A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

222 A history of Inner Asia
their struggle for freedom; and in the very same months of 1920, when
Moscow was dashing the hopes of Muslim representatives in Tashkent
for a truly independent republic of Turkestan, the Muslims of Bukhara
saw their only hope in a Russian intervention against the ever more
vicious despotism of the emir, who now thought himself freed from the
restrictions that Tsarist suzerainty had imposed on him.The difficulty of
the task was demonstrated not only by the inability of an indigenous
effort to persuade the emir to accept reform, but also by the failure of
the first military expedition that the Russians had undertaken against
him in March 1920.The second campaign, which took place in
September of that year, was better prepared, and it quickly prevailed.
The emir fled, and the nationalists thought their dreams had come true
when a People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara was established in October.
Fayzulla Khojaev became prime minister and Abdarrauf Fitrat foreign
minister.Although a few Russians also entered the government, the
republic seemed to be what the patriots of Khoqand and Tashkent had
striven for, an independent Muslim state.A similar process had already
in February 1920 led to the establishment of the People’s Soviet
Republic of Khorezm (the territory’s historic name prevailed over that
of its recent capital, Khiva).
The national delimitation of 1924 put an end to the existence of these
two republics and incorporated their territories into the newly formed
republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan.
This measure revealed the illusory nature of the two republics’ independence.Nevertheless,
they did possess what might be called genuine
autonomy, especially in the first two years of their existence, and gave a
convincing demonstration of the vitality and potential that Central
Asian Muslims had to govern themselves.Upon the abolition of the two
republics, some of their leaders such as Khojaev and Fitrat, joined the
political process and intellectual elites of the newly formed republics,
especially Uzbekistan.
national delimitation
In the TASSR, the Muslim leaders had lost their bid for power by March
1920, but they did not surrender forthwith.Undaunted by the fact that
their Russian comrades branded them as “bourgeois nationalists” or
“deviationists,” they took their case directly to Moscow in the hope that
the central authorities would lend them a more sympathetic ear.In May
1920 their delegation, consisting of N.Khojaev, Bek-Ivanov, and T.