiun), and the Georgian Social Democratic party (the Georgian Mensheviks)— had all been founded before World War I. All three supported the Provisional Government after the February revolution, favored autonomy within the framework of a Russian federation, and enjoyed mass support from their respective national constituencies.
The October revolution, the first signs of decomposition in the Russian Army of the Caucasus, and Turkish advances into Transcaucasia began to change the situation. On November 11 the Mussavat, Dashnaktsutsiun, and Georgian Mensheviks established their own local provisional government, the Transcaucasian Commissariat, whose purpose was to maintain order in the region until the All-Russia Constituent Assembly elected a government for the Russian state as a whole. After the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Bolsheviks, the Transcaucasian delegates returned to their home region and organized a legislative body, the Transcaucasian Seim (or Diet). Lacking influence among the masses, the Bolsheviks directed their propaganda at the soldiers. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in the Transcaucasian region the Bolsheviks received only 4.6 percent of the vote.84 Even in Baku, their stronghold in the region, roughly 80 percent of the Bolshevik vote came from the soldiers. The Bolsheviks tried to use their support among the soldiers to take power in Tiflis in November 1917, but Georgian workers thwarted the attempt.