A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

From Governorates-General to Union Republics 219
tion of Turkestan, social justice, and national liberation were their goals.
The actions of Moscow in 1919 made them believe that they could
reach these goals as national Communists, and this belief was at first
encouraged by Lenin himself.Relations with the Muslims of Russia
seemed to be generally improving.Hostilities between the Bolshevik
government and the Kazakh and Bashkir groups had ceased; the Eighth
Communist Party Congress launched a new drive of attracting Muslims
into the Communist fold; and the government seemed ready to negotiate
with Muslim leaders.The Bashkir Zeki Velidi (Togan) spent prolonged
periods in Moscow, meeting with Lenin, Stalin, and other
Bolsheviks.The question of the future status of Turkestan, Kazakhstan,
Bashqurtistan, Tatarstan and other Muslim regions seemed open, and
to contemporary observers and participants genuine autonomy or even
independence may have seemed possible.
The Russians themselves appear to have been undecided at that time
on one important point: whether Turkestan should become a politicoethnic
unit, or whether it should be divided up into smaller specific units.
In fact, the question even transcended that of Turkestan in the administrative
and political sense: many Muslim leaders viewed all of Central
Asia in the broadest sense as Turkestan, including Kazakhstan,
Bashqurtistan, and Tatarstan.This was implied in the discussions
between Zeki Velidi and Lenin, for the Bashkir leader claimed to speak
for such a comprehensive Turkestan.At the beginning of July 1919,
Lenin asked Zeki Velidi to evaluate a project for the Muslim region that
had been given to him by the Pan-Islamic propagandist Muhammad
Barakatullah; 3 Zeki Velidi submitted instead a project of his own.
According to Zeki Velidi, Lenin liked the proposals and incorporated
most of them – though not all, and this is an important qualification: the
army was one of the exceptions – into the instructions which were
cabled to Tashkent on 12 July 1919.They caused consternation among
the Bolsheviks of Turkestan.Indeed, even with the abovementioned
exception, the new instructions went beyond the policy decided upon by
the Eighth Party Congress and introduced by Kobozev in February of
that year.Nevertheless, Moscow refused to replace the essentially
Russian Red Army with a local one, or to relinquish the key government
posts to Muslims, or to give Muslims a majority on the Turkkomissiya.
Even under these circumstances, Muslim nationalists in their new
3 Muhammad Barakatullah (1859–1927) of Bhopal was one of the most colorful Muslim intellectuals
who left India before the First World War to continue their Pan-Islamic, nationalist, or revolutionary
activities.See J.M.Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam (Oxford, 1990), pp.195–97.