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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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From Governorates-General to Union Republics 217<br />

Committee (Tsentralnyi Ispolnitelnyi Komitet, usually abbreviated as<br />

TsIK or Ispolkom) elected by the Congress.The effort by Tashkent<br />

Bolsheviks to attract natives to their political process was a result of pressure<br />

from Moscow; left to themselves, they tended to display the same<br />

attitude as that of the other Russians of Turkestan: to maintain a fundamental<br />

separation between the rulers and the ruled, and to favor the<br />

strengthening of the Russian and European element at all levels.This<br />

attitude sometimes assumed even ideological, Marxist forms.Thus<br />

Tobolin, a prominent Bolshevik member of the Tashkent Sovnarkom,<br />

said in 1918: “From the Marxists’ point of view, the Kyrgyz are weak.<br />

They have to die out anyway, so it is more important that the Revolution<br />

spend its resources on fighting its enemies on the front than on fighting<br />

the famine.”<br />

The famine that plagued Turkestan and Kazakhstan in those years,<br />

especially during the harsh winter of 1918 and 1919, hit the natives<br />

much harder than the Europeans, and the vast numbers of Muslim casualties<br />

were not altogether unwelcome: they could be replaced by<br />

Russian settlers.Estimates of how many natives died vary between one<br />

and three million people.G.Safarov, a Communist functionary in<br />

Semireche, stated at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist<br />

Party in 1921 that “since the establishment of Soviet power, Russian<br />

land ownership has increased in the Semireche province from 35% to<br />

70%, while the number of the Kyrgyz who have perished is estimated at<br />

35.5%.”<br />

Satisfaction with these developments seems to have been shared by<br />

some Bolshevik leaders in Moscow as well.G.L.Pyatakov wrote in 1921<br />

that some two million (native) people had perished in Turkestan, and<br />

that plans had been made to carry out a transfer of one-and-a-half<br />

million Russians to the vacated lands and houses.<br />

Nevertheless, the more ideologically attuned Bolshevik leadership in<br />

Moscow became concerned that this mistreatment of Turkestanian<br />

Muslims might compromise the plans for Central Asia as a stepping<br />

stone toward a revolution in the entire colonial world.Between 1918 and<br />

1920 a contest thus developed between the Communist leaders at the<br />

center and the local ones in Tashkent.The Tashkent Soviets were aware<br />

that in the long run they would need Moscow’s support to keep<br />

Turkestan Russian, but at the same time they demanded a great deal of<br />

autonomy for their way of running the province.Moscow eventually<br />

prevailed and forced the local group to treat the natives better and start<br />

a recruitment drive among them.At the same time, another contest

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