A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

216 A history of Inner Asia
Republic.” This became a reality in October of that year, when the
Founding Convention of the Kazak Soviets gathered in Orenburg, and
the Kyrgyz (i.e. Kazakh) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was
born.In some respects, the process and the results in Kazakhstan were
analogous to those in Turkestan, where the Turkestan Autonomous
Soviet Socialist Republic came into being at about the same time; in one
special sense, however, the formation of the Kazakh ASSR was ahead
of the rest of Central Asia, for unlike that of the Turkestan ASSR, it was
based on the ethnolinguistic factor of a native nationality, the Kazakhs.
This factor became the principle that in 1924 would lead to the formation
of the other four republics of Central Asia, Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
turkestan autonomous soviet socialist republic
(tassr)
As we have seen, after the failure of the Khoqand experiment in
February 1918, the Soviets of Tashkent were the only organized authority
on the territory of Turkestan except for the still existing emirate of
Bukhara and khanate of Khiva.Russian rule was on the whole secure,
but distance from central Russia and temporary separation from it by the
civil war did create certain special circumstances.One was that for a
little longer, not only the Bolsheviks but also other Russian political factions
had some share in power.Thus at the Fifth Congress of the Soviets
of Turkestan, held in Tashkent in April 1918, from among the 263 delegates
only 86 were Bolsheviks; the next strongest faction, the SRs
(Socialist Revolutionaries), had 70 members, and there were minor
groups; the 87 non-affiliated delegates (bezpartiynye) even outnumbered
the Bolsheviks.It was only a matter of time before the latter would eliminate
all the other parties and would assign the non-affiliates their permanently
subordinate role, but the situation, even though temporary,
had some significance for the Muslims.
With all their ruthless suppression of any Muslim attempts at genuine
autonomy, the Bolsheviks did try, albeit inconsistently, to put an end to
the mistreatment of the natives by the Russians, and they also began to
recruit those Muslims whose class credentials made them worthier candidates
for a share in power.Thus when a new Sovnarkom was
appointed by the Congress, four out of the sixteen members of this
regional government presided over by F.A.Kobozev were Muslims, as
were ten out of the thirty-six members of the Central Executive