A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

From Governorates-General to Union Republics 223
Ryskulov arrived in Moscow, bringing a petition which repeated their
demands and contained complaints about the continuing suffering
inflicted upon the native population by the local authorities and settlers.
At the same time, unbeknown to the Muslim representatives, Sh.Z.
Eliava and Ian E.Rudzutak had also arrived.These were members of
the Turkestan Commission (neither was a Turkestanian; Eliava hailed
from Georgia, Rudzutak from Russia’s Baltic province) who were to give
the central authorities their version of the story.The Politburo examined
the situation on 25 May, and Lenin took a special interest in it.The decision
was announced on 13 July: the Turkestan Commission was
instructed to combat pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, but also to organize
the preparation of a map that would show the ethnic composition
of Turkestan and to examine the question of whether a fusion (sliyanie)
or delimitation (razmezhevanie; “demarcation” might be a better translation,
but “delimitation” is the standard term used by Sovietologists) was
the preferable solution.Thus began the process that would lead, by
1924, to the transformation of Turkestan into a region of five national
units, early forms of the present republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
One of the remarkable features of this process was that after the flurry
of activities in the spring and summer of 1920, it lay dormant until
the beginning of 1924.The two chief reasons for the delay were the
complex situation in Central Asia itself, and the need felt by the
Bolshevik leadership at the center to devise a broader form and name
for their multinational empire than that of Russia; another factor was
the Basmachi movement, a native uprising against the Soviets, the suppression
of which took precedence over other measures in Central Asia.
By the end of 1923 most of those problems had been solved or brought
under control.The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formed in
December 1922, offered both a fitting frame and name for new states to
join it; the People’s Republics of Bukhara and Khorezm were docile
bodies ready to follow instructions from Moscow, and the Basmachis had
ceased to be a threat.Thus, early in 1924, shortly after Lenin’s death,
Soviet leaders decided that the time had come for reshaping the borders
within Central Asia along ethnolinguistic lines.
The first step was a meeting of the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party in Moscow on 31 January 1924, where the decision
was made to carry out a national delimitation (natsionalnoe razmezhevanie)
of Central Asia.The aforementioned I.E.Rudzutak, a member of the
Turkestan Commission, was entrusted with further study of the project.